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~abacushex

Not just you at all, but maybe on a different timescale for me. When the nerd-enthusiast message boards were the only places to chat (pre-myspace and pre-fb and thus pre-2005 or so), I would frequent those and knew quite a few people and site owners. There was enough mutual trust that we would do hardware swaps and sales without the buyer-seller safeguards of eBay.

When I was still on FB, I was in a few groups dedicated to specific bands, or architectural styles, or design. I browsed them frequently and commented and posted. Yet not once did I have a direct message or conversation with anyone else in the groups. Something about the way social media is structured is fundamentally different. It tends to make all conversation at-a-party-small-talk, or even worse drunk-argument-at-a-bar. Those message boards past (and this one) are like a gathering of a group of actual friends or at least friendly acquaintances where common interests are established simply by being there at all.

Some of those message boards are still around but the sites don't have private owners running them out of a labor of love, even if the content quality is still there (think the user forums of sites like anandtech or arstechnica).

And not to be dumping on/stereotyping a particular group, or to be insulting to anyone, but in terms of the nerd/tech sites that still have forums, nothing has ruined gaming like gaming culture. The hardware nerd who understands how the technology works and also likes gaming is a different kind of beast from the self-identified Gamer with a capital G. The latter seems to have overrun the former in online discourse. (Is my graybeard showing?)

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~tskaalgard wrote:

Completely agreed. I think that things were fine a little later than that, even into the early facebook days, but I think the nature of these things have made things more difficult.