I was a SysOp from the twilight years of BBS. To answer your questions: The costs were mostly paid by the SysOps. In the form of additional phone lines, disk s

I was a SysOp from the twilight years of BBS. To answer your questions: The costs were mostly paid by the SysOps. In the form of additional phone lines, disk space, maintenance time etc... A user would have to worry about long distance charges. Re: average people. At the time, there was much more of a dividing line between computer people and average person. Not that you had to be an expert, but you did have to be an enthusiast. The average person would have neither the skill nor inclination/interest. Not very similar to social media. Closest description would be a combo of 4chan, HN, and sourceforge, but much more local and inward looking. Like comparing a small town bar vs tinder. "The BBS industry" was so small that the phrase sounds silly to say. Certainly there were official business bbs and larger players but scale was nothing compared to modern tech companies. The hardest thing to explain now is how novel participating in a network like this was. Prior to large scale internet access, computers were stand alone devices. Networks were arcane company owned things. Having your computer dynamically bring up what others were publishing was new and interesting.