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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me a lot of BBSs. It's hard to develop lasting and deep relationships with random people on the Internet. Just as old WoW, many BBSs had a small group of people who hung out virtually together and you got to know them. It's the closest you can get to lifelong high school and college friendships after leaving school.

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Funny enough, BBSs were the way many of the players on WoW servers pre-cross realm would communicate/flame each other outside the actual game.

When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums.

While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!

I think we lost something with demise of BBSs that the Internet was never able to replace. It's one of those things where one technology is better in almost every way, but something gets permanently lost in the transition. One analogy would be the upgrade from vinyl to CD/Digital music.

Minor nitpick: while Usenet closely resembled the older BBS's, it wasn't an actual BBS per se. Ditto the other forum sites.

I guess I was more including Usenet as a part of the progression, not necessarily categorizing as a BBS.

Fair enough on the notice two, but I think people (or at least I) more generically use “BBS” to describe message boards/forums.

Anyways, appreciate the correction regardless, as after looking the actual definition, I was definitely wrong =)!

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