Ask HN: Histories of Early Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Histories of Early Social Media

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Hi HN,

I’m working on a history of social media platforms. I aim to trace out the evolution of the specific platform features that we take for granted today (groups, profiles, “interests”, etc).

Although there do exist a few histories of social media, they are shallow and don’t cover platform details in depth.

Do you know of any computing blogs/magazines/personal blogs or even historians/people who might have information that I’m looking for — specifically, details about the platforms themselves?

Thank you HN :)

EDIT: if there are any older internet users reading this, I would be really grateful if I could ask you a few questions about this! (email, Zoom, whatever works)

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Livejournal got so many things right that modern platforms throw away.

* Posts could have multiple access levels: public, private, friends-only, and a custom friend group. This was somewhat annoyingly intertwined with the list of who you followed (your “friends”) but it was pretty powerful and easy to manage. Public and private spheres were seamlessly integrated in one account on one service instead of spread across multiple accounts with half-assed privacy measures.

* Long-ass posts and long-ass replies. Something like 64k was the limit. Replies were threaded. Complex conversations making subtle distinctions were easy to have.

* MULTIPLE USER ICONS. Everyone has dropped this and it was great. You could choose a particular icon for every post and comment, or let it be whichever you said was the default. Icon choice could mean a lot of things: it could apply an emotional layer, it could designate multiple characters in a role play account, symbolize projects, whatever. It was fluid and wonderful.

* Seamless e-mail integration. Replies to your posts/replies showed up in your email client. With a reply form right there in it, complete with user icon drop down and a “reply” button that would POST the form to the site. You could keep the conversation going without having to switch to the web browser. This was back before e-mail had become pretty much useless due to the volume of spam.

* Just the people you follow, in chronological order. Not notable at the time, this was what everyhing with any conception of a central agglomeration of everyone you wanted to watch did. There was no “algorithm” to optimize for user engagement time and ad views. That shit needs to die.

* oh and it did RSS too, you could follow any external site via a slightly kludgy method of creating a special account that mirrored an RSS feed, and that showed up in your friends page along with all the LJ accounts you followed

And then it got sold and went through multiple hands before ending up as a Russian site where being gay is illegal.

Nobody talks about it any more. Probably because its glory days coincided with GenX being young adults with the time to write lengthy essays about their lives (and to share dumb personality quizzes about their Hogwarts house). And GenX doesn’t exist any more, we’re all either Boomers or Millenials depending on which side of 1973 we were born on, and our own weird moments of cultural relevance are forgotten.

Similarly, Xanga. A weird mishmash of LiveJournal's text and comment behaviors and MySpace's friend and customization.

Aahhh! This is something I am interested in as well.

I don't have a definite answer but a few vintage points and directions in which you can start your journey and find more stuff from there

- https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/

- https://textfiles.com/

If you are searching for Pre Main stream internet, you can start with BBS Documentary

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1k...

If you are looking for collaborators on this project then, I'd love to join and make this a thing (:

I've been reading Exploding The Telephone (about phone hackers). The author makes a case for the conference call lines (like "2111") being one of (the first?) instances of a networked persistent social space. Groups of young people hanging out on these telephone company test lines... coming and going like it were a coffee house..

I've been trying to wrap my head around what it must have been like at the time.

One resource to try is SIGCIS (https://www.sigcis.org/); it's a professional group of computing historians and a number of retired practitioners.

However, historians don't tend to care about specific technology features, so I suspect you may need to treat this more as a journalistic effort than a historical effort -- emphasis on interviews, press releases, user manuals to build up a timeline.

Definition-wise, PLATO is an interesting case and is a useful test of whatever definition you choose to use. PLATO was a multi-site, multi-user education platform, but featured messaging, chat, and multi-user games. You can access a running PLATO system (https://www.irata.online/) and there are a few books that detail the development and user experience.

Thanks! I was planning to reach out to the folks at SIGCIS already :)

As for your point about specific features, I plan to treat this as a STS-esque project. TLDR: de-emphasize linear models of technology development. Besides, I feel that the history itself would be useful to other practitioners.

I started on BBSes, helped build one of the first local ISPs in Louisiana, was on IRC in 1994, lived through the rise and fall of Yahoo!, had a GeoCities page, was a MySpace early adopter, etc. Feel free to ask away.

Can I have your email if that’s okay with you? Or you can drop me a line (rk@rishav.io) and I’ll reach out to you within a couple of days. Thanks a bunch!

Sure- I'll drop you a hello.

Curious which local ISP? My first tech job was at Kricket out of Alexandria (later moved to Marksville.) in 1994.

I played a lot of Ancient Anguish (MUD) on that graveyard shift. :)

Net-Connect in Lafayette.

Archive of Justin.tv life stream would be of most interest. Not just the broadcast content, but building the early infra ;)

Nettime archives dates back to Oct '96. Mostly net art, but plenty of discussions around "user generated content":

https://www.nettime.org/archives.php

You might want to qualify what you define as social media. Does this imply the potential for people to share content publicly/globally? That eliminates a lot of media like bulletin boards, chats, etc. that were invite only.

Hey there! I've been online and in digital social spaces for 29 years, so I went ahead and sent you an email if you're still looking for information.

AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy these walled gardens deserve to be included in the social history along with independent and international phreaker BBS's

Afaik the earliest close to todays were in Japan and China.

How far back do you want to go? Pre-Usenet? BBS networks? Post web?

Surely it depends how you define social media - I'd expect to see features like having a list of connections/"friends", ability to share messages to said group, and arguably that should include more than just plain text content. Six degrees (1997) was about the earliest, and Friendster then MySpace the first that became "viral" (not a word used back then!). Were there ever any genuine non-web social media platforms?

You’re correct, but I expect that the need to invent those features arose with limitations in existing systems (those that were just plain text content or non-web, as you say).

Good point. AOL was huge in the late 90s and I used to to connect with a bunch of people in my locality who I never met in irl and a couple people I met up with romantically. But there was no human network - just chat rooms people were either in or out of.

In my experience social networking began with Friendster, where artifacts of your network were key to they experience. But this was preceded by web-based discussion and link sharing sites like kuro5hin and metafilter, where your profile and the viewable history of your comments and interactions with other users represented you to others.

I’m tentatively looking to begin with BBS (potentially CompuServe), but I’m willing to go back as far as needed to paint a comprehensive picture.

This is also one of the bits I’m having difficulty with — what was it like to actually use these systems? For instance, how did one even maneuver the process of posting on CompuServe or on Usenet?

Two ways, dial-up modems at home and wired ethernet at work/school.

At home you would use a Mac/PC/etc as a terminal, connected via telephone line to some host like Compuserve ou your workplace computer. This prevented use of the landline for voice communication, a source of some jokes.

At work your terminal/workstation would be connected 24x7 via wired ethernet, or some other LAN but ethernet became dominant in the 1980s, at first with coax cable.

"MOM, DON'T PICK UP THE PHONE, I'M ON THE INTERNET!!!"

"as far back as needed" may be single site multi-user systems. messaging on those systems was a hack that quickly grew important to those using it; but the idea of "computers as communications media" instead of machines to perform "thought assistance" tasks for individuals took a while to catch hold.

I'd be happy to old fart at ya from my memories of BBS times to slashdot, email me or start a Discord perhaps.

Check out BBS: The Documentary - I think it is freely streaming somewhere at this point. Jason Scott made a huge, in-depth analysis of BBSes and their impact.

There are many elements from that era that still exist in a weird way. The core limitation of connecting to a BBS was that it was a normal phone call and would tie up your phone line. And before cell phones, calling outside your area code was expensive! Likely $1 a minute in the 80s.

So BBS communities tended to be local and quasi-anonymous, and often turned into real life meetups. You would log on, check your messages, your door games and some forums then leave. Door games were structured much like phone games now with limited moves per day, but done for phone line reasons instead of gamification/rev generation.

This might be stretching your definition a bit, but the earliest may be X.25 networks/PDNs (Telenet, Tymnet, etc.) or, even earlier, AlohaNET.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_data_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

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