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Dear Barbelith,
I’ve been thinking about you these last couple of days—about the beauty you were, and the bones you leave behind. And I know nostalgia is making it seem rosier than it was, and that it was pretty bloody awful for an awful long time, but here’s the thing: this board was alive.
In my day job, I do internet marketing, which involves a lot of kicking around in social media. A lot of identifying and posting to message boards and fora. Many of these places are in steep and terminal decline. I don’t know: maybe Facebook or some other app has killed the entire message-board moment. But looking through the archives on these various boards, I see that many of them had—even at their ostensible heights—less traffic than this place does even now.
And in the last couple of weeks, I’ve run across a couple of fora in various places—it doesn’t matter where—that are completely unpopulated. I mean completely. Somebody set up the forum, often with an elaborate system of subfolders, and opened it to membership, and people—sometimes a handful, sometimes hundreds—signed up. And no one posted. Ever. At all. Not even a moderator post saying “Welcome!” Absolute zip. Membership is automated, and still open—I signed up myself, and even left a couple of posts. First posts, on boards that have been theoretically active for years now. TOTAL TOPICS: 1. TOTAL POSTS: 1.
It was so odd. These places are like immaculately furnished model homes, abandoned, and just waiting for squatters to move in. And I thought, That woud be quite a thing, to organize a board invasion—get a bunch of folks and overrun this place, turn it into something entirely other than what it was intended for. Membership is free and open and the software and hosting are all already in place—it is begging to be colonized. We probably wouldn’t get away with it for long before the admins or owners noticed—maybe a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks—but, oh, it would be glorious.
And then I thought: Well, yeah. But who am I gonna ask? And there was no one. Too late now. So I left my single post, like a graffito in an empty house, a house where no one has ever lived, and I walked away.
And I thought of you.
Jack Fear
from a house on the hill
in the Flower City
October 2010 |
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