A little bit about the development of communication in the network
By participating in the organization of the Chaos Constructions festival, I also restored my old BBS from the archive.
And in the process of setting it up and demonstrating to festival visitors, I increasingly felt the illogic of where the development of network communications led us.
After reading the story of one point and comments, I see that some do not understand the differences between Fido and forums, and argue that the presence of forums is enough. I do not agree with that.
To begin, we turn to the history of communication.
Communication between people on the network is quite simply divided into interactive: chat rooms / pedzhery, and non-interactive: personal (mail) and group (forums).
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In this article I will consider only non-interactive, for this it is not worth discussing the possibilities of IM and others.
Let's look at the development of group communication over the past 30 years:
The very first example of group communication was the so-called “electronic message board” or BBS .
What it is? In the early 80s, when the first personal computers first began to appear and the first modems available to ordinary people, such things as BBS appeared.
What did it look like? You took your computer, installed a special communication program on it. Now someone else could call you, and connected to your program and could perform some fairly simple actions there — write or read a message, download or upload a file, etc. (It is worth noting that since there were no multi-tasking operating systems for personal computers in those years, you couldn’t do anything else on your computer while the BBS was running. Therefore, most often BBS was launched or on home machines at night, or on machines at work).
It was the only way of electronic communication, and he enjoyed quite a lot of popularity. Hundreds of people called the BBS to read what other people wrote and chat. Needless to say, firstly, it was often difficult to get through to such a BBS, although with the development of technology, round-the-clock stations and BBS with several telephone lines began to appear.
Gradually, such BBS styles were put not only by enthusiasts, but also by major manufacturers of software and hardware, where they laid out firmware and drivers for their products and also carried out technical support.
So by the beginning of the 90s we have dozens / hundreds of BBS enthusiasts in large cities, each of them has a bulletin board, often divided into many subsections on various topics.
You have to dial up to each one individually, register on each one, read the topics of interest, and repeat the dialing in a day or two to check if someone has answered you.
Total: complete decentralization, often duplicate forums on different BBS.
The prestige of individual forums was entirely tied to the prestige and literacy settings as well as the working hours of a particular BBS. Managing forums - exclusively under the jurisdiction of the system operator BBS.
The emergence of the Fido network has significantly expanded the boundaries of the usual then communication. Special node communication nodes, hubs (usually based on existing BBS) were created which at regular intervals, from several days to several hours / minutes, exchanged messages with each other and thanks to this, at any connection point, you could see and read the entire message chain . The fido conferences could be read both through a special software, getting a network address, and as before - in terminal mode with a BBS.
Total: a developed hierarchical system of forums, from global to local to a specific site.
Good centralization within the network, a lot of thematic forums, the relative ease of creating the right forums.
The prestige of a particular conference was provided firstly by regular subscribers, and secondly by a competent moderation policy.
The management is carried out by one / several people of the “creators” of the conference (moderators), regardless of the transport level.
The Internet was developing almost in parallel with our history with you, beginning in the 70s, but until a certain point, connecting to it was practically impossible and often meaningless for the common user. However, in the early 80s the concept of Usenet was developed - global thematic forums. By the beginning of the 90s, she was perfected to perfection, absorbed the best ideas of Fido. Usenet (news / nntp) is actually more global and noticeably accelerated Fido. Hierarchical conferences, widespread, fast communication between nodes.
Created many convenient clients to connect to the network, for virtually any platform. Convenient display of the dialogs by “chains (threads)” made it possible to quickly look through large discussions, as well as quickly “chop off” not interesting branches, and not follow the communication in them.
Despite the fact that currently a small number of people use usenet, I consider this technology to be one of the most thoughtful at the moment.
Total: More global.
All the best that was in Fido, plus great speed and ease of operation.
Starting around the beginning of this century, we are witnessing a large growth of independent sites with personal forums.
Gradually, the web forum becomes the most frequent way of communication, and nothing else, although it is the web that has the most inconvenient format of communication. In the framework of the web, the presentation from a trade is often made flat, and if it is constructed hierarchically, then it is still difficult to have large, hundreds of posts, discussions.
I would compare this situation with the time of the BBS - just as you need to register on each individual forum. In the same way, it is necessary to go to each separate forum with some frequency in order to check if there is anything new. Moreover, the notification of updates to the mail is a terrible crutch of this technology, there is no other convenient way of notifying about read / unread chains, the forums are forced to jump into another protocol (mail) to generate a lot of unnecessary traffic.
It comes to ridiculous, on a couple of sites I know there are common thematic branches. Most of the subscribers are present both there and there, on this often the discussion of something is conducted on two fronts, and it happens that the answer is not always written in the same place where the question was asked.
Total: complete decentralization, many duplicate forums.
The prestige of individual forums was entirely tied to the prestige of a particular site.
The management of the forums is solely the responsibility of the site operator.
In the last paragraph, you can add various social networks and blog services such as LJ, Dairi, etc. since there is no big difference between them.
The introduction of RSS, slightly eases the picture, but still does not reach the full solution and adequate usability.
What are the causes of the degradation?
First of all it seems to me in a large number of new users who have connected to the network since the beginning of the century.
Firstly, those who developed forum software did not know and did not know how to work with other communication systems, so they built everything from scratch. Secondly, the ease of installation of the finished forum, as well as the relative ease of use, lured those who, again, did not see other systems.
At the moment, unfortunately, I believe that it is almost impossible to tear people away from web forums.
However, what can you try to do? You can build a more centralized system for the same forum posts. So that everyone could instead say phpbb or invision put for example, say the next version of phpbb_nextgen, which would have a module of global conferences. And all site administrators could link the conferences of their sites into some kind of a single network, so that on any of them you can see all the messages, no matter where they are written.
In principle, you can probably even use existing server software from Usenet as a transport, writing only the necessary bindings for converting / integrating with forums. I looked at several ready-made web nntp readers, unfortunately they have very low convenience for the end user.
Of course, for such a “new” system, it is necessary to solve some of the new (for web forums) issues:
* Disconnection from the transport level - site administrators should not have greater rights than administrators of a global conference
* At the same time, conference administrators should have ways of blocking / punishing users who violate the rules, regardless of which site it comes from.
* The necessary kind of global structure, leading the list of "official" conferences, so as not to create duplicate, in general, analogue fidoshogo ehobona.
Well, gradually, of course, I want to create convenient clients that would allow all these conferences to be read without going to the web. Something like News- or the same RSS-reader.
PS My experience - Fido 95 years, on the Internet from the 96th. Pictures in an article from Google, the first thing that came across.
And in the process of setting it up and demonstrating to festival visitors, I increasingly felt the illogic of where the development of network communications led us.
After reading the story of one point and comments, I see that some do not understand the differences between Fido and forums, and argue that the presence of forums is enough. I do not agree with that.
To begin, we turn to the history of communication.
Communication between people on the network is quite simply divided into interactive: chat rooms / pedzhery, and non-interactive: personal (mail) and group (forums).
')
In this article I will consider only non-interactive, for this it is not worth discussing the possibilities of IM and others.
Let's look at the development of group communication over the past 30 years:
Epoch the first - modems / BBS.
The very first example of group communication was the so-called “electronic message board” or BBS .
What it is? In the early 80s, when the first personal computers first began to appear and the first modems available to ordinary people, such things as BBS appeared.
What did it look like? You took your computer, installed a special communication program on it. Now someone else could call you, and connected to your program and could perform some fairly simple actions there — write or read a message, download or upload a file, etc. (It is worth noting that since there were no multi-tasking operating systems for personal computers in those years, you couldn’t do anything else on your computer while the BBS was running. Therefore, most often BBS was launched or on home machines at night, or on machines at work).
It was the only way of electronic communication, and he enjoyed quite a lot of popularity. Hundreds of people called the BBS to read what other people wrote and chat. Needless to say, firstly, it was often difficult to get through to such a BBS, although with the development of technology, round-the-clock stations and BBS with several telephone lines began to appear.
Gradually, such BBS styles were put not only by enthusiasts, but also by major manufacturers of software and hardware, where they laid out firmware and drivers for their products and also carried out technical support.
So by the beginning of the 90s we have dozens / hundreds of BBS enthusiasts in large cities, each of them has a bulletin board, often divided into many subsections on various topics.
You have to dial up to each one individually, register on each one, read the topics of interest, and repeat the dialing in a day or two to check if someone has answered you.
Total: complete decentralization, often duplicate forums on different BBS.
The prestige of individual forums was entirely tied to the prestige and literacy settings as well as the working hours of a particular BBS. Managing forums - exclusively under the jurisdiction of the system operator BBS.
Second epoch - modems / FIDO.
The emergence of the Fido network has significantly expanded the boundaries of the usual then communication. Special node communication nodes, hubs (usually based on existing BBS) were created which at regular intervals, from several days to several hours / minutes, exchanged messages with each other and thanks to this, at any connection point, you could see and read the entire message chain . The fido conferences could be read both through a special software, getting a network address, and as before - in terminal mode with a BBS.
Total: a developed hierarchical system of forums, from global to local to a specific site.
Good centralization within the network, a lot of thematic forums, the relative ease of creating the right forums.
The prestige of a particular conference was provided firstly by regular subscribers, and secondly by a competent moderation policy.
The management is carried out by one / several people of the “creators” of the conference (moderators), regardless of the transport level.
Third Age - Internet / Usenet.
The Internet was developing almost in parallel with our history with you, beginning in the 70s, but until a certain point, connecting to it was practically impossible and often meaningless for the common user. However, in the early 80s the concept of Usenet was developed - global thematic forums. By the beginning of the 90s, she was perfected to perfection, absorbed the best ideas of Fido. Usenet (news / nntp) is actually more global and noticeably accelerated Fido. Hierarchical conferences, widespread, fast communication between nodes.
Created many convenient clients to connect to the network, for virtually any platform. Convenient display of the dialogs by “chains (threads)” made it possible to quickly look through large discussions, as well as quickly “chop off” not interesting branches, and not follow the communication in them.
Despite the fact that currently a small number of people use usenet, I consider this technology to be one of the most thoughtful at the moment.
Total: More global.
All the best that was in Fido, plus great speed and ease of operation.
Age Four - Internet / Forums.
Starting around the beginning of this century, we are witnessing a large growth of independent sites with personal forums.
Gradually, the web forum becomes the most frequent way of communication, and nothing else, although it is the web that has the most inconvenient format of communication. In the framework of the web, the presentation from a trade is often made flat, and if it is constructed hierarchically, then it is still difficult to have large, hundreds of posts, discussions.
I would compare this situation with the time of the BBS - just as you need to register on each individual forum. In the same way, it is necessary to go to each separate forum with some frequency in order to check if there is anything new. Moreover, the notification of updates to the mail is a terrible crutch of this technology, there is no other convenient way of notifying about read / unread chains, the forums are forced to jump into another protocol (mail) to generate a lot of unnecessary traffic.
It comes to ridiculous, on a couple of sites I know there are common thematic branches. Most of the subscribers are present both there and there, on this often the discussion of something is conducted on two fronts, and it happens that the answer is not always written in the same place where the question was asked.
Total: complete decentralization, many duplicate forums.
The prestige of individual forums was entirely tied to the prestige of a particular site.
The management of the forums is solely the responsibility of the site operator.
In the last paragraph, you can add various social networks and blog services such as LJ, Dairi, etc. since there is no big difference between them.
The introduction of RSS, slightly eases the picture, but still does not reach the full solution and adequate usability.
Results
What are the causes of the degradation?
First of all it seems to me in a large number of new users who have connected to the network since the beginning of the century.
Firstly, those who developed forum software did not know and did not know how to work with other communication systems, so they built everything from scratch. Secondly, the ease of installation of the finished forum, as well as the relative ease of use, lured those who, again, did not see other systems.
What are my solutions to me?
At the moment, unfortunately, I believe that it is almost impossible to tear people away from web forums.
However, what can you try to do? You can build a more centralized system for the same forum posts. So that everyone could instead say phpbb or invision put for example, say the next version of phpbb_nextgen, which would have a module of global conferences. And all site administrators could link the conferences of their sites into some kind of a single network, so that on any of them you can see all the messages, no matter where they are written.
In principle, you can probably even use existing server software from Usenet as a transport, writing only the necessary bindings for converting / integrating with forums. I looked at several ready-made web nntp readers, unfortunately they have very low convenience for the end user.
Of course, for such a “new” system, it is necessary to solve some of the new (for web forums) issues:
* Disconnection from the transport level - site administrators should not have greater rights than administrators of a global conference
* At the same time, conference administrators should have ways of blocking / punishing users who violate the rules, regardless of which site it comes from.
* The necessary kind of global structure, leading the list of "official" conferences, so as not to create duplicate, in general, analogue fidoshogo ehobona.
Well, gradually, of course, I want to create convenient clients that would allow all these conferences to be read without going to the web. Something like News- or the same RSS-reader.
PS My experience - Fido 95 years, on the Internet from the 96th. Pictures in an article from Google, the first thing that came across.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/91639/
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