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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

The era just prior was even better IMO. BBSes were the best - bulletin board systems. Basically they were locally hosted servers, mostly ran on dial up connections. So they were almost entirely local, and usually with no more than one or two people on at the same time - though some hosts went crazy. I remember one guy had a 16 line connection! Games, chat, file sharing, and all of the best parts of the internet, with none of what it's turned into. And all 100% local. 'Hey guys up for a BBQ this weekend?' was a thing.

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.

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My go to game on our local BBS was Legend of the Red Dragon.

I spent far too many hours playing Trade Wars. It's really a game that I think would probably do well with a reboot. Such amazing depth, room for unlimited players, and such a great strategic layer.

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.

BBSes certainly lacked the global reach.

Being local was an advantage. As a 15 year old kid, I met so many people from BBSes in real life who were much older than me, but we had all the same reference points because we were all local. The older folks took care of the younger folks because we were all part of the same community.

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 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.

It's about having a curated community.

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.

dang certainly does a great job moderating HN, but I'll venture to say it would still have a far more open-minded and intellectually curious vibe than Next Door even if it were left unmoderated.

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.

I disagree. Unmoderated HN would have become 4chan at this point.

I think it was more about the community than the curation. I remember on one quite large BBS there was a guy who was a complete troll and ass - his username was Nihilist. It turned out he was a young adult with some sort of a degenerative, and terminal, muscular disorder. Modern times would definitely call him "toxic" or whatever, but he was just another part of the community, and when he passed, it was a somber day. It felt much more like a family. And in your family, even your crazy uncle is still always a part of the family.

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.

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