I was on BBS forums in the '80s.
Assuming y’all aren’t just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I’m just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like “yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me”
I watched the Adam Friedland interview with Clavicular yesterday, and Gen Z is so fucked. I realize not all of them are like that, but that someone like Clavicular has gained any traction is a sign the youth is not alright.
The only place I hear anything about that guy is on lefty podcasts and streams, I tend to avoid most social media so I’m not exactly tapped in to that shit but it kind of feels like the reactive coverage is his biggest boost. I tune in to chapo and hasan and friedland and denims and seder and holy shit I’m so sick of hearing about this irrelevant fucked up kid on all of their shows.
That’s my rotation as well. You are probably right.
What is denims? Everything else I listen to.
As an early GenZ myself, the only consolation I have is that I still had a pretty un-GenZ childhood and the lack of that rot will likely give me a competitive advantages going forward.
Adam was bugmaxxing hard in that interview
Tom and I go way back. He’s never so much as given you that over the shoulder smile.
9337000 checking in
968015 was my boss
I got a Gmail account back when you had to get an invite.
Drops mic
It’s surreal to think about how genuinely good Facebook used to be, before they added the algorithm. It made our social lives better instead of replacing them. You could go on Facebook to peruse events in your area, having an idea of who would be there before you went.
rofl tell me you do not understand how FB got started without telling me…
That shit’s been a privacy nightmare from the beginning.
Zuck has been selling personal info from basically day 1. He’s been abusing people since day 1.
The day people realize convenience does not equal good is the day humanity grows up from a petulant child to a moronic teenager… Too bad it’s looking more and more like we’ll never make it past, “petulant child”.
Events was what kept me on the site for far too long after they went bad. Being able to organise events with friends so easily was incredible. I can track the decrease in my social activity along with fb making their system worse and it makes me sad
Couldn’t disagree more.
Prior to fb, there was dedicated forums for the music scene I was in to in my area. Everything was in them. Finding what was on was easy as all the promotors used them.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb’s chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
Fuck META.
Discord is (unfortunately) filling the gap now. Why have a bbs when you can have a shitty chat platform with shitty search and conversations that are impossible to track?
I like how they specified before the algorithm and you cite the algorithm for why you disliked it
Let me clarify.
Before the algorithm when both fb and forums coexisted was still annoying.
Some events would be on forums.
Some on fb
Some both.
Occasionally I would miss out on early bird tickets or tickets all together.
There was never a point where Facebook made anything better on that front.
Don’t even get me started on the fuckery that fb marketplace is vs what we had.
Used to be. There was a time when forums and facebook both existed and worked well in their respective niches.
It’s nice that your area had that. Mine didn’t until Facebook, or at least nothing a somewhat tech savvy 15 year old new about.
Back when I was booking shows it was great because you could blast a small event and know it was reaching a lot of people. Bands would share it, every band member would reshare it. But then I noticed the growing discrepancy between the amount of people who claimed they’d attend online and who showed up. Like so much on FB, the illusion of being a part of something became more important than actually being a part of something. But yeah, for a brief moment there was a bit of “social” in social media. Then came the yelling.
Before Zuck hired Joel Kaplan to specifically cater to right wing interests.
It was kinda nice yeah.
@BonesOfTheMoon I was 76474.3012 on Compuserve
I’ve known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I’ve been on university work terminals and back… frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet… I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it, felt it…!
Like ASCII tears in a digital rain
bye
Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.
Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written.
I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me!
Bazinga!
These pretzels are making me thirsty!
I came here to make this exact quote. Good job bro!
57598641, checking in.
Also, I just recently found a list online of old-school BBS names and numbers, and that was a fun 15 minutes going, “yup, called that one. and that one. ooh, that was the one with great u/d ratios.”
Ah Telix…I have usernames older than you.
Friends, hear my story…
In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!
This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.
Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.
pfft. ive cut better lines than yours before.
My ICQ number was 737916. A hacker stole it 20 years ago because I thought, “why would anyone want this?” and used the password “buddha” for some reason.
I loved that platform. Those were innocent days by comparison.
Wish I could have gotten that number back.
I tried to get into it on the relaunched site a few years ago, but it didn’t work. I might have used my university email account as the recovery email, and that account is long gone.
But…why? I doubt anyone else that I know is using it…
There’s no reason to use it anymore. I was using the OTR encryption protocol with it, which was the best there was to offer.
That being said, I did say “could have gotten,” not “could have.”
