The Decline of the Online Message Board - NYTimes.com
These are serious signs of the digital times. Message boards were key components of Web 1.0 — the Web before broadband, online video, social networking, advanced traffic analysis and the drive to monetize transformed it.
If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence.
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Actually web forums arose from the old bulletin boards that pre-dated the web as we know it today by quite some time. I was on Ward Christensen's original BBS in Chicago in 1978; The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a venerable internet community based in the Bay Area of California and dating to 1985, still exists. Twitter it ain't.
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