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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

First the BBSs, then Usenet...

I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry. Today, online services are all about low friction signup, which makes a lot of sense in the highly competitive Internet of 2023. But when computers were somewhat niche and you really had to figure out how to get things working, users were a lot more committed and thus the quality of discussions was a lot higher.

Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets.

Speaking of BBSs, there is nothing today that quite captures the full value proposition of BSSs. Back in the day, you could sign up to one of them and meet a lot of locals due to the high long distance phone bills. I made a lot of "real world" friends, even a girlfriend or two, back in the BBS days.

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> Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets.

Ignoring the hellthreads, the technical content here is pretty mid these days. The last year has been rough on this site. It's like reading a combination of r/linux and r/rust, a sort of nuance free assertion of FOSS-heavy technical preferences. If that's the echo chamber that you enjoy go for it, but even on Matrix I find a lot deeper content than here, let alone some Discords and smaller forums. What I do appreciate is the breadth on some more niche technical content (J and APL threads come to mind.) But IMO the glory days here are gone.

Social forums seem to "collapse" a few ways: die (like Usenet, many old IRC channels), calcify (many older forums I'm in, Lobsters), or become an echo chamber (Subreddits, this place.) I guess Eternal September comes for us all.

What forums, Matrix, and Discord are you a part of that have high quality discussion?

I also think "culture" is a thing.

Something works, culturally, in 1970s place X, and doesn't in 2020s place Y.

Wikipedia, started today, would not be Wikipedia for every reason. Different user culture, different founder culture, finance culture, IP, "truth," etc. Wikipedia started in today's world would start different, go on a different trajectory...

We have an intuitive grasp of this, and are always looking for a more objective/formal/causal understanding... but I don't think it really exists.

In any case, just like with "music these days," and whatnot... sometimes the thing that has changed is you yourself.

I wouldn’t really say the visual aspect of HN really puts people off. I would argue that it’s more a function of discussion topics being more niche and technical.

Ultimately the worst situation is when replies can consist of only a “joke” or meme (worst of all… a gif). Discussion is destroyed and instead replaced with a delta function; a single impulse response. “Click and move on”.

GIFs require too much work, nowadays you only get a reaction - if you are lucky!

Usenet was also niche and technical in the beginning, but that changed over time. Maybe the answer is multifaceted; Hacker News is a bit ugly, has a large percentage of technical users, strong moderation and lack of "low effort" features such as inline images, GIF libraries, reactions etc.

same thing happens at Reddit more niche topic -> better content. There is mainstream, then there is kinda messy middle where people are gatekeeping and it is kinda elitist place but when you go down enough in rabbit hole people start being just happy that you are sharing this hobby or topic of interest together.

We are of a like mind, I see. There is a part of me that misses the level of exclusivity BBS's offered, and that part of me continues to try to find online communities that scratch that particular itch (recommendations welcome).

However, there is another part of me that is glad this new Internet is so much more accessable. Don't get me wrong, I abhor the pervasive marketing, corporate fingers in everyrhing, and all the bloat that comes with it, but if I just focus on the fact that so many more people are even getting a mild, watered-down taste of why I love computers so much, that makes me a bit happy. Computers connect us, and during a crucial time in my life where I was feeling woefully disconnect from my peers (socially excluded, perhaps?) the BBS and newsgroup communities were there to welcome me.

> There is a part of me that misses the level of exclusivity BBS's offered, and that part of me continues to try to find online communities that scratch that particular itch (recommendations welcome).

My hope was that wireless mesh networks would fill that void since you have to be physically local to the network to gain access. We could have local/community level LANs with file sharing, gaming, chat, and forums. Instead we got things like facebook groups and Nextdoor.

> Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions.

I made an account around the time when I started reading HN for the first time. I was a master student in computer science. Other than the reason to be able to create things out of my imagination, another reason why I studied computer science is because I felt too dumb to grok the field. So it was me stretching myself out of my academic comfort zone since I felt I'd never be able to grok programming. I cannot describe how heavy of a pressure I put on myself. How would you feel if what you're trying to attempt is almost certainly futile? The only counter argument I had is that I knew that humans (myself included) are notoriously difficult at predicting someone's capability. In the master computer science, I was scraping by at that point.

When I found HN, it felt quite inaccessible to be honest. It felt too geeky, too technical. I was able to stay around was because of the broad curiosity in all kinds of topics. A related reason was that curiosity is the main virtue that HN stands for, which is the same virtue I've stood for since I was 7 years old. I remember reading all the non-technical submissions for a few months while once or twice per week reading an actual technical submission.

Mind you, I had enough training, I took my computer science master over the course of multiple years (while also doing a bachelor in psych and a master in game-design, simultaneously). And yet, I could only bare 1 or 2 technical articles per day.

It took a whole year of acclimation. After a year, HN felt fully accessible. I could enjoy any submission on there. In part, what really helped was that I took very very hard computer science courses and that gave me an intellectual development that has been unprecedented ever since. After that, HN felt like home.

But for that whole year, it was interesting but it also felt like a strain on my mind every day.

So to say that HN does not have a high barrier of entry, I'd respectfully disagree. I don't think I'd be able to have enjoyed this place if I wouldn't have studied computer science. I know there are non-technical people on here that are able to do that. I know that I simply wouldn't, and I think there are others like me that couldn't have either.

Maybe it's good that it has a high barrier of entry though.. If it would become too mainstream it would get lost in the currents of mainstream news. I don't want to read about the Kardashians here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Kardashian

But honestly I can't say excessive discussion of subjects I have no real interest in is the reason I avoid most online discussion forms (incl. social media). An HN thread about a Kardashian is probably still likely to be more interesting than your average FB (or Twi..., sorry "the site formerly known as an X symbol") comment thread about topics I'm genuinely invested in.

I lived in a small town in Nevada in the early 90s, and I ran one of the local BBSs. Every six months or so, we would have an IRL party and meet other BBS sysops and the users. It was really fun to finally be able to put faces with usernames.

BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this community of other nerds!

It was great and I don't know the equivalent nowadays.

I think one of the key aspects of the dialup BBS days was that long-distance connections were (sometimes very) expensive, and so BBS systems tended to be populated by locals. There were some networked BBS systems, though (FidoNet and WWIV spring to mind).

I played around with FidoNet back in the late 1980s/early 90s, when Usenet was not available to me, and FidoNet's Usenet-like echomail system had some very active groups. But even with FidoNet, there was very much a local-to-regional focus. Networks were organized geographically, and Net 115 (Chicago area) had some social gatherings. But FidoNet collapsed pretty quickly once the internet came to the public.

One of the cool things I saw on BBSes back in the day - that I have yet to see replicated - was 'real time chat' in telechat, or being able to see what the other person is typing out as they enter it on their keyboard. It was captivating and made it really feel like an intimate conversation with another person. That could have just been the novelty of it all, as well... ICQ had a similar feature IIRC?.

<P>age SysOp

Or before that, about every text conversation on Amateur Radio.

CW (Morse), RTTY (Teletype), etc, etc.

Is this place really ugly though? I've always found this trend of claiming a website is ugly if it's content dense or minimalistic to be a bit disturbing. It does sound more like preference than anything else, I don't see anything wrong with what I perceive to be a clean design.

not ugly but unfriendly for mobile.

And those with issues reading text at crazy low contrast...

it was in 1992 that i discovered what long distance calls actually cost, when my young dumb ass called up about 12 different non-local BBSes in search of more daily turns on Legend of the Red Dragon.. i didnt know modems would incur long distance fees just like phones... i was a special child

Also around that time that me and my friends learned what 'Extended Area' calling was- we all thought that if it was not long distance then it must be free! I remember us solemnly concluding that we would have to 'hack' the phone company. All of us also very special.

>>I think that one good thing from these services was the relatively high barrier of entry.

Talking of high barrier to entry, does anyone ever remember that hackers group that said you needed to hack something in your newsreader to make it not read-only so you could post?

Would that be alt.sysadmin.recovery? Your post had to have an "Approved:" header. You could say "Approved: yes", "Approved: no" or "Approved: xyzzy" - it didn't matter.

I expect there were other groups that needed an Approved: header to post.

It was the same method as that, but the group was alt.hackers I think.

https://www.samiam.org/alt.hackers.html

Peak of 70 postings a month? Surely that'd be the threshold for "largely abandoned" for almost any forum these days...

The fact that you dont get notified when someone's replies to you bothers me a lot. I have not answered some messages because of that reason...

You can use https://www.hnreplies.com/ for that :)

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