Reviving the BBS culture in the Internet age reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-29 21:20 On this subreddit we frequently see posts about door games and ANSI art. Those who were involved in the BBS scene in its heydays know, of course, that these weren’t what drawn us to it or why we have such fond memory of our experience. A strong sense of community was the reason. While the Internet has no shortage of discussion forums, the culture is just not the same. Is it possible to bring back the old social dynamic? For some time now I’ve been pondering this question. What made BBSes an effective community-building tool, I believe, boils down to two factors: **Sysops were generally outgoing people with strong social skills** Such character traits were simply necessary. Operating a BBS involved more than just running the system. Sysops had to also act like the host of a party: starting conversations, making guests feel at home, getting them to interact with each other, deescalating conflicts before things get out of hand, and so on. Those not up to the task would quickly find their boards turned into feeding grounds for leeches. People would log in, use up their download quota, and leave. Running such systems is completely unrewarding. Given the high cost of operating a BBS, socially inept sysops would pull the plug in short order. **Users of BBSes generally all lived in the same area code** They can (and do) meet in person. The mere possibility of real-life meetings, I believe, had a strong impact on how people behave. It made them more willing to invest emotionally into others, to hear them out even when what they say neither pleases or amuses. People also exercised more self-restraint in their online discourse back then, since rude behaviors would jeopardize the chance to participate in real-life social events. To recreate the BBS culture we need to recreate these two factors. The solution I’m proposing involves literally a bulletin board: [Example flyer](https://preview.redd.it/rapuieh3vqqa1.jpg?width=800&fo rmat=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=51db89190dd61c3d0de68d65160988659c95f9 8b) [Example tab](https://preview.redd.it/epcg80q6vqqa1.jpg?width=800&form at=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=563bb415245bd0b619d41bd9286dcbc70dc192a4 ) The flyer advertises the board and at the same time functions as an access control mechanism. Randomly generated haiku printed on the detachable tabs enables one to register as a member. Each haiku is unique and works only a single time. Thus the system is open to the general public but only to those who visit of the physical bulletin board's location. Here’s how I imagine this new form of BBSes would work: One day Bob notices a flyer on the bulletin board next to the bathroom, inviting people to join a discussion forum. He sees that a couple tabs have already been torn from it. “The person who made this flyer seems witty”, Bob thinks to himself. “It’d be nice to get to know a couple people who come here regularly. What else am I going to do? Flip through my algro-generated Facebook feed?”. He decides to to give it a chance. Some time has passed. The fledgling BBS now has a dozen or so active members. Alice, the sysop, decides to organize a meet-up. The coffee house is the obvious choice for a venue since they all go there. At the event conversations flow smoothly. People just continue thei discussions they had online. Other patrons at the coffee house notice how these name-tag wearing people are having a good time. “Hey, maybe I should be a part of this!” Before the night’s end, multiple tabs have been removed from the flyer that Alice had just put up. Well, that’s how the scheme is supposed to work in theory. What do you think? Would people actually want to use such a system? I’ve written the code for generating random haiku and PowerPoint flyers already. You can see it in action here: [https://github.com/chung-leong/6bmk](https://github.com/chung- leong/6bmk). The next step is to create plugins for discussion forum software. If you’re a programmer and think that this effort is worthwhile, I can certainly use some help. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RolandMT32 · 2023-03-29 21:28 Regarding the point of "sysops were generally outgoing people with strong social skills" - I'm probably an exception (I know it says "generally"). I ran a BBS in the 90s, and I always thought people who gravitated toward computer/technical hobbies were generally less social than most people. I've always been introverted, so I've often had a hard time being social with many people. However, I do think one reason I enjoyed running a BBS is that I've often been interested in various ways to communicate, and although I'm an introvert, I always thought it was really cool that I could set up a computer in my home that people could dial into and use. I got an excitement that I had set up a system that people enjoyed using (for the games, files, and messagebases). As you said, it was almost like I was hosting a party. I ran my original BBS from 1994 to 2000 and started running a BBS again online in 2007, which I still run currently (it's available on the internet via telnet, RLogin, and SSH and also has a web site). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2023-03-29 21:57 This is actually really smart; whether it would work or not (based on human behavior), I don't know, but it addresses several problems with online interaction now, the primary of which is everyone wants a fucking soapbox with a potential audience of millions, which becomes more of a performance than what we really want - a participatory act in the democratizing or civic or social sense a lot of us are still wound up about, and are horrified at going off-track from. The concept of an online community *as an adjunct to* actual social interaction (or you can reverse that, but in either case, real life and digital life are linked) is something we've lost. And yeah, people will tell me about all of the online communities they were a part of in the old days where they never met the user base in real life, but for me: * Diversi-dial bowling meets and parties * BBS meets and parties * IRC and Usenet meets and parties I met my wife on Usenet and the IRC channel set up for real time conversation of the Usenet participants. I got my first real adult job because of Fidonet. This has become unnatural for a lot of people. You notice it in the way people treat communities like a sewer or say, "It's just the internet, bro" when they dump garbage into a forum. Whether or not this kind of hyperlocal, decentralized social network is possible remains to be seen. However, as someone kind of disgusted at what the net has become, this seems to a great path forward. And by the self-limiting aspect of these hyperlocal networks, you also wouldn't require any significant computing resources to run such BBSes. You could build one without thinking it had to become the next reddit (or other megasite), and in your example by using the web, you can also do away with installation of proprietary applications, or the need to dig up and use hoary old protocols like telnet or the "old days" stuff (hey I like that old stuff too, but the focus is different). I'm gonna think on this for the next few hours. Plug-ins to existing forum apps are a great idea but a turnkey out-of- the-box reference implementation, which includes the forum software and your work with the haiku, would be ideal in empowering those who are not overly technically proficient from rolling these out. People with more facility with forum software could do the integration work with pre-existing apps. Forum software should ideally be free/GPL, or similar, cheap and easy to deploy, and secure out of the box, even if that means limited functionality. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nevarro · 2023-03-29 21:57 I think it's an interesting idea. I may not be totally understanding, but it sounds like its purpose would be for advertising BBSes and voting for them (tabs)? I can see a couple ways a system like this could be abused (sysops farming tab pulls for their BBSes)... but I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ultramagnus_tcv · 2023-03-29 23:37 Yeah I was not outgoing and I definitely had little to no social skills. In fact I participated in and ran BBSs because I struggled with those things. I stayed in hospital for depression, anxiety, and agoraphobia related to all this. So I am an exception too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rlauzon · 2023-03-29 23:42 I think you have a really skewed idea of the Golden Age of the BBS. Hopefully, you didn't bother to read "The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media" by Kevin Driscoll because he wasn't even close to what the "Modem World" was like. First off, "Sysops were generally outgoing people with strong social skills" is completely false. While Sysops were **more** outgoing than their user base, they were not generally outgoing people with strong social skills. I've met a good number of them in my years. BBSs started off with geeks. Geeks like to communicate, but we mostly want to do so with other geeks so we created BBSs. As time went on, non-geeks liked get in on this too. Remember, at the time, nothing like "social media" was out there. AOL, Prodigy, Bix, GEnie, etc. didn't come into being until well after BBSs were established. "Users of BBSes generally all lived in the same area code". This is actually wrong. Users of BBSs were a **local call** away from the BBS. You might not remember but there was a time when local calls were unlimited and free, while anything outside of that area was "long distance" and cost a lot. So callers of a BBS being in the local area simply had to do with cost. "It made them more willing to invest emotionally into others, to hear them out even when what they say neither pleases or amuses." You obviously don't call BBSs and participate in the Political echos. "People also exercised more self-restraint in their online discourse back then, since rude behaviors would jeopardize the chance to participate in real-life social events." More like rude behavior would get them kicked off the BBS - and there were only so many in the area to call for free. Today, that is no longer the case. I've been effectively kicked off a couple because the sysop didn't like what I said, but that doesn't impact me today like it would have 30 years ago. I find it funny that the "new form of BBSes" you propose is exactly what happened back about 30 years ago. I remember several BBS parties in the summer and in my area, there was a weekly meet up at a local restaurant. But none of that lasted. Today, BBSs are no longer local. I can call a BBS in another country as cheaply and easily as one across town. The majority of people who call BBSs today are people who were in the real "modem world" and want some nostalgia, as well as a chance to communicate with like-minded people. As younger geeks get into vintage/retro-computing, they are rediscovering BBSs. Whether new people come in as old sysops die off, though, remains to be seen. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- skyrocker_58 · 2023-03-30 00:31 I ran a BBS back in the mid-late 80's. Started off as a geek project for myself but my now-ex wife started seeing people logging onto it on the console, started trying to talk to them and scared off the geeks who came to read the forums, download a few files and play some door games. Eventually she found some like minded individuals who started calling in regularly and I ended up running an 8 line 'chat' BBS. She was the social director and I was the sysop/tech guy. We did the weekly bowling party thing, traveled to another city to mingle with our 'sister' board. Yeah we were all mostly in the same area code, we mostly lived in the same areas and I learned pretty early that etiquette demanded that you treated everyone else on the board as if they were sitting next to you typing on an adjacent keyboard. The combination of the 'Dawn of the Internet' and purchasing a home is what killed my BBS around '92 or so. Couldn't take the expense of moving 9 phone lines to the new house when back then the phone company was charging $40 per and the caller base was slowly declining anyway. Was it fun? Hell yeah. Would I try to recreate one today? Hell no. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- analog_potatoes · 2023-03-30 00:56 I run a modern BBS and it’s nothing like it was when I ran mine back in the 90s. It’s fun and a few of my users are super fun to chat with from time to time but the reality is it’s purely for nostalgia. As with any sequel, it’s never as good as the original. A recreation of that 80s/90s techno geek BBS vibe is impossible. Much cheaper to run them now though. Slap a docker container together on telnet and you can host as many nodes as you want! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- deekaph · 2023-03-30 01:20 Our BBS meetups turned into alcohol fueled shit shows. What a diverse bunch of people! Marie was 50 and fat, Andy was a Buck tooth redneck, Scott went on to become a computer science professor… we ranged in age from 15 to 65, different skin colours and socioeconomic backgrounds and native languages life experiences… and all chumming it up like we grew up together. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaulLee420 · 2023-03-30 02:14 All of my girlfriends in high school had handles, and we had a similar group of folks in the (419)... from 16 - 65 - altho most of the high schoolers (kids) broke off into their own little click. I think we'd have sleepovers every single weekend. :P ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaulLee420 · 2023-03-30 02:16 I dunno, I kinda disagree - well... I agree that many sysops were geeks and computer nerds, but the good boards back then and still today require a sysop that engages with the user base. I think my board SUCKS, yet its super active b/c I interact with all new users, a host of the regulars and post post post - I think thats what the OP was stating - that it took a sysop who was willing to be involved w/ the users; not just open a system and never interact. What else is the reason that ppl call today??? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- skyrocker_58 · 2023-03-30 02:43 Yeah for me it really was the geek aspect of it for me. My board was written up in a few of the BBS magazines and at one point an article was written about it as being the largest minority owned BBS in the US. I'd have people writing to me from as far away as Australia asking how I did certain things that weren't common then like how to split 4 IRQ's and COM ports into 8 usable ports/lines. Or tips on how to get the board to run under OS/2, things like that. So for me it would never be as fun or even nostalgic for me, though I could see how it could be for a lot of folks and people new to the concept/technology. Every now and then I get an urge to try one out but I find it quicker and easier to just fall back into my own memories and enjoy it that way. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- veeb0rg · 2023-03-30 03:12 I use to enjoy doing the sysop chat with my users, Live chat over a pc was still a new thing and actually talking to someone in real time was amazing. It also helped with my social awkwardness being "shielded" by the text interface. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- atomic_cattleprod · 2023-03-30 04:07 > I agree that many sysops were geeks and computer nerds, but the good boards back then and still today require a sysop that engages with the user base. That wasn't my experience at all. The two most successful BBSs I frequented had sysops who were actually "heard but not seen" for the most part. They both had a strong community of users who interacted with each other a lot (multi-line chat and regional echomail were huge on these particular boards), but the sysops themselves mainly kept with administrative aspects of those boards more than anything. The "good" boards back then were those that had *something* to offer that was either unique or well curated and maintained for users. Be it strong multi-line capabilities with active multi-line chat, door games, large, often refreshed file or message boards, or those that served a unique/niche audience. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dmine45 · 2023-03-30 08:09 Most of us (both Sysops and users) were introverted to the core, and that's why we loved BBSing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-30 09:40 I think a lot of people who describe themselves as introverts are, in truth, high achievers who enjoy impressing people. When they fail to impress, they get really down on themselves. Their social anxiety is really performance anxiety. I'm kind of like that. Over the years I've learned to play to my strength in social situations. It's impossible to impress constantly-- nor do people want to be constantly impressed. I have to bide my time, waiting for the right moment. And when that has passed, gracefully vacate the stage. At the end of the day, I know that people will me better for the one or two clever things I said than the guy who confidently tell anecdote after anecdote. You don't need to have lots of social skills to have a social life. You just need to know the right people. It's a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, I know. BBSes helped solve that back in the days. In my own experience the sysops were usually the ones who serve as the social glue binding different people together. It's just easier for a community to come together in that order. Can an ordinary user who happens to be really social take on that role? Sure. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rlauzon · 2023-03-30 09:45 Engaging in the message base does not mean "strong social skills". Many geeks are highly social when not face-to-face and they will shine in the message base. But will curl up in a little ball when in person. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-30 10:22 There certainly were anti-social people involved in the BBS scene. Since they're perfectly well served by social networks of today, I'm going to pretend that they never existed. They've found their paradise. The software I'm looking at right now is NodeBB. It's GPL and designed for the modern web. UI seems to have been designed with a mobile-first mindset. Plugin system looks to be pretty robust. My plan is to prepare a Docker image so that one can get a system up and running at the cloud provider with just a few commands. As you said, this is something that requires minimal resources. A single server can easily handle thousands of sites. Internet hosting is so cheap nowadays I don't think it matters though. People are willing to spend a few bucks a month to have full control over their data. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-30 10:27 The tabs function as entry tickets. You cannot become a user unless you have one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8bitsNoParity · 2023-03-30 12:00 Yea when I read the social part in the post, I was thinking that was a very different scene than the one I was in. I ran boards for many years during the 80s and 90s and I'm a pretty introverted person and did not organize social events or anything like OP suggests. For me the scene was more about coding, knowledge sharing, exploring the boundaries of what the tech could do, and that was the type of crowd my boards drew. But, for sure there were boards that were highly social and had meet ups and such, it just wasn't my thing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rlauzon · 2023-03-30 12:57 And that's pretty much what I was seeing. When the "normals" discovered BBSs, we got a nice influx of more social people. In my area, it was those people, not the sysops, who set up the off-the-BBS social events. That was one of the nice things about BBSs. They tended to welcome anyone who wanted to participate nicely. Non-social geeks and very social people alike. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nevarro · 2023-03-30 13:14 >What else is the reason that ppl call today??? I think it's really cool that you make communication a priority on your board. I post, respond to emails and am generally available for chat in the Tavern during working hours, but I don't go out of my way to interact with new users. I'll say that there are many reasons people call BBSes today. Communication is just one reason. Having a busy board myself, I will say that, given the ample opportunity and means for users to interact/communicate, most generally don't. They are interested in the games and the tournament. It can be days between seeing a new post or comment, email or someone popping into chat to say hi. Besides communication and doors, I've had users call the BBS looking for retro files/warez or just to check out the BBS for nostalgia or curiosity to see what a BBS is. There's no one reason users call BBSes from what I've seen. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ANSiNiTRON · 2023-03-30 15:16 I'm not sure you can bottle and capture what made the 90's BBS scene so compelling, but I feel there is a movement away from 'big web' and back to 'small web' communities. People are getting pretty sick of the constant ads and ice cold heavy handed moderation tactics. I'm not sure the answer lies with BBS specifically, but I think there is something to be found here. Closed communities using tech like BBS and forum(also called BBS once upon a time) software is very popular in some asian countries, to get around gov oversight and censorship. I've been told they use encrypted echonets a lot. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Icy_Sand377 · 2023-03-30 16:21 I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about reviving 'BBS culture in the Internet age,' but I'm pretty sure that increasing the barrier of entry is probably not how you'd do it... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-30 18:25 Private deal-up systems really aren’t BBSes anymore, since they have completely departed from the notion of a digital extension of a bulletin board hanging in a public place. Invite-only discussion forums suffer from the same issue. Membership is very strongly self- selected. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MarkPflug · 2023-03-30 19:16 Nextdoor? No thanks. That place is filled with the most vile people I've ever seen online. I don't know what it is about that site that brings out the worst in my neighbors. In all seriousness, I miss the BBS community that I had in the 90s. I think the big thing that brought us all together wasn't the BBS specifically, or being local to Portland, but the games we played together. At the time it was MajorMUD, but LORD, Exitilus, Usurper, Trade wars, and other games were also popular at earlier times. I think that's the key to community building, even locally, is having a specific topic that everyone is interested in. In our case, it was games. That's probably true for a lot of old BBS groups. That's why nextdoor is such a shitshow: it's just a bunch of people who happen to live near eachother and have nothing else in common. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-30 19:22 What are you talking about? What is nextdoor? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MarkPflug · 2023-03-30 19:55 Nextdoor is a "social" website where you communicate with other people who are local to your area. When you sign up you need to provide a physical address that dictates what community you'll be interacting with. It is a cesspool; be thankful you don't know what it is. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-03-30 21:27 Thank you very much for your answer. It confirms that I made the right decision. You see, initially the system I'm proposing here was conceived as a web service. People would just go to a website and create their own bulletin boards. Sign up, pay a monthly subscription fee, and off you go. Then I realize that the setup had absolutely zero chance of success, since the most critical aspect is missing--trust. People have been burned so many times already. Only idiots would trust any social website again. The scheme has to be an 100% grass-root effort for it to work. The sysop must be in total control so the question for users boil down to whether they trust this one person or not. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- flamontagne005 · 2023-04-18 16:30 I think your idea is just brilliant. You are are onto something here. For many years now I have been thinking of possible ways to recreate those small cozy communities that were thriving during the BBS era. Once the Internet took over I always felt something wonderful had been lost. It's not just the nostalgia factor, we truly lost something. Now concerning the actual software that would allow people to connect with each other, it would need to offer something more than simply a discussion forum. BBSes also had games, real time chat and other utilities that allowed people to interact in different ways. Without these things I don't believe the concept would work. Imagine the awesome games that could be written for these new BBSes with HTML5 and javascript. Instead of BBS software such as renegade, pcboard, etc we would need some web-based self-hosting platforms that sysops could install on their own server and customize to their liking. The platform would allow the sysops to install games and other utilities in a streamlined fashion. Thanks to today's technology operating one of these new BBSes would be a lot easier than it was in the past. Protocols to link many BBSes together could be implemented. The possibilities are endless. I don't know if such a revival will ever happen but it's fun to think about this stuff. :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chungleong · 2023-04-18 20:13 File sections at BBSes used to be one of the main draws. That’s obviously not something that we would bring back. The same, I think, goes for door games. There’re so many gaming options out there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- staticv0id · 2023-04-21 20:33 > Sysops had to also act like the host of a party: starting conversations, making guests feel at home, getting them to interact with each other, deescalating conflicts before things get out of hand, and so on. The boards that stood out offered things others didn't. Good chat community, door games, FidoNet-type messaging, and of course great 0-day warez downloads were the big ones. It certainly helped if the operator got interactive with their user base, but the users themselves had the greatest impact as they "generated their own content," so to speak. > People also exercised more self-restraint in their online discourse back then That is arguably true, but it had more to do with the size and number of the BBS communities than with any possibility of being uninvited to parties. There were only so many numbers to call and be an ass, only so many other users to piss off before one got the reputation one deserved. > The solution I’m proposing involves literally a bulletin board Unfortunately, very few people are going to do this. The expectations of the potential user base have changed dramatically. The internal conversation will be much shorter. The poster you've shown is very cryptic, with a suspicious-looking URL to boot. If they can't understand it at a glance, they will ignore it. I would. But I hope you do find a way to bring that sense of community back. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2023-10-09 20:41 [removed] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2023-10-09 20:47 [removed] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- skyrocker_58 · 2023-10-18 17:53 Yeah I remember those days. How would I go about logging into your system? I'm afraid I'm out of the loop so I'm no up on the latest BBS technologies. But LOTRD sounds fun, never realized how much I missed it!