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All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's i
by yason 3y ago
All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years.
Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with services designed for masses, to be used by the masses. This will drown all the interesting bits that used to be visible earlier.
The direction of development suggests that these 'good places' will be more and more scarce in the future. Further, (curiously both) privacy and surveillance laws are slowly creeping in and making it harder to freely offer services similar to those that have already died once. This further levels the playground for bigger players.
- HPsquared 3y agoMaybe a blockchain-based chat protocol, where there is a cost to posting? That's a pretty steep barrier to entry.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoThat's effectively what ads are, but without the blockchain part of it.
- ruune 3y agoThe idea and sentence work just as well if you remove "blockchain-based" part. Where is the advantage using complicated things when easy things work just as well?
- dm319 3y agoHackernews is another example.
- yard2010 3y agoFwiw I'm still using usenet in 2023. It's great alternative to torrents :)
- superkuh 3y agoI'm still using text only usenet groups to talk to other people about star trek, cyberpunk, linux, and IRC. Activity is low, maybe a post or two a month per group, but it's real people and decent community. Come back and join us. Usenet/IRC/email/self-hosted blogging still works. There aren't fewer of us, there are just more people in the walled gardens.
- chrsw 3y agoThank you. This is a better version of something I said in another comment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoNot necessarily more scarce. There might be more good places than ever in absolute numbers, just harder to find?