There have been a number of major changes that I’ve noticed over my time. Some good, some bad.
The geographic scale has increased
Discussion has become international, global. The Internet was not used by the general population in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. Electronic forums tended to be local, on things like BBSes, in an era when local calls and long-distance calls had a pricing model that were very different. They’d more-often deal with matters of local interest, whereas that’s less-likely today. In the 2000s, uptake of Internet-based forums was still limited, even as Internet use grew.
The average level of technology knowledge among users has decreased
Until maybe the late 1990s or some, I’d say that personal computer ownership was somewhat-unusual. Certainly many older people didn’t own and use a personal computer. Many people who were doing so were hobbyists or worked in technology-related fields.
I think that relative to most non-technology-specific platforms, the Threadiverse in 2026 is something of a partial throwback here, probably just because (a) there’s a bit of a technical bar to understand and get using it that acts as a filter and (b) perhaps because some people who use it are into open-source.
Also, the level of knowledge that formed a barrier to access has come down as software has become much easier to use and less configuration required. In the 1980s, it wouldn’t have been unexpected to need to manually set Hayes modem configuration strings. On the Mac, even obtaining executable software from the Internet was a major hurdle; Macs didn’t ship with software capable of downloading a file and then converting it into an executable, so one had to bootstrap the process by obtaining, offline, software capable of doing so. Setting up a smartphone for Internet access in 2026 mostly involves turning it on and plonking in a credit card number; the user experience doesn’t involve seeing terms like “MTU”, “SLIP”, “PPP”, or “netmask”.
The level of wealth as a proportion of surrounding society among users has dropped
One thing that I think that a number of people don’t appreciate in the 2020s is how staggeringly much more affordable telecommunications and computing devices have become. I’d say that the personal computer era in the US really kicked off in the late 1970s. At one point, I had a Macintosh 512K, a computer released in 1983. Now, sure, that’s not the cheapest platform out there even at the time, but it was stupendously expensive by the expectations of most users today:
Introductory price: US$3,195 (equivalent to $9,670 in 2024)[1]
That’s not including any storage media, a modem, cost of a phone line, the cost of your (almost-certainly-time-limited) access to your Internet service provider. And it was a lot harder to justify Internet access at that point, given what was out there and the degree to which computer use was present in typical life.
The DOS world was somewhat-more economical, but hardly comparable to the situation today:
Introductory price: US$1,565 (equivalent to $5,410 in 2024)
Those prices will price a lot of people out.
Today, you can get an Internet-capable device that has far more hardware that would have had to have been purchased in addition to that included for well over an order of magnitude less. That’s tremendously expanded the income range of people who have Internet access. It means that there’s a much broader range of perspectives.
The level of education relative to society as a whole has dropped
For a substantial amount of time, a disproportionate chunk of the people who had Internet access were university students who got access via their university; in the US, this was government-subsidized. That meant that higher education users were disproportionately represented; users on something like Usenet weren’t a very representative sample of society as a whole (even aside from any income/education correlation). The Internet is just about everyone now, not something focused on academia and engineering.
The use of pictoral elements has increased
It’s not uncommon to see images (or even video) taking occupying a substantial amount of eyeball space in discussions. Bandwidth limitations used to just make sticking images in-line painful at one point. But there’s also technical bars that dropped, like forum-specific inline images and then emojis entering Unicode. I might have seen the occasional emoticon in the 1990s, but that was about it.
That being said, ASCII art is something that I rarely see now, but which was more-common in an era when many people were viewing all discussion in monospaced typefaces.
Messages are much shorter
Some of this has been due to technical impositions; Twitter imposed extremely short message lengths, but even so, I’d say that Usenet tended towards much longer messages, more akin to letters.
Rise and fall of advanced markup
The early systems that I can think of were text-based and didn’t support styling. Then an increasing number of forums started supporting things like BBCode or HTML. But I think that the modern consensus has come mostly back to text, though maybe with embedded images and Unicode, with some supporting Markdown. Lower barrier to use, and I think that in practice, a lot of styling just isn’t all that important to get points across.
The rise of data-harvesting and profiling
I think that many people viewed messages as more ephemeral. You could say something and it might go away when a BBS dies or the like. But with sites like archive.org and scrapers and large-scale efforts to profile, electronic forums have more of a permanence than they once did. The Trump administration demands that visitors to the US hand over social media identities, for example. I don’t know how much that weighs on discussion in society as a whole, but it certainly alters how I think about electronic discussion to some degree.
The rise of generative-AI-generated text in posts
Probably one of the most-recent changes. Bots aren’t new, but the ability to make extended, really human-sounding text is.
Cadence of discussion has increased
Many discussion forums historically didn’t have a mechanism to push notifications to a user that there was activity in a discussion. A user might find out that there was activity the next time they happen to stop by a forum and see that there’s more activity. Today, social media software on a smartphone, wherever a user is, might play an alert sound that there’s been more activity within seconds of that activity.
The spread of Internet use and the enormous expansion of the potential userbase has made very niche forums far more viable than they historically had been. Because the pool of users is so large, even if only a very tiny percentage of that pool is interested in a given topic, the number of topics for discussion that has a viable number of users interested in it becomes much greater.
The Threadiverse today is also something of a throwback here, as the userbase is much smaller than something like Twitter or present-day Reddit.
The rise of deletion
Many systems in the past didn’t support deletion of messages, or maybe only permitted administrators to do so.
Part of the problem is that it’s not generally practical to ensure that deletion of a message actually occurs, once that message has been made visible to the broader world. And generally, it’s considered to be a bad idea in computer security to give a user the impression that they have the ability to do something if there are ways to defeat it.
But in practice, a lot of people seem to want to have the ability to delete (or modify) messages, and I think that consensus is that there’s value there, even if it rests upon a general convention to not go digging for deleted messages.
The rise and fall of trolling
I’m talking about trolling in the traditional sense of the word, where someone posts a message that looks like it might be a plausibly innocent message, but contains intentional errors or just enough outrageous stuff to spur many people to respond and start a long thread or argument.
The idea is that a user trying to do this would “troll” for fish to try to get as many bites as possible.
Maybe this is just the forums I use, but I remember that showing up quite a bit in the forums I used in the 2000s, like Slashdot. A Usenet tactic was to cross-post — unlike the Threadiverse, responses to a crosspost would typically go to all newsgroups — to forums likely to have users who would argue with each other, like a newsgroup dedicated to Macs and one to Wndows PCs. But I’ve seen less and less of it over time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just that engagement-seeking algorithms and news media have institutionalized ragebait so much that we already have so many generated arguments that it just gets lost in the noise.
A number of forums ran into problems with spam at various points. Usenet particularly had problems with it. I rarely see it today, at least not in an obvious form. I think that the decline is in part due to something that many users here often complain about — the centralization of social media. When there were many small sites dedicated to, say, bass fishing or golfing or whatever, admins had limited resources. But on Facebook or Reddit or whatnot, the anti-spam resources are basically pooled at the site level. Also, the site admins have visibility into activity spanning the entire site. Instead of writing a bot to spam, say, forum system X and then hitting each of many different sites using that forum software, one has to spam many different subreddits on Reddit, say, and that’s a lot more visible to someone like the Reddit staff, who can see all of it.
There have been a number of major changes that I’ve noticed over my time. Some good, some bad.
The geographic scale has increased
Discussion has become international, global. The Internet was not used by the general population in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. Electronic forums tended to be local, on things like BBSes, in an era when local calls and long-distance calls had a pricing model that were very different. They’d more-often deal with matters of local interest, whereas that’s less-likely today. In the 2000s, uptake of Internet-based forums was still limited, even as Internet use grew.
The average level of technology knowledge among users has decreased
Until maybe the late 1990s or some, I’d say that personal computer ownership was somewhat-unusual. Certainly many older people didn’t own and use a personal computer. Many people who were doing so were hobbyists or worked in technology-related fields.
I think that relative to most non-technology-specific platforms, the Threadiverse in 2026 is something of a partial throwback here, probably just because (a) there’s a bit of a technical bar to understand and get using it that acts as a filter and (b) perhaps because some people who use it are into open-source.
Also, the level of knowledge that formed a barrier to access has come down as software has become much easier to use and less configuration required. In the 1980s, it wouldn’t have been unexpected to need to manually set Hayes modem configuration strings. On the Mac, even obtaining executable software from the Internet was a major hurdle; Macs didn’t ship with software capable of downloading a file and then converting it into an executable, so one had to bootstrap the process by obtaining, offline, software capable of doing so. Setting up a smartphone for Internet access in 2026 mostly involves turning it on and plonking in a credit card number; the user experience doesn’t involve seeing terms like “MTU”, “SLIP”, “PPP”, or “netmask”.
The level of wealth as a proportion of surrounding society among users has dropped
One thing that I think that a number of people don’t appreciate in the 2020s is how staggeringly much more affordable telecommunications and computing devices have become. I’d say that the personal computer era in the US really kicked off in the late 1970s. At one point, I had a Macintosh 512K, a computer released in 1983. Now, sure, that’s not the cheapest platform out there even at the time, but it was stupendously expensive by the expectations of most users today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_512K
That’s not including any storage media, a modem, cost of a phone line, the cost of your (almost-certainly-time-limited) access to your Internet service provider. And it was a lot harder to justify Internet access at that point, given what was out there and the degree to which computer use was present in typical life.
The DOS world was somewhat-more economical, but hardly comparable to the situation today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
Those prices will price a lot of people out.
Today, you can get an Internet-capable device that has far more hardware that would have had to have been purchased in addition to that included for well over an order of magnitude less. That’s tremendously expanded the income range of people who have Internet access. It means that there’s a much broader range of perspectives.
The level of education relative to society as a whole has dropped
For a substantial amount of time, a disproportionate chunk of the people who had Internet access were university students who got access via their university; in the US, this was government-subsidized. That meant that higher education users were disproportionately represented; users on something like Usenet weren’t a very representative sample of society as a whole (even aside from any income/education correlation). The Internet is just about everyone now, not something focused on academia and engineering.
The use of pictoral elements has increased
It’s not uncommon to see images (or even video) taking occupying a substantial amount of eyeball space in discussions. Bandwidth limitations used to just make sticking images in-line painful at one point. But there’s also technical bars that dropped, like forum-specific inline images and then emojis entering Unicode. I might have seen the occasional emoticon in the 1990s, but that was about it.
That being said, ASCII art is something that I rarely see now, but which was more-common in an era when many people were viewing all discussion in monospaced typefaces.
Messages are much shorter
Some of this has been due to technical impositions; Twitter imposed extremely short message lengths, but even so, I’d say that Usenet tended towards much longer messages, more akin to letters.
Rise and fall of advanced markup
The early systems that I can think of were text-based and didn’t support styling. Then an increasing number of forums started supporting things like BBCode or HTML. But I think that the modern consensus has come mostly back to text, though maybe with embedded images and Unicode, with some supporting Markdown. Lower barrier to use, and I think that in practice, a lot of styling just isn’t all that important to get points across.
The rise of data-harvesting and profiling
I think that many people viewed messages as more ephemeral. You could say something and it might go away when a BBS dies or the like. But with sites like archive.org and scrapers and large-scale efforts to profile, electronic forums have more of a permanence than they once did. The Trump administration demands that visitors to the US hand over social media identities, for example. I don’t know how much that weighs on discussion in society as a whole, but it certainly alters how I think about electronic discussion to some degree.
The rise of generative-AI-generated text in posts
Probably one of the most-recent changes. Bots aren’t new, but the ability to make extended, really human-sounding text is.
Cadence of discussion has increased
Many discussion forums historically didn’t have a mechanism to push notifications to a user that there was activity in a discussion. A user might find out that there was activity the next time they happen to stop by a forum and see that there’s more activity. Today, social media software on a smartphone, wherever a user is, might play an alert sound that there’s been more activity within seconds of that activity.
Long-tail forums have become more common
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
The spread of Internet use and the enormous expansion of the potential userbase has made very niche forums far more viable than they historically had been. Because the pool of users is so large, even if only a very tiny percentage of that pool is interested in a given topic, the number of topics for discussion that has a viable number of users interested in it becomes much greater.
The Threadiverse today is also something of a throwback here, as the userbase is much smaller than something like Twitter or present-day Reddit.
The rise of deletion
Many systems in the past didn’t support deletion of messages, or maybe only permitted administrators to do so.
Part of the problem is that it’s not generally practical to ensure that deletion of a message actually occurs, once that message has been made visible to the broader world. And generally, it’s considered to be a bad idea in computer security to give a user the impression that they have the ability to do something if there are ways to defeat it.
But in practice, a lot of people seem to want to have the ability to delete (or modify) messages, and I think that consensus is that there’s value there, even if it rests upon a general convention to not go digging for deleted messages.
The rise and fall of trolling
I’m talking about trolling in the traditional sense of the word, where someone posts a message that looks like it might be a plausibly innocent message, but contains intentional errors or just enough outrageous stuff to spur many people to respond and start a long thread or argument.
The idea is that a user trying to do this would “troll” for fish to try to get as many bites as possible.
Maybe this is just the forums I use, but I remember that showing up quite a bit in the forums I used in the 2000s, like Slashdot. A Usenet tactic was to cross-post — unlike the Threadiverse, responses to a crosspost would typically go to all newsgroups — to forums likely to have users who would argue with each other, like a newsgroup dedicated to Macs and one to Wndows PCs. But I’ve seen less and less of it over time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just that engagement-seeking algorithms and news media have institutionalized ragebait so much that we already have so many generated arguments that it just gets lost in the noise.
[continued in child]
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The decline of spam
A number of forums ran into problems with spam at various points. Usenet particularly had problems with it. I rarely see it today, at least not in an obvious form. I think that the decline is in part due to something that many users here often complain about — the centralization of social media. When there were many small sites dedicated to, say, bass fishing or golfing or whatever, admins had limited resources. But on Facebook or Reddit or whatnot, the anti-spam resources are basically pooled at the site level. Also, the site admins have visibility into activity spanning the entire site. Instead of writing a bot to spam, say, forum system X and then hitting each of many different sites using that forum software, one has to spam many different subreddits on Reddit, say, and that’s a lot more visible to someone like the Reddit staff, who can see all of it.