[parksy]

This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions before, but it wasn't all roses there either.

Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-term social engineering so you could get to see the IP addresses of the members) that these users were from competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members.

Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a general shared interest and grow organically from there. This was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora pattern.

Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform - albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default. You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they basically hacked our brains.

Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it did also have a ton of downsides.

I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board as we have to learn new things like managing our identity / signatures and learning differences between providers, but efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old attention silos people have been trained to use these days.

[moron4hire]

I never ran an popular board. I had ran some small ones, mostly folks I knew in real life. I've also ran several in-person clubs over the years, which obviously don't scale to the same degree. But I do have some inkling of the issues you're talking about.

The newess of the whole thing is a great point. I keep hoping that Internet culture as a whole will invent a new sense of manners. (At the risk of being accused of being an Eternal Septemberist, which was actually before my time) 'Member when people talked about being a "good 'netizen"? We had trolls, but they knew what they were doing was against good manners (indeed, that's why they did it).

Somewhere along the line, people stopped getting on-ramped onto the Internet. They got dumped on instead and the only role models they had were other folks who couldn't see the humanity behind the handle.

A lot of the issues you talked about still exist in general-purpose social media. Indeed, the platform reinforces it, as it gets to know your political proclivities better and pushes you into their engagement bubbles.

I think the decentralization is a bulkheading against those issues. When they happen--and they will happen--the limited scope of the topic board limits the damage to that subculture. It doesn't impact the Whole Damn Nation. Can you imagine someone like Donald Trump winning the presidency without a one-stop-shop of advertising and propaganda dissemination that Facebook provides? You don't even have to spend that much money, you can get the people to organically self-sustain it with the right meme seeding.

We had competing boards, too. I was active on two different game development boards. There were more that I just didn't bother with. If one started to feel like shit, I could dump over to another one. There was some continuity, but it wasn't absolute.

IDK. I know I'm probably rose-colored-glasses on the issue. And you're right, there's no putting the cat back in the bag. Maybe the bigger problem is that most people really are shit and smartphones gave them access to the internet. "Garbage in, garbage out". But it seems like they'd all be fighting it out on the ESPN boards, away from my eyes, if it weren't for general-purpose social media.