Everytime someone mentions Usenet, I have to remind myself they’re not the people who developed the Terminators.
I was complaining in another thread about how modern technology has killed old-fashioned romance. When I was courting one of my ex-girlfriends back in the old days, we would write actual e-mails to each other, and attach mp3 files of our favorite songs. We would talk for hours on MSN messenger. You just can’t get that kind of intimacy by sharing YouTube links and posting on Facebook walls, or whatever the kids are doing these days.
A new Atlantic Monthly piece about why email is still the best thing about the Internet. I agree.
Back to the OP – As others have said, Dopers tend to value different communication methods for different purposes. They appreciate the email-esque format of the Dope, because slowly typing out text items that range in size from a sentence to a multi-paragraph mini-essay requires (or at least encourages) careful thought. It gives you a chance to express an idea clearly, thoroughly, and grammatically, and to fix errors before hitting “submit” (and for a few minutes afterwards as well).
(Yes, I know you can fix errors before “submitting” in Facebook posts and the like, but something about FB discourages this…maybe it’s the constant stream of random updates on all topics which pushes you to get your piece out there fast, or maybe it’s just the informal, un-serious atmosphere generated by all those photos and stuff.)
Back in the old days, to get online I had to wave my abacus over a smokey fire.
Back in MY day, we had this device called a “telephone,” (pause for appreciative “ooohs” and “ahhhs”) that allowed me to HEAR the actual VOICE of the lady I was dating. No carpal tunnel, either. 
::standing back for inevitable Monty Python pile-on::
I use FB as a quick way to keep up with family and friends, know the latest memes, and follow the latest news and articles for things that interest me. I usually do this on the train during my daily commute.
But for interesting in-depth discussion, or for answers I can’t find elsewhere, there’s nothing like message boards and the Dope is the best general interest board on the net, unless there’s some other one that I’m missing.
I also use some technical boards, mainly for work, and a couple of political boards.
I don’t have a Twitter account. I decided that at some point I had to draw the line as far as high volume information sources. There are only so many hours in the day.
And cats.
Forums are the only online tool that permits extended discussions that persist over time.
Extended: few if any length limits. (Actually, this board and others have a *minimum *length limit.)
Persist over time: The exchanges persist as long as the forum operator chooses, which is generally forever - there are discussions on here dating back to 1999. Some accrete new posts at intervals, not always because some spammer finds a zombie thread, and anyone interested can pick up the, um, thread.
Discussion: When two or more people love a topic very, very much, they can exchange extended comments **over time **about that topic, and make something new in the world. This is a ham-handed comparison to sex, which lets me compare TwitBookIt to a fast, cheap [del]blowjob[/del] hand job in an alleyway.
I watched forums grow from independent BBSes, where only folks who dialed into that board could participate (and often serially), to FIDONET, which connected thousands of such boards, to Usenet, which connected millions around the world… to the death of all these things in the face of individual web site forums like this one, and the pathetic shadow of global communication in the rushing river of brief drivel.
The loss of the long-form, persistent forum is one of the great tragedies of the internet’s short life. That you find it unusual is a lovely paper cut with some lemon juice dripped on it, thank you very much.
That’s true of the entire internet, not just this board. I think it’s some sort of infection.
Edited to add: This board does have an obsession that seems to be unique: pigeons.
It also seems to me (and please correct me if I’m just being an ignorant luddite here) that forums are the only online tools for meeting and conversing with people you don’t otherwise know in real life. Facebook is for people you already know or have at least met in person. E-mail is for people you at least already have some reason to talk to in the first place (and often don’t actually want to talk to). Twitter is… actually, I have no idea what the hell Twitter is actually for.
OK, there are dating sites (although I don’t if people actually use those anymore, or what the kids might have replaced them with, as I haven’t set foot in one for years). So I’ll moderate my statement to: Forums are the only tools for meeting people you don’t otherwise know in real life, for non-sexual purposes.
Luxury! Why, in my day we had to sacrifice a chicken. And use it’s blood to draw messages on the walls. And we were grateful, because we got a nice chicken dinner out of it to boot.
You had walls? We had to write the messages on other chickens.
Social media is what you make it. The main issue is that it obeys Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of anything is crap. So most social media users/content is useless crap, but it’s absolutely possible to have intelligent debates (yes, even on Twitter!), stay informed on current events (whether they be as far away as Israel & Gaza or as close as floods all over your metro area), etc.
The problem is that as time goes by, Sturgeon’s Law means that most of that 90% is forgotten because, well, it was crap and we hang onto that 10%. Everyone’s heard of looking through rose-colored glasses; we tend to don them – societally and individually – looking back, so that great 10% becomes closer to 100% of what you remember.
People got into riDICulous flame wars on usenet. People used and use one of the most important creations from the internet (email) to forward conspiracy theories and stupid chain emails. Personal Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod webpages were horrifically designed and basically only a way for their owners to talk about themselves. There’ve been prank telephone calls since basically the invention of the phone. Chain letters circulated by post long before email was around.
And so it goes…
Luxury! In my day, chickens were still dinosaurs.
I have seen no form of “social media” that fosters any real dialogue or has any persistence whatsoever. It’s a crowd shouting at each other, or across the crowd to another. It can’t be used in any coherent way. It has all the persistence of echoes. It’s a mob speaking to itself, with no one listening to anything but their own babble.
Does it have its place? Sure. But the deconstruction of Usenet with no real successor, and the return to independent, isolated (albeit more quickly accessed, shared and prettier) forums is a giant step backwards in mass communication.
Honestly, I can live with Twitter and Facebook’s piss-into-the-river stream of “communication.” What I truly loathe are the sites that use balky simulations of the forum format - because they’re prettier, or easier to bash away in, or just work in a glued-on fashion - but have even less support for long-form, persistent discussion than either Twitter or FB, but pretend to. Cracked, AICN… I’m lookin’ at you, posers.
You can pretty much say anything you want here within reason,& that makes me warm & fuzzy all over.
Something I could not do on boards like city-data.com
So that day is today? FWIW, chickens are, for all in tents and porpoises, dinosaurs.
Hey, you got Prince Albert in a can?
Watson, is that you? Get off the phone!
And this thread degenerated into Monty Python riffs in just about 30 posts. Don’t ever change SDMB.