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> I wish we had something similar that was local (and no, not like Next Door which is full of busybodies and complainers) I wonder if it's possible now or if t

> I wish we had something similar that was local (and no, not like Next Door which is full of busybodies and complainers) I wonder if it's possible now or if that kind of experience simply belongs to a bygone era. Next Door should in theory be what you're looking for, but it seems like now that everyone's online instead of just early adopters, the current state of Next Door is just what you get with a location-based community that anyone can join.

wenc 2y ago
It's about having a curated community. In the early days, BBSes were frequented by cognoscenti because not everyone had modems. There was a natural curation mechanism which kept the quality high. There was also moderation -- BBS systems like WildCat allowed sysops to appoint moderators. Quora in the early days was a community of curious people, and many were startup founders and well-known people in the valley. It went downhill when it tried to growth hack, which attracted a flurry of low quality answers that made it devolve into a Yahoo Answers. The problem with Next Door is that it is democratization without curation. It doesn't have to be this way. HN for instance is democratization with curation (thanks to the efforts of @dang), and it works very well.
- danenania 2y ago
  dang certainly does a great job moderating HN, but I'll venture to say it would still have a far more open-minded and intellectually curious vibe than Next Door even if it were left unmoderated. I think the problem with Next Door is that traits like these (which HN tends to aggregate) are rare in the general population. To get the vibe you want, you'd probably need to curate to the point that you'd be blocking like 70% of people or more. And that has its own issues, since it would then feel like some kind of closed elitist club—which also definitely wasn't the atmosphere in the internet's early days.
  - varjag 2y ago
    I disagree. Unmoderated HN would have become 4chan at this point.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I think it was more about the community than the curation. I remember on one quite large BBS there was a guy who was a complete troll and ass - his username was Nihilist. It turned out he was a young adult with some sort of a degenerative, and terminal, muscular disorder. Modern times would definitely call him "toxic" or whatever, but he was just another part of the community, and when he passed, it was a somber day. It felt much more like a family. And in your family, even your crazy uncle is still always a part of the family. The first internet based BBSs, which now enabled people to login via telnet and could host magnitudes greater number of users, really started to lose alot of that community aspect of the local systems.

wenc 2y ago

It's about having a curated community. In the early days, BBSes were frequented by cognoscenti because not everyone had modems. There was a natural curation mechanism which kept the quality high. There was also moderation -- BBS systems like WildCat allowed sysops to appoint moderators. Quora in the early days was a community of curious people, and many were startup founders and well-known people in the valley. It went downhill when it tried to growth hack, which attracted a flurry of low quality answers that made it devolve into a Yahoo Answers. The problem with Next Door is that it is democratization without curation. It doesn't have to be this way. HN for instance is democratization with curation (thanks to the efforts of @dang), and it works very well.

danenania 2y ago
dang certainly does a great job moderating HN, but I'll venture to say it would still have a far more open-minded and intellectually curious vibe than Next Door even if it were left unmoderated. I think the problem with Next Door is that traits like these (which HN tends to aggregate) are rare in the general population. To get the vibe you want, you'd probably need to curate to the point that you'd be blocking like 70% of people or more. And that has its own issues, since it would then feel like some kind of closed elitist club—which also definitely wasn't the atmosphere in the internet's early days.
- varjag 2y ago
  I disagree. Unmoderated HN would have become 4chan at this point.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
somenameforme 2y ago
I think it was more about the community than the curation. I remember on one quite large BBS there was a guy who was a complete troll and ass - his username was Nihilist. It turned out he was a young adult with some sort of a degenerative, and terminal, muscular disorder. Modern times would definitely call him "toxic" or whatever, but he was just another part of the community, and when he passed, it was a somber day. It felt much more like a family. And in your family, even your crazy uncle is still always a part of the family. The first internet based BBSs, which now enabled people to login via telnet and could host magnitudes greater number of users, really started to lose alot of that community aspect of the local systems.