I recall the great discussion groups on Usenet. Most were rec.tv or alt.tv. Nearly every tv show in the 90’s had a group. There would be several hundred posts every week after a new episode. The Babylon 5 group even got postings from the shows creator. I’m not sure if the Straight Dope started on Usenet or not.
Spammers eventually drove nearly everyone off Usenet.
Moderated Discussion boards appeared on the Internet. The removal of spam made life good again. I was very active on the Discovery and TLC boards. Mythbusters, American Chopper, Trading Spaces etc. were very active between 2002-2007. Hundreds of posters for the shows. American Choppers has only a handful of regular posters. Mythbusters is way down too.
Suddenly arround 2008 it seems like the boards dried up. Even TWOP is a shell of what it was. This season Top Chef has less than 20 pages of posts each episode. It used to get 50 or more for every episode.
At times, even the Straight Dope postings trickle off.
Have people finally grown tired of talking? Has the novelty worn off?
Or, has the discussion shifted to somewhere new that I’m not visiting?
I think they’re still out there, but they are all specialised now. If you want to find the message board that discusses your narrow interest, you can find it by Googling, but there are very few general ones like this one. It’s partly that it’s a lot of work to moderate a board so that the spammers, trolls, and ignorant children don’t spoil things for the adults.
Flamers, trolls and assorted lower life forms. And a generally shallow gene pool. One board I left, I left because 15 of 15 new posts simply said something-or-other was “da bomb”. Nothing else; just “da bomb”.
I’ve always avoided facebook. A friend of mine makes a good living repairing computers. A lot of his customers got viruses from facebook and Myspace. That was a few years ago. Maybe things are better?
I belonged to a pretty neat board for many years. The people were bright and funny. Then the whole world seemed to begin to polticize nearly every issue. Fights broke out among friends. New people stopped being welcome for their political views. The board became inbred and insular.
They’re still there and they’re still bright and funny and there is no variety. A handful of people who all agree. Boring.
I felt sorry for the Terminator Sarah Connor Society board I visited. They put a lot of work into it. A couple members were graphics artists and did amazing work for the board. Then the show gets prematurely canceled. All that work. Zapped by ratings. The board dried up overnight without new episodes.
A valuable cautionary tale. This is the main reason I value the smart, articulate members here who piss me off no end. I have friends IRL when I just need to be agreed with.
I was on Usenet for awhile, but not for long. Was Usenet moderated? There was a TON of spam and garbage posts.
[hijack] I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would. I can keep up with the kids and grandkids, look at their photos without having to download them from an e-mail (or sign up for a photo site), and we can communicate privately if we want, using the message feature, or chat.
I’ve hidden the people who only use it to play stupid games or proselytize.
It’s the second site I open every day, after the Raffer trivia game.
Yeah, I read the specialized message boards sometimes that are in areas that interest me, and some of them are still very active. For example, FlyerTalk for air travel, and MSN Your Money for finance. But I really enjoy a board where people have intelligent conversations about anything at all, and at the moment SDMB is about all there is that is still active, as far as I can see. I used to subcribe to about 30 Usenet groups; now I never read them at all.
I do think facebook has drawn people away from discussion boards. But, I’ve noticed on quite a few discussion boards, there are a few posters who simply insist on hijacking every thread into a political/economics/conspiracy theory rant. I’m so sick of these people that I just lose interest.
AFAIK, The Straight Dope traces it’s lineage back to a forum on AOL, although there was an unaffiliated Usenet group (alt.fan.cecil-adams), which I was familiar with in the mid-90s, but admittedly didn’t really spend much time there.
For the most part it was a free-for-all, but there were a (very) few Usenet boards that were moderated. For example, rec.humor.funny had a single moderator who would read all submitted jokes and pick the best one or two per day to send out.
I was pretty active on Usenet in the 90’s, in fact I first started using my standard online handle on the MST3K boards, but I can’t really comment on the state of Usenet today. My ISP dropped it’s news feed about five or six years ago and I wouldn’t know where to find another one.
Part of it is probably that people are more aware that they have no privacy online. Everything you say will be filed for easy access decades down the road, which kind of quells socialization. Imagine if video cameras recorded every conversation you had with friends and coworkers, and anyone who wanted to view the videos could at any time. It makes people not want to socialize.
Could it be that younger people who might be posting are to an increasing degree sucked into online gaming, which now has social aspects with its guilds and chat functions? My attendance on SDMB has gone WAAAAAAAAY the hell down since I found a game full of fun people I enjoy playing with, it’s a chance to go out with the cool kids and do something that is tremendous fun, EVERY FREAKING DAY. I still like to visit the Dope, but not like I used to.
I’m not sure if the Straight Dope started on Usenet or not.