No offense to its visionary creators, but to be candid, Club Caribe and Habitat were unappealing to me as a teen, kinda dull in the same way bad VR experiences

No offense to its visionary creators, but to be candid, Club Caribe and Habitat were unappealing to me as a teen, kinda dull in the same way bad VR experiences are to this day. Skimming the paper, it was indeed mostly for the reason highlighted at the top of the paper, I didn’t have great interactions when I visited. The tech alone wasn’t of interest for more than 5 minutes. Straight up text message boards on a topic of interest were better. The one cool thing from QLink that I miss was chat rooms where the host could control a MIDI playlist taken from endless archives of such things which played in the background while you (text) chatted. I never saw that imitated in the internet era which I always thought was a bit of a shame. Shared discovery, sharing, affinity for music, now there was an enhancement to the otherwise silent experience of BBS-dom. I consider the loss of that capability a sad victim of the MPAA/Napster/RIAA wars. I still think there’s a Spotify/competitor feature hidden there…