Brilliant post on the history of web forums! I came online too late for the heyday of web forums, but I’ve used a few. They certainly did have a distinct charm compared to modern social platforms. The reason it struck a chord is because I’ve been thinking of setting up a small forum online as a calm space to discover weird rabbit holes and to connect with weird and wonderful people. It’ll probably fail, but is it worth a shot?

I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.

That said, I do think that as the internet matures into something that is more furniture in our lives, perhaps some of us will slow down. Maybe we’ll log into a forum and realize what we actually wanted out of our online experience was never the ability to reach everyone, but to reach the small number of people that think kind of like us. Maybe the “collisions” that modern social networks create just make things worse, even if it means we don’t get the occasional ego boost of Patton Oswalt replying to our tweet or whatever.

There was charm to all that barely-working PHP and Perl code that I think we’re still trying to recapture a quarter-century later.