Are BBS-Like Communities Dead?

Fr05t asks: "Since the day the Internet became popular and the good old BBS's faded into the back ground, I myself have had a hard time finding the same kind of active community. Sure there's Slashdot, BugTraq, and IRC, but for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature. I do see other Slashdot members posting often, but there are allot more people that read the articles and have opinions that remain in the background. I guess my question is if anyone has found the same kind of thing as the old BBS's?" (More)

I remember back in the 80's when I spent most of my waking hours after school in front of the monitor hooping from one BBS to another. I figure most of the BBSes have evolved in some way, shape or form and made the jump to the Internet. A few of them have evolved into Web Boards, which just don't have that same feel.

When I speak of "that BBS feel", I mean having the ability to go through different sections of the system, actually browsing the messages left by others in a free-forum (as opposed to moderated forums like Slashdot), actively seeing who was on the system at the time (the afore mentioned "who" command), the ubiquitous file transfer areas (which, for the most part have been surplanted by your mega-FTP sites like WcArchive and Freshmeat and others of their ilk). And door games....anyone remember door-games? (I'm still waiting for an online version of TradeWars for the Internet...)

Of course, my free time online has dropped dramatically due to my day-job and Slashdot, so I don't have the time to search for such online communities anymore. If anyone cares to make recommendations to any IBBS systems that may still exist, please feel free.

Comments

Infinite Connections --> Too Big Communities

[Christopher B. Brown]

In the BBS days, you were limited to connecting to BBSes in the local community, as LD charges to go further made anything more extensive impractical.

The Internet immediately "scales" to handling ludicrously large numbers of interconnected users. If you've got the name of:

• A person's email address
• A Usenet newsgroup
• A web site

You have random access to that location, and little reason to have any concern about whether this be in the same city, state, country, or even continent.

Last night, I got an email message from someone in New Zealand complaining that some of my web pages were mislinked/missing. This was because I was, at that very moment, in the process of installing updates, after having just nuked the existing copies. Apparently there's not a time to do maintenance that's not "prime time" somewhere.

In the old days, Star Trek fans would have to get together in person, which limited connections to occasional "conventions" and local community meetings. With Usenet, this provides the ability for everyone to post on the same newsgroup, and with tens of thousands of fans, this results in daunting quantities of traffic.

That heads us now towards the problem... BBSes limited community sizes to the size and diversity of the people in the local community. Usenet and the Web expand this to allow literally hundreds of thousands of participants in each of a multitude of fora. Unfortunately, you can't usefully have hundreds of thousands of participants in any kind of forum. A Slashdot thread with a mere 200 messages is effectively unreadable.

The result is that only those that are, in some manner, "Extreme," wind up being prime participants. A Star Trek newsgroup will have a small set of experts (such as one might be "expert" on such) that participate usefully, and those that are less expert will either:

• Be intimidated out of participating as they feel inadequate to really contribute, or
• Not care that they're inadequate, and bluster through to produce whatever they wish, which leads down the road to Inane Flame Wars.

That doesn't have to be Star Trek; it can apply equally well to any other topic with many "somewhat interested parties."

This is almost exactly the same idea as how single people have a hard time connecting personally/socially in large cities even though there may be vast quantities of other singles. The vast quantity of other people is off-putting.

And the same is true of apartment hunting. Some years ago, I moved to Toronto, and started apartment hunting by acquiring copies of the local newspaper. The thousands of apartment listings were less useful than having mere dozens, as the sizable lists had too much "chaff" to plough through. I wound up using word-of-mouth, via a friend-of-a-friend, to locate a place.

Having a virtually infinite number of links is thus as bad as having no links, if you have no good way of choosing from the infinite quantities.

The downfall of the BBS.

[sinnergy]

You make a very good point. It seems as though the closest thing that I've ever used that comes close to a BBS-like community is MUD (or one of it's variants). Peronsally, I used to be heavily involved in batmud (telnet batmud.bat.org). It's still a thriving community (with the required obnoxious personalities) and I hope to be able to have the time to play and/or socialize there again.

I admit that it's not the same as the traditional BBS. There are a few out there, and many that support some of my old favorites (door games (BRE, SRE, etc.). I sometimes yearn for the "old days" of my 14.4 and ANSI telecomm program, but then I realize, too, the benefits that the net has today.

As it is, Cleveland, Ohio, lost a landmark in online communities this fall when the Cleveland Freenet (owned and operated by my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University) was shutdown. The shutdown invoked scathing critcism and many flames directed toward both the President of the University (who was only in office for a few months) and the VP of IS (who was summarily fired a couple of months later). Still, even though the Freenet model was a trailblazing way of connecting people and allowing the "common folk" to explore this wonderous new thing called the Internet back in the early 90s, by even 1996 the system became so deprecated that it was becoming nothing more than an embarrassment and a money pit for the University. The "communities" that once thrived (including a very active local IRC, one that I still miss to this day and one which I can proudly say I found my current girlfriend of 3 years and potential wife on) were no longer active, except for a few strong holdouts by a stalwart few. In the place of the active lurkers and posters alike came the kiddy-porn mongers, the leechers and flamers. Granted, they were always there, but the ratio increased to a degree where it was no longer any "fun" to use it.

I feel like and old fogey when I reflect how things were in the late 80s and early 90s. People that didn't use BBSes will never truly understand the quaint charm they held and the sense of community they brought about. However, I can say for certain we'll be saying these same things about the Internet in 10 years. We'll be telling our children about how we used to have to type in "slashdot.org" this and "http://" that. I presume that the guts of the net will become so transparent we'll experience another great abstraction of the methodolgy in which we obtain and contribute information.

I've rambled enough. I need to mud...