I was thinking the other day that massive communities like Facebook and Reddit suffer because EVERYONE's allowed in, to an unlimited degree. Everything reverts to the newbie state and every sh*t post can define the threads.
Remember dial-up? BBSes had limited lines and you'd have to set your (non-multi-tasking) computer to redial so you could visit your BBS. Moderators, paying members would get a smidge more time, but rarely unlimited.
Then you had 10/20/30 minutes and the BBS would hang up on you.
It might have been a civilizing force for communities, the sort we still could use in social...
BBSes have a sense of locality in that everyone is either in your LATA, or is spending a lot of money on long distance (remember that?) to visit.
BBSes also were not primarily fedgov privacy harvesting honeypots (mostly...) and that had interesting social interaction effects when the sysop was just some dude down the road instead of some NSA spook or marketing droid.
I also remember door games like TW2000 were a lot more fun than the modern "you must send us microtransactions of cash because your friends do" modern social games. Inherently slow empire building is also more social than spending money on a fake farm or the tired old FPS model.
I think what you describe has more to do with the population in general than the artificial limits of the various mediums.
In BBS and early Internet days (pre-95 or so), people who were using computers were highly intelligent. Certainly above average.
These days, everyone and their dog is on the Internet. The masses have moved in and thus the medium shifted to accommodate them, by dumbing itself down to the lowest common denominator. With the shift away from a knowledge repository to advertising and consumerism ("the spectacle") the SnR has dropped significantly.
In cybernetic terms, during the early years of the Internet, the space acted upon you, by programming you. Thus, if you lacked knowledge, you had to put in the time and educate yourself in order to explore and learn to use this new space efficiently. Cyberspace forced you to get better.
These days, the opposite happens. The masses act upon the space and dictate its evolution, downwards.
Looking back, I can't help but mourn what could have been but I also feel enormously lucky to have lived through it all.
To this degree I definitely agree with you: NextDoor is unbearable. The internet has trained everyone, and they carry that into their micro-local communities. Early days had a qualification element.
Not really, except:
I was thinking the other day that massive communities like Facebook and Reddit suffer because EVERYONE's allowed in, to an unlimited degree. Everything reverts to the newbie state and every sh*t post can define the threads.
Remember dial-up? BBSes had limited lines and you'd have to set your (non-multi-tasking) computer to redial so you could visit your BBS. Moderators, paying members would get a smidge more time, but rarely unlimited.
Then you had 10/20/30 minutes and the BBS would hang up on you.
It might have been a civilizing force for communities, the sort we still could use in social...