Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System

I often remark that people love reimplementing BBSs badly, and a fraction of the functionality. Of course it's not an entirely fair comparison because of the scope, different UI/nature of the web, audience size, and speed of communication to name a few issues.

It's important to note that your average decent BBS had most if not all of the following:

* Files - Often meticulously organized, with sometimes user voting or strict moderation. Unlike a lot of file sharing today, most boards also had things that would extract descriptions from archives or otherwise let you write them manually, along with providing other file metadata.

* User Management/Registration - Complete with idiot filters for the more underground boards (apps, voting on users, new user passwords)

* Mail - Even later, various versions of distributed mail including early email access for many people as well as things like FIDOnet

* Instant Messaging/Chat - There were entire huge multi-node boards entirely devoted to this, and even a single node board at least had sysop chat usually

* Games - Door games, mail/message games, offline sync'd games

* Timelines/Walls - Lots of plug-ins for this type stuff to leave short messages, shouts, etc.

* Time Management - Not necessarily a good thing, but on some boards you could bank time. Moreover, the fact there was time involved with your login on some boards created a sense of purpose and urgency.

* Keyboard Shortcuts - Godsend compared to your average web app, but also a drawback for some.

* Customizable UI - Most boards at least let you change menus, if not install plug-ins and other add-ons

* Distributed Content - Various boards would call each other or a sync service or otherwise download sync files to sync data such as games, not just mail.

* Groups/Subcultures

* No Frills - Despite being over modems primarily and thus slow, BBSs were pretty fast. In fact, I still feel like I got to more relevant information faster. It's not just a keyboard and mouse thing, it's about flow and the fact that the goal of the BBS was to deliver you some content quickly and efficiently. Navigation in web pages just sucks sometimes in so many ways - multi-page ads, long click funnels, huge percentages of random things I don't need on the screen like sidebars, etc.

I think for me the #1 thing about BBSs is at least for the better, BBSs, they tended to be more restrictive and served as great content filters. If you were an idiot, you simply could not join or got banned. There was a sense of excitement to get on a new BBS and see what it had, and with many, a status attached, especially in various undergrounds. There were always troublemakers, but they were limited and it was part of the fun usually to fight and have factions.

The small scale really made you feel like you knew everyone, even on large BBSs with tons of users. Sometimes this also meant that we all met up in real life and that changed how you interacted with people. It also sometimes deflated your view of certain people.

On the flip side, there were many things that were pains not limited to busy signals, slow speed, lots of bad BBS software that was popular, file transfers in the earlier days, limited to calling or receiving per number of phone lines unless you had expensive hardware/telco, and so on. I've often thought of writing some sort of newer, hybrid Internet modern BBS software. I am keenly aware of the many efforts to do things over SSH, telnet, web sockets, but they are mostly just unfinished rehashes of a lot of the less impressive parts of the old stuff. I have a list of many somewhere if anyone cares.

There are just so many things I could write about what we could learn from BBSs. Sadly, I still think the filtering aspect was really what tied it all together. Regardless, I would like to see someone build something new starting at the protocol level that isn't just sitting on top of what exists or at least is not just copying the old stuff. Some things like Hotline and other file sharing were close in a way, but lacked the same feel. I really wish at least the idea of getting to information fast and without bs would come back more. Gopher in the early days sometimes felt like this, and many web pages were like this to some degree.

Anyway, I am sure there are a lot of people who disagree and I believe there is a lot more good and bad things to say. I feel like BBSs are really ignored by a lot of people, and misunderstood by another large amount of people including former users. There are still some BBSs out there and the good news is most don't require a modem (just SSH or telnet), but it's just not the same.

Fidonet always sounded interesting but I never knew anyone who used it. Only a few of the local boards participated and none of my (local) friends used it. Downside of Metcalfe's law, I guess. If you could play Global War over Fidonet, though, I'd have loved that!

I used to visit a BBS semi-regularly during middle school, I had always enjoyed the simplicity of the basic text interface. Not that there was much going on, this was around 2008, so everything was long-dead by then. Reddit (and HN) has its voting system and 4chan has the bump system, but there's something about newsgroups with the long-lived threads with email-length replies that really appeals to me. Will there ever be something as popular and "open" as newsgroups, where each user judges a post on its own merits instead of by what the rest of the community thinks? Or am I merely pining for a past that never really existed?

Back in around 1994 I remember dialing into BBSes that had these amazing UIs drawn with vector graphics. Can't remember the software name (local BBSes could use it, not like e.g. Prodigy), but holy cow it was cool, compared to the regular text-based or even ANSI stuff I was used to.