It also had a way better sex ratio, for reasons I don't really understand in hindsight. It was at least ~30% female. Many a match was made on those sites, not just hookup stuff, but people actually forming real relationships.
There was also that one game where you went deep down into some dungeon, and had the option of taking various drugs for buffs while also dealing with side effects. It was weird, and fun.
And contrary to what people might think, BBSes weren't full of neckbeards. There were people from all walks of life (lawyers, doctors, people with families, singles, men, women, kids like me). For something so "techie" it was unexpectedly diverse.
I remember my BBS days fondly. I wish we had something similar that was local (and no, not like Next Door which is full of busybodies and complainers)
I wonder if it's possible now or if that kind of experience simply belongs to a bygone era. Next Door should in theory be what you're looking for, but it seems like now that everyone's online instead of just early adopters, the current state of Next Door is just what you get with a location-based community that anyone can join.
In the early days, BBSes were frequented by cognoscenti because not everyone had modems. There was a natural curation mechanism which kept the quality high. There was also moderation -- BBS systems like WildCat allowed sysops to appoint moderators.
Quora in the early days was a community of curious people, and many were startup founders and well-known people in the valley. It went downhill when it tried to growth hack, which attracted a flurry of low quality answers that made it devolve into a Yahoo Answers.
The problem with Next Door is that it is democratization without curation. It doesn't have to be this way. HN for instance is democratization with curation (thanks to the efforts of @dang), and it works very well.
The first internet based BBSs, which now enabled people to login via telnet and could host magnitudes greater number of users, really started to lose alot of that community aspect of the local systems.
I think the problem with Next Door is that traits like these (which HN tends to aggregate) are rare in the general population. To get the vibe you want, you'd probably need to curate to the point that you'd be blocking like 70% of people or more. And that has its own issues, since it would then feel like some kind of closed elitist club—which also definitely wasn't the atmosphere in the internet's early days.
In my area, we had the Cleveland Freenet with an IRC server. Met a lot of friends in real life from there—I believe they also had periodic picnic meetups but I never went to one of those. Briefly dated someone in HS after we met in an IRC channel, and one of my real life friends met his future wife on a freenet in neighboring state that we could access.
I also had a personal site that a random girl my age a few states over found. She emailed me and we started corresponding for years over email, AOL/AIM and hand written letters. We still do on occasion. We met in person about 13 years after we first emailed.
- Your immediate friends who you personally knew and exchanged ICQ numbers with to add each other. You couldn't just find them... you needed to know their numbers.
- Everyone else you "found" by searching / randomly connecting with when they / you set your status to "Free to Chat" as opposed to just "Online".
Features:
- Until the MSN Messenger / AOL IM years, ICQ was p2p - both parties needed to be online in order for conversations to take place. So, in a way there was a more skin in the game in order for it to work. Conversations meant more.
Community:
- It being the early days of the internet, it felt more special - ICQ, BBS, IRC, and web forums is how people found each other. There was no Reddit, even Digg came much later.
My handle was more embarrassing out loud than it was on the internet :).
hah, i had a similar experience. originally i spelt my nick "embe", but once i heard someone on an in person meeting pronounce it with a stress on the first e, and a short low stress second e, that sounded totally wrong, so i changed the spelling to "embee" to get them to pronounce it right.