Don’t forget Ham radio.
ducks
Before this I briefly frequented Telnet MOOs (Multiuser, Object-Oriented environments). Similar in terms of interaction, but not in terms of having posts or a particular knowledge-sharing theme.
I wouldn’t say this is new; a new step, maybe, but there are plenty of boards vaguely similar.
Usenet is the immediate precedent, then the big ships.
But personally, I don’t care one whit what you are; I care who you are.
Ham Radio. With 1920’s style Long Radio Waves.
Actually, I think college can be a community that’s pretty similar.
This reminds me of that old AOL commercial where you see this guy who might be described as crimson-naped doing a slow burn in front of his computer because he’s in a chat room with somebody who is “whatchacall ‘pro-NAFTA’”.
“Mom, Dad done shot up the internet agin!”
The funny thing was that it confirmed the opinion of AOL users that was harboured by a lot of usenet posters at the time.
(somebody please rate the previous sentence. I’m not sure I managed to put it in English)
I have the most difficulty convincing people who don’t know the SDMB that this isn’t some random Internet messageboard filled with trolls. I know Eve’s full name, some of her history, titles of books she’s written, etc. … if Eve, or any other reputable poster, relates an experience I can be fairly sure the truth is being represented. Because of the SDMB’s connection with real-life identities, these boards are more to be trusted (when one knows of the poster who’s speaking) than any other large messageboard out there.
Does that make us unique in history? Kinda-sorta. Unique in the history of messageboards, definitely.
We are hardly unique. However, we are certainly uncommon.
I have been on at least a dozen message boards, lists, BBS’s, and spent a lot of time on a very few chat media. On one other I had a very strong sense of “community” and membership. That one too had a loosely defined, but well understood set of limits, which were enforced by banishment. The limits were different. Being a jerk was not dealt with by management. It was dealt with by a very stringently applied ignore function. But there were limits, and known general goals to the community. The nature of those limits made the mix of people different, but still included a very wide range of folks, outside of the one area of commonality.
Here we fight ignorance, and do not suffer jerks well. It works for us. And we get a different mix. Raging bigotry still exists. But the raging bigots are just not quite ready for having their ignorance fought. They want to have their bigotry fought. They have that one down pat. But they don’t have cites, and they don’t have any new information. They get bored. They go away. It works for us.
As it turns out, whatever you want to talk about, there is someone here who talks about that too. And probably someone who knows a fair bit about it that you didn’t know yet. If you hang around a few years, you notice the fairly reliable sources of new information. Now that’s bandwith!
Tris
Well, I didn’t really mean are we unique as message boards go–I meant more, are message boards themselves unique in human history.
I had been thinking of the old “party lines,” but people have brought up ham radios and CBs–I’d forgotten about those. Though I think this is a huge advance for different kinds of people from different walks of life and areas to communicate more cogently . . . “Soon we’ll be as one world, and someday we’ll all realize that as different as we are, we have many reasons to hate each other’s insides.”
Salon’s Table Talk boards were pretty good. Maybe they still are; I don’t know, because I haven’t visited them since they went pay-to-post.
Or to our age. 
I’m not entirely disagreeing, but there are still differences. The ham radio is a one-on-one discussion generally speaking and one cannot skip from one topic/person to another in the same way. Also my experience was that hams would find out where each other were, talk about their equipment, how the weather was, who they might know in common, etc. but not have a discussion with the variety mentioned in the OP. Having said that ham radio is still a good example.
How about the UN?
Ham radio, CBs, and the older usenet systems all required a certain interest in the equipment or the system-- they were for dedicated hobbyists, really. The Internet now is so mainstream it gets a wider variety of people.
Nah, we’ve got a few pre-literate Doperkids registered.
Robin
Jury duty was a lot like this. Not that you could call it a community.