slashdot, kuro5hin, usenet, a few other choice places, all either gone, or polluted by willfully ignorant voices.
Or outright mean spirited, aggressive trolls, like Rusty of kuro5hin found out the hard way, poor guy.
You may find Metafilter of interest.
I'd be interested in other places as well, I never found a replacement for those lost treasures of the early net.
I still have my tattered original kuro5hin T-shirt, can't wear it, but can't bear to throw it out.
All of the sites that you named except Usenet postdated that event.
You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one.
A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine.
So yeah, there were a lot less of us than when they started shipping out discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.
I started on usenet in '85, and saw the decline there, but for slashdot and kuro5hin I seem to recall a different "trigger" of some sort that brought the masses there, it happened rapidly and was not a welcome change
It starts off as a toy, a side project. "A news aggregator hosted by a venture capitalist, hah!"
But toys and side projects attract the intellectually curious. It becomes a hub. More and more people start to migrate to it.
Eventually it gains prestige. People who care a lot about prestige join. They start flexing, shooting down ideas and discussions. People no longer feel safe to share ideas. It gets locked into an echo chamber.
The intellectually curious migrate to other places. Some stay here.
I've seen several crop up and die. Some die from the above. Many die because they can't hit critical mass.
What happened? I haven't even thought about kuro5hin in many years.
> Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone foreve
I've seen a friend share something from a space colonization site - what an absurd idea, but also fun and interesting. Too bad I didn't keep the link.
Some of the old forums are still good. Something Awful is still up there, still a little funny, still a little interesting, but feels a little stale. Bay12 (Dwarf Fortress) forums are good, but have become really tight knit that it's might feel a little clique-ish. Still a good place to discuss those kinds of games. I'd bet the Paradox games forums are good too. There's some erotic RP forums which I won't link, but those usually are good places because they attract a lot of Asperger's people who are educated, good at writing, mature enough to discussing anything at all, and it's very tightly moderated.
It was a different time. One could posit crazy ideas, play Devil's Advocate for all sorts of horrible positions, and even be an outright asshole, with little consequence other than maybe being dropped into a lot of kill files.
Compare that to what happened to Tim Hunt or RMS more recently. Hard to see how we might get back to the older ways. Maybe people will start opening up illicit "speakeasys" where people can, well, speak easily, without fear of life-altering consequences.
I don't think there was any sort of trigger.
Private chat groups are the only place I see now that are like that.
http://kr5ddit.com/ tried to do it but went down as Alpha Racks went dark. Now it is a chat forum.
I have 10 invites available right now, and I am not affiliated with them — just enjoy the discussions and community that are growing.
The best explanation of the site's goals and values is still the original announcement blog post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Here's the discussion on HN at the time too (note that the site was totally private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093
I assume drannex will run out of invites soon (thanks for offering them!), so if anyone's interested in an invite please feel free to email the address in the blog post and I'll send you one tomorrow. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a base site culture and more features continue getting built up.