That is what I often wonder on the larger discussion of "privlege". What draws the line between your parents or grandparents having worked for a better life for you and having some sort of shameful "privelege"? I understand that there is a difference when it comes down to historical oppressions of entire categories of people, but I feel that many people often confuse that and "rich parents vs. poor parents", seeking to remedy some percieved unjust inequality where the inequality comes from earlier sacrifices leading to more positive outcomes.
We have a saying in Britain, that few people remember now: "rise with your class, not above it".
That comes from an understanding that making the best of living under a system that creates opportunities to be rich and opportunities to be poor is not the same as altering that system.
Really, the idea of privilege as people use it now is too individualistic to make sense at the macro level.
I used to visit a BBS semi-regularly during middle school, I had always enjoyed the simplicity of the basic text interface. Not that there was much going on, this was around 2008, so everything was long-dead by then.
Reddit (and HN) has its voting system and 4chan has the bump system, but there's something about newsgroups with the long-lived threads with email-length replies that really appeals to me. Will there ever be something as popular and "open" as newsgroups, where each user judges a post on its own merits instead of by what the rest of the community thinks? Or am I merely pining for a past that never really existed?
I got rather obsessed with BBS in the early-mid 1990s. That quickly turned into an obsession with Usenet.
Looking back, those were amazing times. By day, I was an awkward teenager who was still battling a pesky speech impediment. But, by night, I was part of communities where I was judged by the quality of my writing!
All that said, while I see what you're saying, BBS and Usenet both had their problems.
With Usenet, the biggest problem was discoverability. There were amazing, inspiring threads, but it took work to find them. When you would find an amazing thread, you had to parse through (often hundreds) of meaningless replies to find the few gems. Then, there was the sheer hostility of some of the communities. While much of that was reserved for newbies who violated the oft incomprehensible etiquette, some of it was just insane. For example, massive flame wars would erupt over the slightest provocation. This sounds silly in retrospect, but there was a point where typing 'Reconstruction of the Fables' in rec.music.rem would provoke serious hate.
With BBS, particularly when they were popular enough to be busy, the biggest issue was that people are really fucked up when they think they're anonymous.
Newsgroups were a bit different I always thought than BBSs, but were still much closer in feel to various message bases. The problem even from pretty early on was spam and moderation. When you did have any ad-hoc or defacto moderation, it was usually divisive and heavy handed in a way that didn't have the same vibe as a BBS.
On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear, and activity.
In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam, moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything, BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their BBS and they just did what they wanted.
Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means <drop 1 sentence random mental garbage> thought and leave or <me too thought>.
Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting "f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good for fun.
"On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever."
Yes, a funny anecdote, obviously there was no central registry of names so sometimes there would be multiple BBS of the same cool name in the same LATA, so when I was about 12, operating on a tip from a schoolmate at 1200 baud I log into one of the several pirates cove bbs, or whatever the name was, and try to send the sysop a mail asking for private access to the files because I know XYZ from school and sysops cousin is XYZ (XYZ and I are still IT-type people 30 years later) and the sysop breaks into the session (which they could do in those days) and reads me the riot act about how he has no warez and he works real hard and spends a lot of money to make a BBS and what would decades later boil down to darn kids get off my lawn type lecture and never set foot here again and I'm deleting your brand new account and at 1200 baud it took awhile. And being a little kid I'm like "ok sorry about that" because what else am I supposed to say to mr angry wall of text? Then I go to school the next day and talk to my friend and "you idiot, call the pirates cove in suburb ABC not the one in suburb XYZ" or whatever. So that's what passed for a good time in the 80s. Sysops would sit there and spy on you, while you tried to work the social game to get access to the good stuff.
Several of the boards I was on with access to the special stuff were basically BBS embedded secretly inside a normal looking BBS so that made it fun. One of the special boards as a requirement to make it look good, required us to participate in the political debate forum if we wanted to keep access. Oh that board, thats just teens trying to debate federal tax policy. When actually it was full of software trading, hiding under dumb debates. On the modern internet of course instead of trading software we just skip right to the dumb debates, LOL.
Another "only 12 year old boy in the 80s could believe it" is back then we were pretty paranoid with people getting busted left and right and stories on TV so before XYZ gives me his tip he asks me between classes if I'm a fed and I told him no and I asked him if he was a fed and he said no, and that was it, we believed each other as if that proved anything (and neither of us were a fed, but I've known this kid since we went to kindergarten together and we're asking each other if we're a fed... well its just what you did in those paranoid days). I do not think modern stuff like GPG key signatures are quite as paranoid on a personal level as we used to be back in the old days.
Thanks for the story, lots of good memories like that too. I used to always try to call boards named things like Thieves Guild, Pirates Cove, or some sort of 31337 sounding name in the hopes of discovering some new scene or underground board. The best boards were dedicated 100% and didn't even try to fake it, but did a lot of the stuff I listed below.
Regarding boards with fake or legit parts, I used to routinely page sysops on boards I thought were underground or had hidden parts. The classic ones later on were almost always based on PCBoard and later Ami/X, but highly customized. The early ones generally just ran on whatever the best software was at the time and boasted about the hardware. They'd have all sorts of legit content typically and even legit users, but so much of it was a joke. I used to call one board that was big with HAM radio people and early Internet adopters. The most nerdy discussions you can imagine. What they didn't know is that there was a second part of the board that had a huge ROM dump, Amiga, C64, and PC warez scene.
As far as sysops go, I will also admit to spying on my users as sysop and as a co-sysop on various boards. I sometimes would break people into chat and kick them off. There were also many plug-ins that initiated fake chats and logged the results. A particular one that I'll never forget on one board I was co-sysop on featured an ANSImation (animated Ansi) by JED of ACID with some troll I think flipping you the bird as it brought up chat. Sometimes we'd post the fake chats for other users for comedy purposes.
I was nice and would help people find files, talk about fun stuff, meet in person, but I was also a dictator and would boot anyone on short notice. There were often periods of paranoia from alleged "busts," most of which probably never happened though I know for sure some did. Lots of calling people NARCs and so on.
One of the funniest things I used to see people do was upload fake files. Early on it was random binary or generated text files. Later it was things like blank audio or the same pictures renamed and zip'd. They were just so desperate for upload credit and time that they'd do this insane stuff. Checking files was really a pain. Thankfully on my boards, we were snobs about content, like on the warez boards we'd think we were so cool having 0-30 day, then it was something like 0-14, then 0 day stuff. So stupid banning and deleting people for uploading something 2 months old. Same thing happened on various FTP dumps that started to displace BBSs for file purposes later on.
Anyway, BBSs and the relationship to various underground scenes was a funny thing. On the one hand, a lot of the communities could be very exclusive and created all sorts of protections, barriers, precautions, and more. On the other hand, they'd then make it super obvious what they were up to in so many ways.
Classic examples include:
- Advertising your BBS on other not-so-secret boards
- Commissioning ANSI art from a group like ACID, ICE, etc. with the name in the ANSI and often the area code too. Not uncommon to see things like +1-212-YOU-WISH Sysop: Mr Man. Awesome, now I know the name and what area code to look for the number at least, if not people who run it.
- Logon screen with ANSI depicting group affiliations. THG Eastern HQ = Genesis Distro = Legion of Doom HQ. It was hilarious because even if you didn't have access, you instantly knew you called a pirate board, cracking board, art board, whatever.
- New User Application filled with terminology from whatever scene. Again, same as the previous item.
- New User Password. As if most BBSs without anything illegal would have this.
- Users with huge ratios listed. Hmm, not many files on this BBS and yet this guy uploaded 500 megs!
- Certain BBS Software. You could be pretty sure that someone running things like Ami/X were into warez, Oblivion, Iniquity, Eternity, etc. - art, and so on. The more customized with nice ANSI too, usually the more likely it was underground. Huge tip-off the board was legit if it ran something like WWIV, Wildcat!, Celerity, and a few others we all considered hugely lame. Renegade and other Telegard or Forum hacks always made you wonder on the other hand. The old stuff on Atari ST, C64 etc was harder since there was a huge deluge of stuff and not as many ones that were 100% preferred yet.
We thought we were pretty cool in those times, but wow I look back at some of it and cringe. Good times and I was lucky enough to be involved in most underground scenes, while still getting time to interact in the legit scenes too.
