Closed Bulletin Board: Difference between revisions
(Created page with "A type of online discussion platform where visibility and interaction is limited by means of keeping accounts. What internet vernacular understands as a ''forum''. It is truly ancient, originating in the late 80s as account systems were implement on Bullet Boards, systems that were re-implemented during the rise of USENET and WWW. === Evolution === The gating of the forum was not intentional, but it was organic. The primary factors we...") |
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[[Category:Closed Bulletin Boards]] | |||
[[Category:Online Discussion Platforms]] | |||
A type of [[Online Discussion Platform | online discussion platform]] whose primary characteristic is that visibility and interaction is limited by means of accounts, usually through a process called ''registration''. What internet vernacular understands as a '''forum'''. | |||
=== | It is truly ancient, originating in the late 80s as account management systems were tacked onto Bulletin Board Systems, practices re-implemented during the rise of USENET and WWW. Forums peaked in the late 90s and the early 00s as they enabled both lifelong friendships and profitable networking. They entered a fast decline when widely available server space cheapened hosting enough to enable the [[Open Bulletin Board | open bulletin boards]] to become faster news-spreading services, promote content remixing, gain popularity and dictate [[Internet Culture]]. Today, the additional process centralization has almost erased the forum from the Internet, with pseudo-forums - news-aggregator megaplatforms such as [https://reddit.com/ Reddit] absorbing all forum activity. | ||
=== Origin === | |||
The gating of the forum was not intentional, but it was organic. The primary factors were: | The gating of the forum was not intentional, but it was organic. The primary factors were: | ||
Latest revision as of 05:07, 20 October 2025
A type of online discussion platform whose primary characteristic is that visibility and interaction is limited by means of accounts, usually through a process called registration. What internet vernacular understands as a forum.
It is truly ancient, originating in the late 80s as account management systems were tacked onto Bulletin Board Systems, practices re-implemented during the rise of USENET and WWW. Forums peaked in the late 90s and the early 00s as they enabled both lifelong friendships and profitable networking. They entered a fast decline when widely available server space cheapened hosting enough to enable the open bulletin boards to become faster news-spreading services, promote content remixing, gain popularity and dictate Internet Culture. Today, the additional process centralization has almost erased the forum from the Internet, with pseudo-forums - news-aggregator megaplatforms such as Reddit absorbing all forum activity.
Origin[edit]
The gating of the forum was not intentional, but it was organic. The primary factors were:
- Protecting posters from identity theft
- Cultural influence of blog-like mail chains (images were expensive to host!), any making individual posts worth keeping track of.
- Technical limitations for large databases to keep track of posts, quite literally a problem of accounting.
- Demand for heavily personalized posts, signatures and "digital presence".
