Subj : FidoGazette Vol 11 no 14 Page: 5 To : All From : Janis Kracht Date : Fri Jul 27 2018 01:25:02 ================================================================= A R T I C L E S ================================================================= What is the Relevance of the BBS in 2017 by Allen Prunty Social Networking and/or blogging, is what I believe, caused the decline of the BBS and bespelled the users with memes, graphics and gave the users a different way to express themselves online. Traditional BBS systems have faded away... but they have NOT gone away. It's no secret that most all of the social networking sites are controlled by four... or maybe five big corporations that provide the services for free, but who pays for all that data storage? Who pays for all the bandwidth that the social networking sites use? Notice that they all are embedded with advertisements and by using their sites you agree to have tracking cookies embedded in your browser. For instance you mention something about blue widgets in a tweet and suddenly when you go to facebook you will see advertisments for blue widgets on your screen. Wake up people... the social networking sites are nothing more than slick advertising agencies. They find out your interests and tailor marketing materials to your screen. People also get tired of seeing every movement that their "friends do" it becomes to the point where I don't want to see how your farmville farm is going... nor do I care that you checked into the local coffee shop for your caffiene fix every morning at 7am. I even had one "friend" broadcast their cat having kittens. The BBS is a more cerebrial medium. One must READ the words on the screen and reply to words alone. There are no mindless memes that are forwarded and circulating. There is pure and relevant discussion on what is going on in the world... there is some time invested in each post and most of them are unique. The user does not get lost in a sea of forwarded messages and news articles. Another plus about the BBS is that people's minds open up when they actually have to sit down and read a message and put thought into responding to it. There are simple emojies :-) for instance, but rarely do you see a single emoji response on a BBS. As people are awakened and learn that their celebrities, news outlets, and politicians are not what they expect them to be people are starting to write more meaningful posts... and are craving a medium where rich discussions can happen. Simply put, they are tired of the "noise" on the social media networks. Another plus that the BBS systems have over the big corporate social networking sites is I don't know of -ANY- BBS that has agreements with the government to snoop on their users. Facebook's photos are often scanned by law enforcement to find people who are wanted by facial matching bots. BIG BROTHER watches social media. We can lead people into the BBS medium by introducing them to our systems. Sometimes it takes walking a prospective user through logging on via telnet. I'm finding that a lot of newer machines do not even have a telnet client installed. I believe that there are users out there that would enjoy the BBS experience... but we, as sysops, need to provide a little instruction on how to get on the systems. Much like we work on our menu structure, and our ansi graphics... each BBS needs to have a web page that instructs people how to log on, create an account, put their system into Thunderbird, Postbox or other NNTP readers. I don't know of many sysops that actually try to advertise their systems and they are just not as available as they could be. The Relevance of the BBS in 2017 is quite simple... it's a way that users can communicate without the clutter of advertisements, meme forwards, mindless tweets, friend checkins to underwater basketweaving classes and cat videos. Although I do find April the Giraffe fascinating. :-) Allen Prunty 1:2320/100 FIDOGAZETTE Vol 11 No 14 Page 5 April 05, 2017 ----------------------------------------------------------------- --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3 * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38) .