This is the first forum I ever used.

[Human_Wormbaby]

As you can see I registered a long time ago. Long long ago I remember doing an AOL search for Metroid, and finding Metroid classic. That project was still early in development (and ultimately doomed to die when the webhost got a nasty letter from the IDSA (Now ESA) and nuked the site) so my dreams of making my own Metroid levels would have to wait. The site did, however, link me to its "sister project" Zelda Classic.

I eagerly waited as ZC downloaded at the trailer park AOL rate of 250 bytes per second, and prepared to play for free a long lost game from my childhood that we had been unsuccessful in locating at secondhand shops, Zelda 1.

But my excitement was short lived as I found that the game wouldn't boot due to not having alleg40.dll or something like that. I gave up, and eventually located a copy of Zelda in a pawn shop.

Some time later, was it a year?, I was a bit more confident with using computers and the internet. I downloaded Zelda Classic again, and explored the website to try to fond the solution to my problem. I found the help I needed on the AGN forum.

Having never seen, or used a forum, I was very cautious not to stand out too much. I was excited and amazed by this community, but I didn't want to screw up and end up rejected from this wonderful place. Ever since I was 5 years old I had been drawing my own video game levels, and that interest hadn't faded with time. Here I was, for the first time in my life, among like-minded individuals.

I didn't post much, due to a combination of shyness and not wanting others to think that I was just posting for the sake of increasing my post count since post count was a sign of status/seniority back in those days. I did, however, lurk here a lot. I think it was from here that I was turned on to romhacking, which lead me to join other forums and meet new people. the rest is all history.

This forum is where my online social life began, and at that time I had no other real social life.

Thanks, AGN, for still being here and giving me this nostalgia trip.

[Brasel]

Well, you should stick around. We're always looking for good conversationalists these days.

[Binx]

I second that emotion. I'd really like to see this forum liven up once more.

[Human_Wormbaby]

All the forums I've posted at over the years are either all gone now or have slowed to a crawl. Must be a side-effect of my generation growing up.

[Chris Miller]

It's in the same fashion that letter-writing and visiting gave way to telephones; telephones gave way to message boards. Now message boards are giving way to Twitter and such.

[Beldaran]

Now message boards are giving way to Twitter and such.

NOOOOOOOOO!

I hate those technologies. I refuse to ever use them.

[AtmaWeapon]

I had a discussion about the point callitaday's making the other day.

Forums' heydey is kind of linked to chat rooms. IM was only good for talking with people you already met; to meet new people you had to go somewhere that had established groups of people already talking. Forums were good for this, as were chat rooms, though I think forums had more appeal because they kept a record and you could draw out conversations for longer or spend a longer amount of time responding.

Today, practically everyone has a text-ready (and possibly email-ready) cell phone. (This always invites some nerd to chime in about how they specifically bought a phone without text messaging to "save money" where I feel like the phrase "save money" is code for "the opportunity to act smug because remember 3-5 years ago when we all hated texting yeah I'm still going to talk about how stupid texting is even though 90% of my social circle has changed their mind and the 10% who still talk to me agree".) I've got a really frugal friend and I think he's paying something like $10/month for a phone with a slide-out keyboard and pay-as-you-go texting capabilities. This has all but completely replaced IM for personal communication; I've got some 80 people on my AIM list and clearly remember times when I'd have > 5 simultaneous IM conversations going; today there are only 3 people I know that use IM (and one uses it because they know I pay more attention to it than my phone.)

Twitter has killed chat rooms and IM clients. Maybe someone doesn't give you their phone number for texting; you can still DM them on Twitter (email also can serve this purpose.) You can't easily do something like a chat room with text messages, but Twitter is essentially a single-room chat service in which you whitelist people you want to hear.

I think forums are going to outlive chat/IM because they serve a special purpose. Forum conversations are permanent, and for Q&A topics like programming this is invaluable. The goal of any programming forum is to cause the need for new threads to approach zero as search yields increasingly useful results (reality isn't kind to this notion.) But forums as a social device are dead as far as I'm concerned. Twitter's starting to prove itself better at answering quick programming questions than my forums, which typically require an hour or two of wait for someone to respond.

I'm not sure whether I'm sad or not. In my mind, forums are like a pub you go to and the active members are the regulars. In AGN's heydey, even the lamest of threads would generate discussion for an hour or two and sometimes blossom into great discussion. Twitter's more like the world's biggest cocktail party and lame conversations just die without the chance to become beautiful.

(This is also the part where some nerd makes the statement that they aren't ever going to use Twitter because "I don't care when you're going to the bathroom." Twitter's like a phone conversation, if you don't like what you're hearing you hang up. Stop following them and the problem is solved! I assure you for practically every hobby there are people to follow that talk about their bathroom habits less than 5% of the time.)

[Binx]

Sites like Twitter and Facebook are great, for keeping in touch with people you already know, or reestablishing ties to those you haven't seen in a long time, but IMO they don't give the true social experience that forum sites do. I don't know what any of you look like, or what you do outside of AGN, but I really don't care. You all have a common interest with me and that's what's important... Of course my opinions are rarely the popular viewpoint.

[Beldaran]

I had a discussion about the point callitaday's making the other day.

Forums' heydey is kind of linked to chat rooms. IM was only good for talking with people you already met; to meet new people you had to go somewhere that had established groups of people already talking. Forums were good for this, as were chat rooms, though I think forums had more appeal because they kept a record and you could draw out conversations for longer or spend a longer amount of time responding.

Today, practically everyone has a text-ready (and possibly email-ready) cell phone. (This always invites some nerd to chime in about how they specifically bought a phone without text messaging to "save money" where I feel like the phrase "save money" is code for "the opportunity to act smug because remember 3-5 years ago when we all hated texting yeah I'm still going to talk about how stupid texting is even though 90% of my social circle has changed their mind and the 10% who still talk to me agree".) I've got a really frugal friend and I think he's paying something like $10/month for a phone with a slide-out keyboard and pay-as-you-go texting capabilities. This has all but completely replaced IM for personal communication; I've got some 80 people on my AIM list and clearly remember times when I'd have > 5 simultaneous IM conversations going; today there are only 3 people I know that use IM (and one uses it because they know I pay more attention to it than my phone.)

Twitter has killed chat rooms and IM clients. Maybe someone doesn't give you their phone number for texting; you can still DM them on Twitter (email also can serve this purpose.) You can't easily do something like a chat room with text messages, but Twitter is essentially a single-room chat service in which you whitelist people you want to hear.

I think forums are going to outlive chat/IM because they serve a special purpose. Forum conversations are permanent, and for Q&A topics like programming this is invaluable. The goal of any programming forum is to cause the need for new threads to approach zero as search yields increasingly useful results (reality isn't kind to this notion.) But forums as a social device are dead as far as I'm concerned. Twitter's starting to prove itself better at answering quick programming questions than my forums, which typically require an hour or two of wait for someone to respond.

I'm not sure whether I'm sad or not. In my mind, forums are like a pub you go to and the active members are the regulars. In AGN's heydey, even the lamest of threads would generate discussion for an hour or two and sometimes blossom into great discussion. Twitter's more like the world's biggest cocktail party and lame conversations just die without the chance to become beautiful.

(This is also the part where some nerd makes the statement that they aren't ever going to use Twitter because "I don't care when you're going to the bathroom." Twitter's like a phone conversation, if you don't like what you're hearing you hang up. Stop following them and the problem is solved! I assure you for practically every hobby there are people to follow that talk about their bathroom habits less than 5% of the time.)

And when forums are gone, how are you going to make ridiculously long posts like this on twitter?

Twitter is horrible. It prevents smart people from chaining more than two sentences together to form a thought. I wish people were more literary, but no we all have to circle the drain with everyone else and if you want social interaction, you'll need to get in the cultural sewer called twitter.

Bah. Get the fuck off my lawn, hippy.

[Human_Wormbaby]

There's yet to be something to replace forums. I gotta admit, though, twitter is handy for stuff like keeping up with bands that you like.

[AtmaWeapon]

And when forums are gone, how are you going to make ridiculously long posts like this on twitter?

Twitter is horrible. It prevents smart people from chaining more than two sentences together to form a thought. I wish people were more literary, but no we all have to circle the drain with everyone else and if you want social interaction, you'll need to get in the cultural sewer called twitter.

Bah. Get the fuck off my lawn, hippy.
You write a blog post, enable comments, then link to it on Twitter. Done and done. Lots of smart people have blogs with lots of interesting articles to pore over; 10% or so of the people I follow on Twitter only ever talk when they finish a blog post. My opinion is the expression of a profound thought in a brief manner requires far more skill than vomiting out several pages worth of text to get the point across. You have no idea how much it embarrasses me when I spend 30 minutes on a post only to find out someone else managed to make my point with one paragraph.

Or, the Twitter version:
Start a blog, put your long thoughts there. Tumblr works as well. Smart people handle it just fine; see Dave Winer. http://scripting.org

The second version was more pleasant to write, and doesn't lose any meaning. Short-form posts can be liberating.

[Beldaran]

So instead of having a forum where I know my friends hang out, I have to follow 17 blogs with pretty much no chance of meeting new people since there is no central nexus for "registering" and creating a profile. Or I can randomly browse the 50 billion blogs out there, 99% of which contain three posts from four years ago saying "my cat peed again, I hate men."

I prefer forums. If I have an interest in a game, I join their forums and talk with lots of like minded people about it. I have I have an interest in Linux, I join a Linux forum and talk with lots of like minded people about it.

Is the internet, via blogs and twitter, really becoming one giant forum? Because I don't find it enjoyable to post on a forum with 3 billion registered users. It's too vast and horrifyingly banal.

[jerome]

You have no idea how much it embarrasses me when I spend 30 minutes on a post only to find out someone else managed to make my point with one paragraph.
The one good thing about your long posts is that there is usually little to no confusion about where you stand on said topic.

I was primarily against joining any myspace, facebook, twitter, etc. I finally joined Facebook a few months ago. It's mostly so I could see my brother's growing family and keep in touch with him since he's usually 1000+ miles from me. I like it.

I have problems trying to see why some people spew out some of the most uninteresting things and expect anyone to really care. I like my stepsister and all, but no one really NEEDS to know that you had a bowl of peaches at lunch. Things like that just turn me away from it for a while.

As far as the topic of this thread, I don't recall if this was the first forum I've ever joined. It might've been, but I post zero times. I first signed up back in 2000-2002 era under a different name. I had forgotten what it was, and so I joined under this one. I had lost my creativity for names, and just went with my own.

[Human_Wormbaby]

That damn newfangled web2.0

[AtmaWeapon]

The problem: I can't visit many forums at work. First off, it's obvious I'm dicking around and visiting a forum. Second, many forums I enjoy have people with no concept of "work-safe" content for their sigs/avatars. I can turn them off, but only if I manage to get logged in first. Third, people that get things done don't spend their days on forums. It takes 5-10 minutes to browse a forum, decide if there's something worth responding to, and longer if you need to respond. Twitter takes 10 seconds. Here's a glimpse at the losers and silent underachievers I follow on Twitter:

Scott Guthrie (http://twitter.com/#!/scottgu), VP of Microsoft's Developer Division. He usually announces products on Twitter, and often has alternate download links to things when their servers get hosed (like when the new Async CTP dropped yesterday.)
Martin Fowler (http://twitter.com/#!/martinfowler), leader in the Agile community and OOP guru. If you don't know who he is or haven't read any of his books, you probably aren't writing OOP code properly.
Brad Wilson (http://twitter.com/#!/bradwilson), big on the ASP .NET team in Microsoft. Another good source for inside information.
Cory Doctrow (http://twitter.com/#!/doctorow), Sci-Fi author and co-editor of Boing Boing.
Roger Ebert (http://twitter.com/#!/ebertchicago), movie critic and all-around pretty funny guy.

Here's some of the vibrant personalities I encounter on my daily walk through 5 or 6 forums with various levels of activity:

•

I've never seen any of these people on a forum anywhere. They have blogs, but my RSS reader hits 500+ articles per day and it takes 30 minutes to sift through it and organize the articles worth reading. On Twitter, if one of these guys posts something, I know it's probably good. If other people start talking about it, I know it's gold. My wife's got a whole bookshelf devoted to ARCs and review copies of books she gets direct from authors on Twitter.

You can blow it off if you wish, but 95% of my useful content over the past year comes from Twitter.

[MottZilla]

Point being forums are basically a dead medium.

[apples]

I'm jealous! I browse a lot of forums looking for a hang out, but it seems like I'm bad luck :( After a couple months or so, the forum begins to dry up and the people move on. I do manage to make quite a few friends in the process. Maybe one day I'll start my own gaming forum and gather everyone in one place...