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

On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear, and activity.

In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam, moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything, BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their BBS and they just did what they wanted.

Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means thought and leave or .

Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting "f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good for fun.

Looking back, those were amazing times. By day, I was an awkward teenager who was still battling a pesky speech impediment. But, by night, I was part of communities where I was judged by the quality of my writing!

All that said, while I see what you're saying, BBS and Usenet both had their problems.

With Usenet, the biggest problem was discoverability. There were amazing, inspiring threads, but it took work to find them. When you would find an amazing thread, you had to parse through (often hundreds) of meaningless replies to find the few gems. Then, there was the sheer hostility of some of the communities. While much of that was reserved for newbies who violated the oft incomprehensible etiquette, some of it was just insane. For example, massive flame wars would erupt over the slightest provocation. This sounds silly in retrospect, but there was a point where typing 'Reconstruction of the Fables' in rec.music.rem would provoke serious hate.

With BBS, particularly when they were popular enough to be busy, the biggest issue was that people are really fucked up when they think they're anonymous.

If you like phreaking as well, Exploding The Phone is really good.