I was a latecomer to TOP, late 2015 or early 2016. My spouse was a regular reader at the time and would preface sooo many conversations with “there’s this article on BoingBoing about…”, so I thought I may as well read myself. As far as I know he never participated in the comments, though.
It took me a long time to decide I had anything to contribute to the conversation, but when they shut it down I was surprised to realize how much I, a 50-something non-techy SAHM white woman, had come to rely on the community. I had found Elsewhere maybe a year or two before they flipped the kill switch at TOP and lurked here on and off. I invited myself over.
I was a lurker for years; I created my account at TOP in 2015. (I just logged in for the first time in months, and found I got my Decennial badge in June.) My first post was a reply to an item posted by Cory Doctorow (!) in December 2016. It earned 9 likes, and a reply from our own @FGD135
I had somehow missed the creation of Elsewhere, so when TOP was shutting down I had no idea that this place even existed. You can imagine my joy when I found several PMs inviting me to join.
I remember a lot of kvetching and agonizing among the commentariat over the switch to bbs. Turned out to be a good switch. Bummer the one to SS wasn’t a good one.
Its hard for me to pin down exactly when i started reading. Between 2007 and 2012, i didn’t make an account for a while so that window of time is my best guess.
I don’t recall when I started reading Boing Boing, but it was through Cory. When I got my first mp3 player in the early aughts, I wanted most of all to listen to stories, so I went looking for audio fiction. And, I found Cory giving away stories, so I went looking for anything else I could find about him.
Then it took me years to make an account to comment, because I found slashdot early on, and that made me hesitate to participate online. Recall, those were the days when we didn’t rickroll, we had goatse, and I am still somewhat scarred from that experience. A wedding ring?‽ AAAaaaaaa Happily the mutants were more kind & welcoming and less whatever-that-was.
I first noticed it when I was starting out studying chemical engineering. I asked an older classmate why the chemical engineers had better behaviour and didn’t get up to as many stupid antics as the mechanical or civil engineering students. The older classmate happened to be a woman, and she nailed it. “More women.” Chem eng at the time had about one-third women students; still not enough, and noticeably more than the other engineering departments.
I first began reading BB around 2002. I don’t think I ever posted in the comments section in the olden WP or Disqus days, but I read the site all the time.
It wasn’t until I joined the BBS in 2015 that I became active in that community. It wasn’t long before I wasn’t reading site and was just interacting with the community.
Of course, giving up on the actual site was completely self-inflicted on their part. Some of the milestones I remember (not necessarily in any order):
RSS feed was turned to shit so you would be forced to go to the website to view anything other than a tiny snippet
The increasing amounts of sponcon, advertorials, “Store” posts to where it made up a bulk of the daily content
Original content was replaced with simply recycling shit from Twitter or Reddit
No more guest authors
The front page arms race of ads/trackers/adblocker blockers/etc.
Most of the long-time authors left for other sites
Fake authors invented to write up rage bait content to drive engagement (like that unforgivably awful post about Shelley Duvall after her death, and some immensely shitty takes about life during early COVID)
That’s not even covering the shennanigans over at the BBS, which I’m sure I don’t need to recount to most of you.
Substack was the final straw. I haven’t read any content since then.
I read the BB zine back in the day. Eventually realized there was a website. Eventually realized there was a comment section. I think I forgot my log-in and created a new account at least once, so I was posting under several names over the years. It’s strange to think about how long I read it, yet how little I read it now, and how unrecognizable it is.
There already are alternative platforms that appear to my eye to be functionally identical to SubStack, that other people chose over SS because those other platforms don’t have a Nazi problem. No work required, but SS seems to have “discoverability” as one of its selling points, where you get recommendations for similar blogs, and I don’t know if the other platforms offer this (or have enough users to make it work the same way).
That was a major turning point, IMO. When they pivoted to “not only are we going to make half of our posts ads for garbage products, we’re going to remove your ability to mock or criticize them”, I stopped believing their claim that ads were a necessary evil that was forced upon them in order to keep running. It was no longer a reluctant concession, it was full-on selling out and putting corpos over community.
I’m pretty sure my turning point was the third time Mark posted about his “favorite” spatula that his family had used for years and it was a different spatula each time.
I liked Rob’s obviously bogus ad copy for products, told through stories and dialogue.. they’re a work of art. Was it Rob? I forget and I don’t want to check but the point is I liked them.
i wonder whatever happened to Mark’s chickens.
not that i give a shit about chickens, but he did go on about raising them for a while, a long time ago.
On the one hand, yes, it was fun to cynically bash the content and how asinine it was. “Who’s this ‘we’ that you keep talking about?” or “Oh, look, more ‘for tobacco use only’ paraphernalia wink wink nudge nudge”. It was also always good to have people point out how some of those “get ‘lifetime’ access to over $1 billion dollars in products for only $195.95” offers were complete garbage (or how some were actually not a bad deal). It was mostly crap, mostly worth of criticism or warning.
On the other hand, there was so much of this constantly infesting the BBS that I was actually quite happy to see it go away. Occasionally something would slip through and we’d all rag on it appropriately, but for the most part it kept discussions focused on things more interesting than shitting on the adverposts.
Invitations aren’t required to join. I believe we’ve turned that feature on once or twice, but not for quite some time. That may be of little consolation if you have no way to contact those people, of course.
I believe I’ve shared my own story of discovering the BB BBS, but I’ll recap it briefly. I was a fan of CodingHorror from back in the VB days, through StackOverflow, and the creation of Discourse. In the early days of Discourse, there were three sites that were selected to be pilot/beta testers. They were:
How-To Geek
BoingBoing
Ubuntu
I’m not sure if I joined then (2014), as I vaguely recall joining a Discourse instance for DailyWTF around the same time, and they’re clearly not in the list above. Notably, of the above, only Ubuntu is still using Discourse. How-To Geek was never really a good fit (neither was DailyWTF, oddly), and they’re really nothing like they were back then anyway. I don’t think anyone would have considered me a particularly active participant at BB, but I appreciated the community there (and still do, here) and they ways in which they/you would challenge my assumptions and pre-conceived notions about the world. Becoming a regular there was a distinct honor. My personal turning point, unsurprisingly, was the St. Elsewhere incident, and the realization that this place that had become so important to me could be taken away at the whim of someone else.
I was thinking about something recently, since a new month arrived and with it the emails from the hosting service and the email service notifying me about how much it costs to run this place. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s not insignificant either. I’ve had numerous offers over the years to help with that, and maybe someday I’ll get around to figuring out how to manage that in a way that doesn’t feel too weird. For now, though, I’ve come to realize that it’s some of the easiest money I spend every month, because what we have here is worth so much more than can be assigned a simple dollar value.
I forget and I don’t want to check but the point is I liked them.