It's interesting how HN crowd are mostly text (and text with low formatting too!) consumers. Compared to other social media, and even old school forums...
Are we mostly l33t developers here, in love with CLI and Vim? Ha!
In the beginning was the command line
Come on, it's absurd to think that we all follow a stereotype. Some of us use emacs.
I don't have eight megs to spare, you insensitive clod!
:wq
You monster.
I personally think the plain text howtos and forums of 1996-2002 were way easier to follow than the video links that come up these days.
The phrase “old school forums” really does a number on me. Forums are a web thing, and the web is newfangled tech.
Usenet, bbs. There are a lot of forums that predate the web.
They weren’t called that, were they? Usenet was just Usenet, or “news.” BBSes were BBSes.
And in context, “forums” was presented opposite plain text, and pre-web stuff tended to be plain text.
They were still forums. And there were some graphical usenet clients that were arguably better than any web forum - 35 years latter and much better graphics toolkits exist today. similiarly, not all bbses were text basee, though with modem being so slow that was the default.
ngl I grew up using gopher and Usenet before www commercialization. I'll take a plain text file over a video any day...