This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
https://ineedcoffee.com/the-coffee-house-a-history/
They rapidly became a place where people from all walks of life could, and did, come for lively discussion. And their rapid increase in popularity caused them to collapse from their own success.
Early access to the internet was, by definition, limited to people who were on academic or military networks. But by the time BBS culture came about, it was the thrill of finding like-minded folks from wherever they might be- it was not a culture based on exclusion per se, like what you would find at a country club.
"All walks of life" is a polite fiction. The September in "Eternal September", after all, refers to university intake. "Wherever they might be" is a bit of a cop-out, because they weren't really "wherever", they were in other universities.
It wasn't a coffee shop, it was a strongly walled garden which only very specific groups of people could reasonably access.
Yes, but it was the introduction of easy-to-use 3D printers which actually, rather than theoretically, democratised it. As it was with AOL and Usenet.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
But the online services were really freaking pricey.
Here's a price list of online services from the 80s.
Compuserve was $11 an hour.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1...
Can't both sides be correct? There is certainly a host of good feelings one gets when they're a part of something that is exclusive. (Not saying it's morally right, just making an observation.) Whether those feelings are altruistic or not is besides the point. From that person's point of view, they no longer have those good feelings when their club is no longer exclusive.
From the view of the larger public, the ends justify the means as the happiness of all is larger than the loss of happiness of the few. But for those few, it's still worse.
Global Climate Change is just one big Tragedy of the Commons.
Speaking just for myself, here, but this has not been my experience. In my opinion, that interest in the early internet was a niche was essentially orthogonal to what it offered. It just so happened that the mindset of folks who would be attracted to the early offerings was a small portion of the overall population. But it wasn't the fact that the group was comparatively small that was what was interesting.
But it's a different feeling than it was before, because of how things work. And some of that works against the process of forming smaller, tight-knit communities than how it used to be. And it's ok to lament loss.
Does that make more sense?
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
It's a decent ready-to-go forum. I only used it for the clojure groups, but then the clj community discovered slack. All that useful topically categorized awesomeness now must be mined from worthless slack logs.