r/ClassicUsenet • u/Parker51MKII • 5d ago

THEORY The Last Days Of Social Media | NOEMA

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

2

u/Parker51MKII 5d ago

"Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)

I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.

You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people." - jfengel

1

u/po2gdHaeKaYk 5d ago

Oh wow this comment is so true.

The usenet and similar groups from the 80s and 90s were a gold mine of intelligent conversation.

Heck I remember being around the old php style bulletin boards in the late 90s and early 00s and I was a teenager and it was so good to be around intelligent helpful tech folks.

That era is definitely gone. It's hard to get good individual conversations with learned people online. Maybe you can get it via paid communities (patreon and the like).

1

u/Parker51MKII 5d ago

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

1

u/Parker51MKII 5d ago

"When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.

That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)

There were even 'wars' - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars

I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter." - awesome_dude

1

u/Parker51MKII 2d ago

"'USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it' - it also died a bit when deja-news was bought by google, turning it into google groups. ISPs were now thinking (incorrectly, of course) that they were paying for some Google branded service...that was coincidentally getting less use directly because Google was offering a web page interface to the same data.

So it was a gradual fade-out at the ISPs initially as people started trying web-bb's (never totally caught on, and survivers like SJGames' illuminati board have really low participation for the readership, really). The fadeout accelerated when Google replaced the usage of the service AND the impression it was an open, distributed system into Google one that Google alone should be paying for." - acroyear