[TUHS to Bcc: and +COFF] On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 3:50 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: Don't forget SHARE! Honestly, I think the IBM mainframe community doesn't get its due. There was actually a lot of good stuff there. The phenomenon of "September" being the time when all the new undergrads got their accounts and discovered USENET and the shenanigans that ensued was well-known. Eternal September when AOL got connected was a serious body blow. As for BBSes...I'd go so far as to say that the BBS people were the AOL people before the AOL people were the AOL people. A takeaway from both was that communities with established norms but no way beside social pressure to enforce them have a hard time scaling. USENET worked when the user population was small and mostly amenable to a set of shared goals centered around information exchange (nevermind the Jim Flemings and other well-known cranks of the world). But integrating someone into the fold took effort both on the community's part as well as the user; when it wasn't obvious that intrinsic motivation was required, or hordes of users just weren't interested, it didn't work very well. I think this is something we see over and over again with social networks. - Dan C.