[vcf-midatlantic] The good old days of user groups.

[Ethan O'Toole]

>  As someone who did grow up with them, I can tell you that this is 
> absolutely the case.  The Internet is presented to people as a "you can GET 
> this, you can GET that!"  "Get get get!"  ...not "participate", not

Oh no way. There were leaches on BBSes too. Heck, they had their own 
protocol! LeachZModem. It would complete the entire transfer to disk then 
tell the remote side that the xfer wasn't successful, back up... back 
up... back up... abort. So user wouldn't get dinged for the download.

The internet has a ton of people sharing information. I mean, look at 
youtube. How to fix cars, HVAC, build things, play musical instruments, 
etc. It far exceeds the old days millions times over.

And only a small portion of the people in say the underground hacking 
community or BBS communities had specific skills. MANY were just end 
users. MS-DOS toaster operators.

>  Well, this does have the effect of increasing the signal/noise ratio on the 
> forums and mailing lists.  In my experience at least, the people who flock to 
> Facebook, well, sorta belong there! ;)

A big problem with the stand alone forums is the spam bots and stuff. But 
many of them are still successful, although traffic is declining. I ain't 
gonna lie... Facebook marketplace is amazeballs. I've sold a few things on 
there already, I think it's going to take on eBay and Craigslist. Saw some 
deals but I missed them. Oberheim DMX for $350.. phew.

I only have so much bandwidth though. Overloaded in modern times between 
IRC, Slack, Discord, E-Mail, Text... forums and the occasional facebook 
driveby.

I think facebook has bad searchability but after the nekochan.org 
disappeared it showed the risk of ease of loosing long term knowledge 
pool.

 	- Ethan