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It's a different time, the net world changed forever after AOL got the "masses" on-line. slashdot, kuro5hin, usenet, a few other choice places, all either gone
by Mister_X 7y ago
It's a different time, the net world changed forever after AOL got the "masses" on-line.
slashdot, kuro5hin, usenet, a few other choice places, all either gone, or polluted by willfully ignorant voices.
Or outright mean spirited, aggressive trolls, like Rusty of kuro5hin found out the hard way, poor guy.
You may find Metafilter of interest.
I'd be interested in other places as well, I never found a replacement for those lost treasures of the early net.
I still have my tattered original kuro5hin T-shirt, can't wear it, but can't bear to throw it out.
- btilly 7y agoAOL got the "masses" on-line in 1993. That caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. All of the sites that you named except Usenet postdated that event.
- generalpass 7y agoAOL began to get really big when they launched unlimited minutes, I think '96 or '97. The unwashed masses adopted a few years later. AOL of '02 was nothing like AOL of '97.
- geoelectric 7y agoI wouldn't put too much gloss on that. I was on AOL from its original GeoWorks-based release forward, and it always had considerably more mass appeal than icb/forumnet, IRC, Usenet, or any of the other Internet-based forums/chatrooms of the time. It was night-and-day. You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one. A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine. So yeah, there were a lot less of us than when they started shipping out discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.
- Mister_X 7y agoSorry, wasn't trying to rewrite history, just making the point that those places were changed by an infusion of willfully ignorant people who drastically lowered the signal to noise ratio. I started on usenet in '85, and saw the decline there, but for slashdot and kuro5hin I seem to recall a different "trigger" of some sort that brought the masses there, it happened rapidly and was not a welcome change
- klint 7y agoI'll second Metafilter. It's even from the same era.
- muzani 7y agoI think there's always been cycles. It starts off as a toy, a side project. "A news aggregator hosted by a venture capitalist, hah!" But toys and side projects attract the intellectually curious. It becomes a hub. More and more people start to migrate to it. Eventually it gains prestige. People who care a lot about prestige join. They start flexing, shooting down ideas and discussions. People no longer feel safe to share ideas. It gets locked into an echo chamber. The intellectually curious migrate to other places. Some stay here. I've seen several crop up and die. Some die from the above. Many die because they can't hit critical mass.
- egdod 7y ago> like Rusty of kuro5hin found out the hard way, poor guy. What happened? I haven't even thought about kuro5hin in many years.
- ce4 7y agoTrolls took over basically. Discussion from 4 years ago when the site shut down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308
- kick 7y agoFamiliar with Metafilter! I think you've got a little of your chronology mixed up there, though. It happens!
- wolco 7y agoThe iPhone came out after that period and changed the world by bringing your grandma online. Facebook even twitter made everyone discuss there and then stop discussing. Discussion has never been the same.