Social Media's Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system <comment><USER2> I got into BBSes when I was in maybe 8th grade. Because we didn't have call waiting, and thus it would tie up the phone line, I could only do BBSing at night. Until I got a long extension cable from Radio Shack, I had to move the computer ( Commodore 64 ) to the dining room table every night when everyone had gone to sleep and I could finally BBS!

I wish there was some way to convey the excitement of getting online back then, and to recapture that magical feeling. Try to imagine sitting at your dining room table in the dead of night, and it's completely silent, except for the (muted) sounds of your modem. And then holding your breath in the hopes that the BBS answers, and you don't get a busy signal. And then finally when those colorful characters started scrolling across the CRT screen... It was magical... I don't have any other word for it.

<comment><USER3> My parents got a second line! I can't tell you how awesome that was to this generation nor the trouble I caused. I bought my first modem when I was in 8th Grade.

Oh the things I learned on BBS.

Back then black boxes, free compuserve, phreaking and other nefarious things got allot of my "social group" in trouble. My favorite thing was to try and find a server and figure out who owned it. To bad my friends who were brothers in Virginia. They had all their computer equipment confiscated by the FBI and were national news. One stupid friend (Capt Kirk) took carbon copies of sales at work and bought tens of thousands of dollars through Compuserve for over a year. He got caught at 17 or 18 and was hired for $40,000 to help their security.

I had learned Assembly for cracking purposes at 14 and I didn't have the heart to throw away my two black garbage bags full of floopy disks away till 2004.

Watching the movie War Games knowing I already owned all that equipment was pretty cool when that movie came out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Growing up in a coffee farm in countryside São Paulo state, I was a late BBSer (from 1994 to the early 2000s). As other people have it with Usenet and early web forums, I just loved how tight-knit and contentful the Internet was back then. I don't subscribe to the Eternal September "newcomers ruined everything" feeling (in fact I'm quite a big fan of massified Internet culture), but I do love and cherish those sorts of small, focused online communities, every day more protective of themselves and thus harder to find.

I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say, Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and oldest of the Internet.

<comment><USER5> _as far as I 'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design._

It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular and/or "LURK MOAR."

 _no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet._

I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists, subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc...

The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the community has multiple ways to talk among itself.

You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social networks anyway.

If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb.

If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in the day there were BBSs running on just about any type of microcomputer, CP/M, Apple II/Mac, Atari 8bit/ST, Commodore VIC/64/128/Amiga, TRS-80, etc. Most overviews focus just on the IBM-PC stuff (or what the author used back in the day - like Jason Scott an Apple II user). The smaller micro BBS were their own vibrant little universes.

The Commodore 64 boards had a quite a few BBS systems from pretty spartan 6485-BBS, Compute's Gazzette BBS (yeah they even had a magazine type-in BBS: Dec'84 & Jan'85), up to more advanced ones like Color64/128, C-Net 64/128, and Image BBSs - the high end ones used either a bunch of 800k 3.5" drives or hard drive (comparatively expensive but was worth it for speed and storage), or RAM drives.

Near the peak of Commodore BBSs some publishers and SysOp worked up their own Commodore BBS networking schemes where BBSs could exchange emails and forum postings (like FIDONet, but specific to Commodore), there was even a couple multi-line Commodore BBSs, and a few got the different makes of BBSs cross communicating as well. Such things were a labor of love, as us SysOps footed the long distance bills to exchange messages on top of the cost of an extra line, hardware, etc. (the automated exchanges happened during lower cost calling hours, like 2am.)

Now a days there are still a few that either held on or have started new Commodore BBSs - with most BBSs now being accessible via telnet (though I hear there are a couple dial up ones out there).

Of course there was a bits of rivalry between computer models as well as BBS brands...

Any former SysOps/Callers out there?

Me: Joe Commodore SysOp of Silicon Realms BBS 1987-2004

<comment><USER7> Systop of Overdose BBS, sometime around 1993/94\. I was 13 or 14 years old.

From a look at a list of software on Wikipedia I think we were running Remote Access ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess)). I remember hooking up a Fido mail feed which fetched email at 5am every day towards the end of things, and playing a Mud (Mud 2) and Lord.

Crazy to think how far things have moved on in 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's my funny BBS story: I was a heavy user in the early 90s, but in 1994 I got recruited into the military and was sent to a remote corner of the world where we had one official-business-only phone line for about 250 people, so no BBS scene. I came back in 1997, met up with an old friend, and inquired about where to get a current BBS list for the town. And of course he laughed and said there was no such thing anymore. So basically, from my perspective, the online experience went from BBS's, telnet, and FTP to full-blown web pages overnight.

<comment><USER9> It... pretty much did. 1994 through 1995 I recall as being the big turning point from where usage went primary on BBS' to primarily on the Internet by around 1996.

At least in terms of people who I wanted to talk to were doing. By mid 1995 I was pretty much Internet only other than to dial-in a few times a week to check a few local boards I participated in.

<comment><USER10> It took a bit longer for some of us to get broadband at home. I don't think I got it until about 1998 or so. A number of the (relatively) big commercial BBSs transitioned to becoming dial-us ISPs for a time. I used Channel One in Cambridge and they were my first ISP at home until I eventually got broadband through, I think, AT&T Roadrunner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's the BBS documentary miniseries - worth a watch either for nostalgia or learning about how electronic communication worked pre-internet: [https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary](https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary)

<comment><USER10> To be completely accurate, it's not pre-internet so much as parallel to the Internet pre-Eternal September. There was a whole culture of PCs (of various architectures) BBSs, freeware, shareware, etc. that was pretty much independent of--and was largely unaware of--the fairly insular proto-Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can still recall the little rush I'd get when that 14.4KBS modem would get a handshake and the lines of green characters would start scrolling down the old CRT screen...

Good times.

<comment><USER13> 14.4? Slow down there, friend, we lucky people were using Hayes 300 baud modems. I still remember my glorious upgrade path:

300->2400 (now we're cooking)->4800->9600->14.4->19.2->28.8->56k

USR, Courrier, and Hayes were usually the best ones for me. I skipped 33.6 among other upgrades. The Courrier also had that extra punch if you were lucky enough to get one on the other end.

The Unix stuff was pretty pedestrian as far as programs, but on Dos, Windows, Amiga, Atari ST, C64, and some others, some cool programs for connecting. I think on Dos I remember using Terminix and Telix quite a bit, but the names mostly escape me by now.

Anyway, I guess now it's better I don't have to dial with options like *70 or use the various AT codes to get online, handshake, and stay there.

<comment><USER14> acoustic coupled modems anyone?

<comment><USER15> It's a bit grimy, but: [http://m.imgur.com/JTwCqyy](http://m.imgur.com/JTwCqyy)

That's an A4 piece of paper for scale.

<comment><USER14> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I also miss the BBS scene. Though I grew up in the Chicago area, I first got online in Champaign-Urbana, since my folks categorically refused to buy a modem for the home Apple II. I'm not sure if that was because they thought I might go full WarGames, or if it was just that they didn't want to risk a massive phone bill.

C-U had a hopping BBS scene at the time, but the real standout for me was Tranquillity II, which was conversation only with no downloads. At first it ran on, of all things, a TI 99/4 with the expansion box. Later it was moved to an Amiga. There were several Fido systems, and I ran a point (a subnode of an existing Fido node) for a while. Since I was out of school by then, echomail was the closest thing I could get to Usenet newsgroups.

When I got back to the Chicago area, I continued with Fidonet until the local ISPs started popping up. It still surprises me just how quickly the Internet bulldozed the BBS scene, and I think we've lost something because of that, even though we've gained a lot as well. Sure, there are still BBSes here and there (and Fidonet still exists even today), but telnetting into one halfway around the world just isn't the same as dialing into one that's a couple of miles away.

</comment><comment><USER17> I used to visit a BBS semi-regularly during middle school, I had always enjoyed the simplicity of the basic text interface. Not that there was much going on, this was around 2008, so everything was long-dead by then. Reddit (and HN) has its voting system and 4chan has the bump system, but there's something about newsgroups with the long-lived threads with email-length replies that really appeals to me. Will there ever be something as popular and "open" as newsgroups, where each user judges a post on its own merits instead of by what the rest of the community thinks? Or am I merely pining for a past that never really existed?

<comment><USER13> Newsgroups were a bit different I always thought than BBSs, but were still much closer in feel to various message bases. The problem even from pretty early on was spam and moderation. When you did have any ad-hoc or defacto moderation, it was usually divisive and heavy handed in a way that didn't have the same vibe as a BBS.

On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever. On newsgroups, it just got much more out of control with bad actors because the scale was so much larger and the authority was so much less in terms of credibility, fear, and activity.

In defense of Reddit and HN, it's just hard to scale things up with more people and deal with the related concerns of post visibility, spam, moderation, and more. I know you're not saying this, but sometimes people point that 4chan is more like BBS messages, but it's not true because most BBSs were heavily moderated, complete with co-sysop users who would log on just to do this or moderator users with escalated privileges. If anything, BBSs were the most moderated of all, it's just that some people didn't mind if you talked about certain things or used certain language because it's their BBS and they just did what they wanted.

Regarding email-length replies, I obviously love them. I generally don't agree with short = powerful in most cases except in code sometimes. Of course short replies can be focused and have a lot of value and I certainly appreciate the people that do that well. Unfortunately, short for many people means <drop 1 sentence random mental garbage> thought and leave or <me too thought>.

Finally, regarding text, I couldn't agree more. I sometimes wish all websites just gave me a command line as a second interface. I know I can use curl and APIs for a lot of similar stuff, but yeah, no, that is not the same as hitting "f" for files or even just simpler unix commands. Lobste.rs kind of did this as a joke if you want to check it out, but it's not quite right IMO but good for fun.

<comment><USER18> "On a BBS, a sysop would disconnect you mid session if you were being an idiot. You'd be warned, banned for some amount of time or forever."

Yes, a funny anecdote, obviously there was no central registry of names so sometimes there would be multiple BBS of the same cool name in the same LATA, so when I was about 12, operating on a tip from a schoolmate at 1200 baud I log into one of the several pirates cove bbs, or whatever the name was, and try to send the sysop a mail asking for private access to the files because I know XYZ from school and sysops cousin is XYZ (XYZ and I are still IT-type people 30 years later) and the sysop breaks into the session (which they could do in those days) and reads me the riot act about how he has no warez and he works real hard and spends a lot of money to make a BBS and what would decades later boil down to darn kids get off my lawn type lecture and never set foot here again and I'm deleting your brand new account and at 1200 baud it took awhile. And being a little kid I'm like "ok sorry about that" because what else am I supposed to say to mr angry wall of text? Then I go to school the next day and talk to my friend and "you idiot, call the pirates cove in suburb ABC not the one in suburb XYZ" or whatever. So that's what passed for a good time in the 80s. Sysops would sit there and spy on you, while you tried to work the social game to get access to the good stuff.

Several of the boards I was on with access to the special stuff were basically BBS embedded secretly inside a normal looking BBS so that made it fun. One of the special boards as a requirement to make it look good, required us to participate in the political debate forum if we wanted to keep access. Oh that board, thats just teens trying to debate federal tax policy. When actually it was full of software trading, hiding under dumb debates. On the modern internet of course instead of trading software we just skip right to the dumb debates, LOL.

Another "only 12 year old boy in the 80s could believe it" is back then we were pretty paranoid with people getting busted left and right and stories on TV so before XYZ gives me his tip he asks me between classes if I'm a fed and I told him no and I asked him if he was a fed and he said no, and that was it, we believed each other as if that proved anything (and neither of us were a fed, but I've known this kid since we went to kindergarten together and we're asking each other if we're a fed... well its just what you did in those paranoid days). I do not think modern stuff like GPG key signatures are quite as paranoid on a personal level as we used to be back in the old days.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the story, lots of good memories like that too. I used to always try to call boards named things like Thieves Guild, Pirates Cove, or some sort of 31337 sounding name in the hopes of discovering some new scene or underground board. The best boards were dedicated 100% and didn't even try to fake it, but did a lot of the stuff I listed below.

Regarding boards with fake or legit parts, I used to routinely page sysops on boards I thought were underground or had hidden parts. The classic ones later on were almost always based on PCBoard and later Ami/X, but highly customized. The early ones generally just ran on whatever the best software was at the time and boasted about the hardware. They'd have all sorts of legit content typically and even legit users, but so much of it was a joke. I used to call one board that was big with HAM radio people and early Internet adopters. The most nerdy discussions you can imagine. What they didn't know is that there was a second part of the board that had a huge ROM dump, Amiga, C64, and PC warez scene.

As far as sysops go, I will also admit to spying on my users as sysop and as a co-sysop on various boards. I sometimes would break people into chat and kick them off. There were also many plug-ins that initiated fake chats and logged the results. A particular one that I'll never forget on one board I was co- sysop on featured an ANSImation (animated Ansi) by JED of ACID with some troll I think flipping you the bird as it brought up chat. Sometimes we'd post the fake chats for other users for comedy purposes.

I was nice and would help people find files, talk about fun stuff, meet in person, but I was also a dictator and would boot anyone on short notice. There were often periods of paranoia from alleged "busts," most of which probably never happened though I know for sure some did. Lots of calling people NARCs and so on.

One of the funniest things I used to see people do was upload fake files. Early on it was random binary or generated text files. Later it was things like blank audio or the same pictures renamed and zip'd. They were just so desperate for upload credit and time that they'd do this insane stuff. Checking files was really a pain. Thankfully on my boards, we were snobs about content, like on the warez boards we'd think we were so cool having 0-30 day, then it was something like 0-14, then 0 day stuff. So stupid banning and deleting people for uploading something 2 months old. Same thing happened on various FTP dumps that started to displace BBSs for file purposes later on.

Anyway, BBSs and the relationship to various underground scenes was a funny thing. On the one hand, a lot of the communities could be very exclusive and created all sorts of protections, barriers, precautions, and more. On the other hand, they'd then make it super obvious what they were up to in so many ways. Classic examples include:

\- Advertising your BBS on other not-so-secret boards

\- Commissioning ANSI art from a group like ACID, ICE, etc. with the name in the ANSI and often the area code too. Not uncommon to see things like +1-212-YOU-WISH Sysop: Mr Man. Awesome, now I know the name and what area code to look for the number at least, if not people who run it.

\- Logon screen with ANSI depicting group affiliations. THG Eastern HQ = Genesis Distro = Legion of Doom HQ. It was hilarious because even if you didn't have access, you instantly knew you called a pirate board, cracking board, art board, whatever.

\- New User Application filled with terminology from whatever scene. Again, same as the previous item.

\- New User Password. As if most BBSs without anything illegal would have this.

\- Users with huge ratios listed. Hmm, not many files on this BBS and yet this guy uploaded 500 megs!

\- Certain BBS Software. You could be pretty sure that someone running things like Ami/X were into warez, Oblivion, Iniquity, Eternity, etc. - art, and so on. The more customized with nice ANSI too, usually the more likely it was underground. Huge tip-off the board was legit if it ran something like WWIV, Wildcat!, Celerity, and a few others we all considered hugely lame. Renegade and other Telegard or Forum hacks always made you wonder on the other hand. The old stuff on Atari ST, C64 etc was harder since there was a huge deluge of stuff and not as many ones that were 100% preferred yet.

We thought we were pretty cool in those times, but wow I look back at some of it and cringe. Good times and I was lucky enough to be involved in most underground scenes, while still getting time to interact in the legit scenes too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh that takes me back. There were so many BBSes in the 312 in the mid 90s. Just reading the list [1] is like a trip down the memory lane.

The end of that article makes a great point. There was a huge diversity of communities back then, and each of them was small enough that they didn't devolve into spam and mindless trolling. It's something I really miss, and something that can't be replicated by uber-sites like reddit or facebook...

[1] [http://bbslist.textfiles.com/312/](http://bbslist.textfiles.com/312/)

<comment><USER20> The sense of community was very real with BBS's. Real friendships developed with people you would likely never meet. SYSOPs cared about the people who dialled in to their little hobby project. Many organised meet-ups and BBQs. Memories for some of the phone bills are less warm though!

It all disappeared incredibly fast in the mid 90s as ISPs and the net grew.

Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.

<comment><USER10> >Social is, ironically, far less personal with none of that sense of community.

I think that's overstating things. I can certainly think of a fair number of exceptions in my case. One thing that could be different in the BBS world, however, was that there often _were_ organized meetups and BBQs because the BBS users tended to be clustered locally because of phone costs.

<comment><USER20> Where I've encountered community since it's been for the activity (eg regional scuba forum - natural to organise meets, etc). I've never encountered any arising from the medium since.

OK I'm from a smaller country (UK), many BBS's were national, but still organised BBQs. The differentiation was usually for the platform rather than geography.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's worth noting that there's a Taiwanese BBS established in 1995 that's still extremely popular, with "over 150,000 users online during peak hours" according to Wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System)

Interestingly, none of my friends that use it know what Telnet is. It's almost exclusively accessed through unofficial dedicated smartphone apps.

<comment><USER22> Interesting, I'd never heard of that. Apparently runs on FreeBSD. Will be checking it out when less active. Right now too many _guest_ users online so can't log in...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was too young to use BBS when it started but the topic fascinates me, especially after having read Hackers and The Innovators.

Not to hijack the topic, but has anyone watched the show Halt and Catch Fire (available on Netflix)? I'm curious how accurately that show captures the culture of that era.

Would love any additional reading recommendations around BBS' emergence as well. Already bookmarked the documentary series: [https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary](https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary)

<comment><USER24> re: Halt and Catch Fire -- it's an enjoyable show, but the accuracy seems to get worse with each season. The latest season in particular had a lot of things that made me cringe.

I wish AMC had put the same effort into it as Mad Men, in terms of attempting to be an extremely accurate period piece. I suppose the viewership for HaCF didn't get large enough to warrant it, and/or the showrunners just aren't up to it?

<comment><USER25> Or, most likely, the concept of the show was different on that point, as on many others.

<comment><USER24> That's fair, but when it first launched the network was putting a lot of marketing effort into portraying it that way. And I think in the first season that wasn't too far from the mark. So I'd argue more that the concept _became_ different on that point over time, for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I definitely miss the local and human aspects of BBSing. I grew up in rural Ohio, and we had just a few (3 - 4 at any time) BBS that were local calls in the late 80's and early 90's. Knowing the local "cast of characters" was a lot of fun, and it was always exciting when somebody new popped-up on the scene. We had some get IRL get- togethers and a lot of behind-the-scenes drama.

I wrote some software for a friend's board that used an NTSC frame grabber and Soundblaster card he had attached. You could upload a sound file (WAV or VOC) and it would play over the PA downstairs in the gym he ran. After your sound played the machine recorded 5 seconds of audio from a mic in the gym and pulled a single black and white frame from the gym's surveillance camera. You'd get back a ZIP file with a single GIF and a VOC file in it. That was a ton of fun.

I really miss the old "hacker" boards, too, but that's arguably nostalgia for my youth more than anything. I'd still love to talk to somebody who frequented the old Bit Truth BBS (203). I very occasionally talk to friends who were on the old Unphamiliar Territory (602). The Internet helped change that "scene", but the it was already a pretty established tradition that most people would either go to college or get a "real job" and move on. Ahh... growing up...

</comment><comment><USER27> My experience with BBSes started around 4th grade, in 1983 or early 1984. 1200 baud US Robotics external modem, a Heathkit CPM machine my dad built, and typing AT commands by hand. My favorite at the time was Bongoland, a pacific northwest bbs which was designed more like an adventure game with message boards tucked away in various places, and I'm sure a larger, secret segment I never gained access to. I later discovered some amazing communities (Thrasher Skateboard magazine had a great system) and some horrifying ones (some people loved their pets in ways different than I was accustomed to.)

Within a few years, we got a second phone line and I started up my own. Through a lot of incarnations, but it was most popular as the Chelsea Hotel and was a hangout for miscreants, hackers, and skaters. Through it, I got to meet some people who are very influential today, as well as plenty of anonymous friends.

The experience certainly piqued my interest in other areas of tech, and I can easily trace my path from there to where I am today. I miss the limited access and smaller communities of BBSes, the excitement of hearing the connection tones after having auto-redialed for 30 minutes of busy signals, and of course, Trade Wars.

</comment><comment><USER28> Man those were the days. I was just barely old enough to be able to get into them before they died. Anyone remember the door games?

I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases.

And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...

<comment><USER8> I remember one place that had a "wall" plugin at login where you could leave public messages, and the BBS software also included some special escape sequences that would resolve to the current user's name, phone number, etc. Not a real security hole since you could only show someone their own information, but it was bags of laughs to post something like "Hey <firstname>, I've been trying to get hold of you all week! Isn't your home # <phonenumber>?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A BBS as the original social media site. Most people were from the same area code and had BBS Meetings to see the faces behind the handles.

<comment><USER30> Oh yeah.

I still remember my fathers face when he saw the 5000 NOK phone bill from me dialing a non local bbs a few too many times in the early 90s :) Here in Norway we had charges by the minute for all calls, but long distance (outside your area code) was a lot more expensive.

In the end i had a separate phone line installed on my room and ran my own bbs using [https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBBS](https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBBS) (I can't find any non Norwegian sources, use translate).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I missed the BBS phase. I vaguely remember sitting on the floor in my parents room playing with some sort of IBM-Compatible computer, but my real days were the DOS and Windows 3.1 days.

I'm fairly certain I didn't hit the Internet at large until the Windows 95 days. However, I have very fond memories of Usenet and IRC. I am glad IRC is still around, but I still miss Usenet. Even after Eternal September, Usenet was just amazing.

Anytime I'm forced to use literally any website forum, I'm reminded just how far back we've fallen. Usenet clients were amazing. I could quickly and easily catch up on posts in groups I was paying attention to. I could quickly and easily find new groups for literally any interest. Access to a fast server was included in almost any ISP subscription.

Web forums are just so painful to use these days. Especially since there are 400 forums for a particular topic that are all very disjointed.

</comment><comment><USER32> Fidonet always sounded interesting but I never knew anyone who used it. Only a few of the local boards participated and none of my (local) friends used it. Downside of Metcalfe's law, I guess. If you could play Global War over Fidonet, though, I'd have loved that!

<comment><USER8> Fidonet was neat. I think I sent a message to a Fidonet forum in Thailand or Cambodia (from Oregon) once, and someone answered, but it was about a two week round trip. For anyone not familiar, a participating BBS would dial up its upstream hub in the wee hours of the morning and exchange messages, and the hubs used dial up as well, so sending messages between major cities took days, depending on how many hops they took. Toward the end there were even some email gateways, so you could send reeeeaaally slow email as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> SDF ([http://sdf.org/](http://sdf.org/)) started out as a BBS but by the early 90s had turned itself into a public access UNIX system with a community feel. One of the original admins is now on staff at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle.

Tilde Club ([http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/)) was(is?) an attempt to revisit 1990s-era UNIX community tools from a 2010-era perspective.

</comment><comment><USER34> When I was 11 years old, I intermittently ran a Telegard 2.7 BBS using a 2400bps external hayes modem that I plugged into the electrical outlet. Eventually, I upgraded to a 14.4k internal modem and have bad memories of fighting IRQ jumpers every now and then. I played a lot of doors and eventually was consumed by tele-arena. I enjoyed collecting ANSI art and mod music. Those scenes had some really talented people. The local bbs's were on FIDO net. I vaguely remember posting. I remember going to a couple of BBS picnics and was always the youngest among the crowd, but the people were usually nice. I had friends in real life but had developed an online life with a very different group of people. BBS's gave me access to smart people and more substantial conversation, but also a lot of trolling.

Back then, turbo pascal was a popular language. I knew nothing about programming and found it beyond me to learn it on my own. I tried to find help but failed. I wonder how my life would have changed had I taken up programming at age 12.

Has anyone seen the BBS Documentary? [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I often remark that people love reimplementing BBSs badly, and a fraction of the functionality. Of course it's not an entirely fair comparison because of the scope, different UI/nature of the web, audience size, and speed of communication to name a few issues.

It's important to note that your average decent BBS had most if not all of the following:

* Files - Often meticulously organized, with sometimes user voting or strict moderation. Unlike a lot of file sharing today, most boards also had things that would extract descriptions from archives or otherwise let you write them manually, along with providing other file metadata.

* User Management/Registration - Complete with idiot filters for the more underground boards (apps, voting on users, new user passwords)

* Mail - Even later, various versions of distributed mail including early email access for many people as well as things like FIDOnet

* Instant Messaging/Chat - There were entire huge multi-node boards entirely devoted to this, and even a single node board at least had sysop chat usually

* Games - Door games, mail/message games, offline sync'd games

* Timelines/Walls - Lots of plug-ins for this type stuff to leave short messages, shouts, etc.

* Time Management - Not necessarily a good thing, but on some boards you could bank time. Moreover, the fact there was time involved with your login on some boards created a sense of purpose and urgency.

* Keyboard Shortcuts - Godsend compared to your average web app, but also a drawback for some.

* Customizable UI - Most boards at least let you change menus, if not install plug-ins and other add-ons

* Distributed Content - Various boards would call each other or a sync service or otherwise download sync files to sync data such as games, not just mail.

* Groups/Subcultures

* No Frills - Despite being over modems primarily and thus slow, BBSs were pretty fast. In fact, I still feel like I got to more relevant information faster. It's not just a keyboard and mouse thing, it's about flow and the fact that the goal of the BBS was to deliver you some content quickly and efficiently. Navigation in web pages just sucks sometimes in so many ways - multi-page ads, long click funnels, huge percentages of random things I don't need on the screen like sidebars, etc.

I think for me the #1 thing about BBSs is at least for the better, BBSs, they tended to be more restrictive and served as great content filters. If you were an idiot, you simply could not join or got banned. There was a sense of excitement to get on a new BBS and see what it had, and with many, a status attached, especially in various undergrounds. There were always troublemakers, but they were limited and it was part of the fun usually to fight and have factions.

The small scale really made you feel like you knew everyone, even on large BBSs with tons of users. Sometimes this also meant that we all met up in real life and that changed how you interacted with people. It also sometimes deflated your view of certain people.

On the flip side, there were many things that were pains not limited to busy signals, slow speed, lots of bad BBS software that was popular, file transfers in the earlier days, limited to calling or receiving per number of phone lines unless you had expensive hardware/telco, and so on. I've often thought of writing some sort of newer, hybrid Internet modern BBS software. I am keenly aware of the many efforts to do things over SSH, telnet, web sockets, but they are mostly just unfinished rehashes of a lot of the less impressive parts of the old stuff. I have a list of many somewhere if anyone cares.

There are just so many things I could write about what we could learn from BBSs. Sadly, I still think the filtering aspect was really what tied it all together. Regardless, I would like to see someone build something new starting at the protocol level that isn't just sitting on top of what exists or at least is not just copying the old stuff. Some things like Hotline and other file sharing were close in a way, but lacked the same feel. I really wish at least the idea of getting to information fast and without bs would come back more. Gopher in the early days sometimes felt like this, and many web pages were like this to some degree.

Anyway, I am sure there are a lot of people who disagree and I believe there is a lot more good and bad things to say. I feel like BBSs are really ignored by a lot of people, and misunderstood by another large amount of people including former users. There are still some BBSs out there and the good news is most don't require a modem (just SSH or telnet), but it's just not the same.

<comment><USER35> There are two "features" that are hard to re-create with modern BBSes. These, in my opinion, partly lead to the good user experience.

1\. Because you tied up a phone line (on both ends), your time was limited. This results in not only not wasting time while on there, but also an increase in anticipation for when you can next get on. It prevents people from getting to far ahead in games.

2\. Banning could actually mean something. You were not really anonymous (at least on the local ones) since you can be identified by your phone number and maybe banned that way. How do you effectively ban a person nowadays? Can't do it by IP or email, which leaves... ? That results in large amounts of spam, trolling, sockpuppets, etc.

<comment><USER36> > Banning could actually mean something. You were not really anonymous (at > least on the local ones) since you can be identified by your phone number > and maybe banned that way

Hypothetical question: if we would see a new emergence of mobile based BBS's, using some novel protocol without identifiable phone numbers but with ability to assign unique IDs to users and solve those problems, could it take off today?

<comment><USER13> I am afraid I don't have any great answers other than taking some of the ideas that made BBSs great as a whole and combining them into something entirely new. There I have a few thoughts, but then we're not really talking about BBSs.

The fact things were on a phone line helped in some ways (exclusivity, time, identifiability), but doing it all through a mobile phone or other telephony does not really capture that. For one, there would only be single node BBSs unless you got creative, so I think the mobile phone part is too literal on the concept of phones.

Secondly, while this is less popular, a lot of us including myself were not actually identifiable unless we wanted to be. This happened because you could call a BBS through an intermediary such as a PBX, and it was common to war dial to find and hack these (or use open hardware) to dial out long distance. Another way was carding (stealing credit cards) to pay for calls, which would also often answer caller ID requests with another number than your own depending on what you bought.

The anonymity was more complicated as you can see, but yes, it did help quite a bit to have some sort of reputation attached to your name. A BBS handle could carry weight across many systems, and word did spread. Some Sysops were pretty nasty to people and went out of their way with that, but I think most people accepted it and didn't do things like try to take them to court like we have today. Somehow, whether they knew who you were or not, it just was not worth it and getting other users to accept you in one form or another was important. This happened via message bases, uploads (try to be top, avoid being banned for bad uploads), new user signup, games, and more. So souring your reputation had a cost if you were an avid BBSer, and even more so if you had met people in real life.

I think anything remotely similar to BBSs in terms of success needs to do at least some of these things:

\- No frills access

\- Tie things together as a cohesive hole

\- "Character" per system. Logging on to X should not be the same as logging on to Y, but familiar enough to still be usable.

\- Distributed (run by a person/people)

\- No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot

\- Cross-over between the real-world and the virtual-world. Ex: In person meetings.

\- Sense of urgency

\- Connections to several rabid groups of sub-culture that will drive future updates, modding, usage, etc. In the old days, this was HAM Radio operators, ANSI artists, Anarchists, Punks, Crackers, Warez kids, Phreakers, D&D players, and many other groups.

\- Decent give and take type systems. Ratios, time, and chat often worked this way and sometimes were all interconnected. The more you upload, the more time you get, and the more you can chat for example.

Many more things, but I'll stop there.

<comment><USER18> "No advertising. Advertising is at the root of ruining a lot"

I remember enormous controversy at the time about modem manufacturers who would sell you a high speed (for the time) modem for free or a substantial discount if you put a little advertisement for their modem on your board and it was NOT well received. I think this was around the era of dueling and completely incompatible 9600 baud modems. I skipped that horrible era and went right from 2400 to 14400 then rapidly to 28800.

Class based access levels were a thing in the BBS era. It seems hard to believe in 2016 web page world where there's maybe "have an account vs no account" or at most "guest/free/paid" but some BBSes had a zillion levels of participation and allowed time and ratio requirements. Some got a little eye roll-y over specific.

Active discouragement of lurking, is how I'd phrase it.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. A lot of BBSs both thrived and ruined themselves over having pay tiers. Sometimes it was pay for "premium" content which was usually warez, porn, etc. Then there was a period of charging for access to parts of the Internet (gateways), like email or usenet messages through your BBS.Other BBSs simply asked for donations and got quite a bit because people were passionate.

Ugh, modem incompatibility was an awful thing. The modem manufacturers often got greedy or out right lied about supporting standards correctly. It really was a case of needing to pay for quality. The worst period I remember was toward the end of the era with "Win modems" tied to windows. They'd pop these pieces of junk inside Dell, Packard Bell, eMachines, Compaq, and other consumer junk.

You're absolutely right about tiered access. I will say that torrent sites, especially private ones do have some levels of tiered access. As do some web forums in terms of moderation privileges. That's about the closest you get, but it's no where near as nuanced, draconian, or as powerful. The class-based access did have positive effects like you hint it such as discouraging lurking, creating exclusivity, encouraging uploads, discouraging bad actors. I kind of laughed at the web when years back they tried to do some version of that via game-ification and in most cases it ended badly excluding the obvious notables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Oh man, I still remember having friends over to my house when I was a kid and waiting til midnight so we could dial up to the local list of BBSs to take our turns on the text games they had.

I think Red Dragon and Usurper were the big ones that we played. It's funny that I was actually thinking about Usurper the other day because the best thing to be in that game was an Alchemist which struck me as funny because now that I'm into Elixir that's what the devs like to call themselves. :-)

<comment><USER34> what about Global Wars? :)

<comment><USER18> [http://www.tradewars.com/default.html](http://www.tradewars.com/default.html)

In the late 80s I used to have whiteboards all over my bedroom with various graphical trade routes in my local tradewars game. From memory the solar systems were all numbers so you'd go 3-6-99-8 or whatever.

Around the same time a local set up a machine with UUCP email and usenet. The same people are on rec.pyrotechnics today as were on in 1989, probably because they're FBI honeypots not people.

Around the early 90s I would download Phrack magazine from its internet site when it was released using an email to FTP server where pre-mime days you'd run uudecode on the email it sent back to get your short file. You'd email it batch style a list of FTP commands and it would email you back whatever you wanted to download. Then I'd upload the new Phrack zine to all my local BBSes to get a better upload/download ratio. I distinctly remember email@example.com. I'm not sure the concept of a zine or Phrack (or 2600) would make any sense to anyone under 40.

<comment><USER34> you were so l33t with your hpacv.. what happened to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I set up my first BBS in the late 80's. Prediction: You will start seeing more and more locally oriented internet sites as the need hasn't disappeared. It was only bulldozed out of the way to make way for the global village.

(God, did I just say global village, what's next, "Information Highway?"

<comment><USER39> Isnt FB doing local groups/circles now or something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Don't remember much except Trade Wars. And some cracked C64 games.

</comment><comment><USER41> So many good memories, mostly on the Raytech BBS in Scotland, which was a central point for PoV and other raytracing chat.

</comment><comment><USER42> God I miss Totse.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I print and sell custom waterproof Google Maps? - <AUTHOR>

I run a hiking website called www.trailbehind.com, and we have maps of all the US parks and forests. As one way to monetize the site, we plan to sell custom-printed maps.
Other sites currently sell custom print-outs of USGS topo maps. However, Google's tiles now overlay topo lines at the appropriate zoom level and are comparable, if not better than a lot of USGS maps.
My question is: can I print and sell maps using Google's titles? I had a hard time finding an answer on Google, so I thought I'd ask here. <comment><USER2> <http://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html>

Section 2, subsection b and c says no.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out <http://www.openstreetmap.org/> It is like Wikipedia for maps. Add your trails to their maps and then you can do anything you want with it as long as you credit them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love OSM and admire the stuff they do. But their tiles are no comparison to Google's tiles, especially for printing topo maps as I want to do, nor for displaying our maps.

I even have a friend who works there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might want to contact their biz dev and see if you can arrange a license program, where for every x maps you sell, you pay a royalty to them.

<comment><USER5> Heh, yes. Contact the Google Maps biz dev team. If it's anything like their tech support, I'm sure they'll get back to you in short order. </sarcasm>

Seriously though, you're probably better off dealing with OpenStreetMap or something where you don't have to deal with licensing. If you do license maps, do it with someone who you can have an actual adult phone conversation with. The bozos answering e-mails at Google will likely give you the bureaucratic runaround (or reacharound), if they ever get back to you at all.

<comment><USER4> It's worth a shot. I actually like the idea, and with the amount of people working there you never know who might field your call.

Anyway, certainly shop around for alternatives. I like the idea, I think there might be a niche market there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I contacted Google's BizDev about getting more than 15,000 geocodes per day, and my email fell into the abyss. I don't think I rate :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GNU Guix 0.5 released - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2013-12/msg00061.html <comment><USER2> For reference: GNU Guix is a version of Nix[1] with some additional features like a Guile API. While I'm sure it makes sense in the greater context of a GNU system where everything is happy and Guile-powered, I personally do not really see a reason to use Guix over normal Nix which seems to have a greater mind share and user base.

If you like this approach to package management, you might want to consider trying NixOS[2], which is a distro that uses Nix as its primary package manager. NixOS has a disproportionately high uptake in the Haskell community, so it has a very good selection of Haskell packages--if you're playing around with or actively using Haskell, that could be another bonus for NixOS.

Personally, I think the idea is very cool. I will probably at least try using NixOS for my next laptop--I generally switch distros every time I get a new computer.

[1]: [http://nixos.org/nix/](http://nixos.org/nix/) [2]: [http://nixos.org/](http://nixos.org/)

<comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of the nix/guix projects (initially I was super excited to see a guix because I prefer scheme, but actually the Nix language is wonderful). I'm really surprised the Nix package manager doesn't have a bigger following with Mac OS X people (it's a lot more capable than homebrew, and you get binary distribution for free).

One problem I ran into as a ruby guy was building gems that needed to link against a C lib. Part of the beauty of the Nix approach is that it isolates everything. The "proper" solution I guess would be to package gems as Nix packages, but it seems like there probably should be some way to let a utility know the proper build flags for a given lib.

<comment><USER4> Same here, Nix is exciting. The story with ruby still has some way to go before it is seamless.

For each language they have an adapter that exports the language-specific package manager to nix expressions. cabal, perl, python and ruby are all supported (maybe more). In the case of ruby there is `nix` ruby gem that you can use to generate a .nix expression. Ideally you could amend it to say that nokogiri depends on libxml2 and such. Then your project could have a deps.nix file that you can install. `nix-env -f deps.nix -i`

I'm also exploring different ways to work with my projects. For example creating a custom profile per project that's derived from a project-specific derivation.

<comment><USER5> I'm not particularly a fan of the idea of static converters to nix expressions, ala cabal2nix. They require someone to run them in the first place, so you don't pick up updates to packages dynamically.

I'd rather we collectively agree on a protocol for installing, updating, querying packages etc, such that each language-specific package manager can talk to others through a daemon and install foreign packages that are required for the projects. It would require a fair amount of work to update each package manager to talk it (optionally), and agree on the semantics and policies of the protocol, but I think the benefits could be huge.

Using Nix/Guix as the basis for such protocol would probably be ideal due to the immutable nature of packages and ability to install side-by-side versions, and that you can specify an identity of a dependency, rather than rely on fuzzy matching of name and version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations to ludovic and the other contributors! I wrote a few of the new packages in this release. The prospect of having not only an official GNU distribution but one built on such a solid package management platform is very exciting.

I recommend checking out some of the package definitions in the gnu/packages directory to see how elegant the DSL is. Here's a module that I wrote: [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/sdl.scm)

If you happen to be interested in monads in Scheme, be sure to check out guix/monads.scm. It's a good read: [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/monads.s...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/monads.scm)

Please try out the QEMU image for an early look at Guix's GNU system. If you like what you see, we could use some help packaging popular free software programs. Oh, and join the mailing list and come lurk in #guix on freenode.

<comment><USER7> I see some interesting parts in the dsl, but at the same time, I see some warts that would rather be shaved off. For example, requiring (sha256 (base32 "hash")) just adds cruft in my opinion. I'd say exposing a function that handles all that for you, like what nix does, would be better -- something like (hash-sha256 "hash").

Though personally, the licensing section leads a real sour taste in my mouth. Nix's licensing system is much simpler, much less politicized. Simply link to the license directly, leave the commentary elsewhere. Linking to the FSF's reasonings for every license just makes me much less inclined to experiment with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For any one else wondering:

>The result of package build functions is cached in the file system, in a special directory called the store (see The Store). Each package is installed in a directory of its own, in the store—by default under /nix/store. The directory name contains a hash of all the inputs used to build that package; thus, changing an input yields a different directory name.

>This approach is the foundation of Guix's salient features: support for transactional package upgrade and rollback, per-user installation, and garbage collection of packages (see Features).

[http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Features](http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Features)

</comment><comment><USER9> How is this concept different from the concept of "deterministic builds"?

To break that down, first: Can you get a determinisitc build from using a functional package manager?

Second, is a functional package manager a better way to get deterministic builds than whatever else is used (and what that is, I have no clue)?

<comment><USER3> Read the paper from the Nix people, it's fantastic: [http://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/nixos-jfp- final.pdf](http://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/nixos-jfp-final.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I'll probably not be using this myself, tokhonj's explanation of what this is does make me a bit tickly. _Nix_ as a whole sounds neat. Having that work with LISP/Scheme sounds even neater.

But the name is horrible. Guix makes this sound like something GUI-related. A GNU implementation of X? I don't know. The name is wildly misleading.

They really should consider doing something about that, because naming conventions tend to matter more than you think they do.

<comment><USER5> I dislike the name too. It's meant to be pronounced "geeks", but I imagine most people will expect to pronounce it "gwicks" or "GUI x" on first look. I'd prefer something like "Gnix", or GNU Nix, which maintains it's origin and makes it clear it's a GNU project. Or just call it "Geeks" if you want it pronounced that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds similar to Nix/NixOS [http://nixos.org/](http://nixos.org/)

<comment><USER12> That's because guix is a fork of Nix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is anyone using NixOS on a laptop or desktop they use frequently? This is the third time I read about it here, and I generally curious.

<comment><USER14> I have been using NixOS as my primary OS for the best part of half a year now (maybe more). I haven't looked back since :) I do warn people though - it's not as featureful as other distributions, so you have to be willing to help out. I'm approaching my 100th commit on the project, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > New port to the Loongson MIPS64 processors, n32 ABI ('mips64el-linux')

Time to fire up my yeeloong

</comment><comment><USER13> Want your head to explore: the future of package management: an Emacs plugin when Emacs goes Guile! (Personally, I think that would be pretty cool.)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps we could have something like EDE mode (but one that people would actually use), which uses a Guile DSL to describe projects and which hooks nicely into Guix to automatically handle the dependencies of the project, and build projects in an isolated environment. With any luck we could say bye-bye to make, m4 and pkg-config too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just looked up the page on Nix, and, yuck.

First of all, requiring the directory you install shit to to include a full cryptographic hash in its name? Do you even comprehend how completely useless the file path is now to a human? Sure you can have a directory of symlinks to make it readable again, but as we should know by now, plenty of applications bork on trees of symlinks (and you can't hardlink a directory). Plus your garbage collector depends on hardlinks (or a whole lot of tree indexing). This could have been managed in so many ways to make it a lot more user friendly.

"Complete dependencies"? You mean MANDATORY dependencies? This is so fucking annoying. Now I can't install an entire OS because one package with a specific SHA is gone. So even though I could rebuild it from scratch and it could be functionally identical, with 1 bit different the SHA is hosed and now everything is useless. Not to mention even if I had it, I have to ship every single dependency to anyone any time I want to give them that package/app/etc. Fantastic. And 'scanning binaries for hashes of directories'? This has got to be the laziest, dumbest solution to a complex problem i've seen supported by GNU since...... Wait, nevermind. They've probably supported dumber things.

MULTI-USERS?!? YOU MEAN A NORMAL USER CAN INSTALL A PACKAGE? GET OUT. NO PACKAGE MANAGER CAN DO THAT EXCEPT.... All of them?

Atomic rollbacks/upgrades sounds nice, until you realize a program might be running other programs, which might trigger your runtime dependency checking, which might screw everything up.

"Garbage collector" ? Oh. If it has hardlinks, you don't delete it. Gotcha.

As far as "functional" operations go, it's been pretty well proven in production environments that you don't actually have to completely recreate a binary exactly; just approximately. Functional operations management gives techies a hard-on, but means diddly in terms of real-world problem solving. We have managed away the implicated problems years ago.

WHY ARE WE STILL INSTALLING FROM SOURCE?! Did Gentoo teach you all nothing!?!

Service deployment? You mean service configuration management and deployment? Sigh, here we go again. Let's combine three different things into one and pretend it's a viable solution for general operational challenges.

Everything else seems handy.

<comment><USER17> Why are you even using a computer?

<comment><USER16> .....Why are you?</comment></comment></comment>


Apply HN: WiseGuy– Solving a problem of most Hacker News users: Too much to read - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ApplyHN/apply-hn-wiseguy-solving-the-problems-of-every-hacker-news-user-have-someone-read-your-articles-334278913c84#.1n15mt4tz <comment><USER2> One particular problem (or opportunity) with political summaries are ideological leanings. I'd be interested in summaries from different viewpoints, e.g. a social democratic reading of the WaPo Sanders article would be significantly less favorable.

I guess that might look like a browser extensions where individual users give their own short summaries of an article, you can see the various summaries of a given article, and you can see what other people are reading and have summarized. Sounds a lot like Twitter in my mind, but with the additional cross-referencing by article URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great idea, thanks for sharing. Now that I think about it, most of our early adopters (people who read a lot) would be present on desktop and for such users a community driven browser extension would be a great MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this idea a lot.

Seems like you don't even need to build a website to get started.

I installed the pocket chrome extension and it looks like I can share my list publicly using this service: [http://sharedli.st/jessealdrg9](http://sharedli.st/jessealdrg9)

Can you look at that list periodically and send summaries of any new items to firstname.lastname@example.com?

I'd be willing to pay for this. Knowledge is power.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your support and interest. This is could one of pg's "do things that don't scale" kind of oppurtunity.

The idea is that when you have concentration of users with somewhat similar reading habits (like the HN community), economies of scale kick in where the cost of analyzing each article drops to pretty much nothing/view and access to summaries is near instantaneous in 99.9% of the cases.

As a personal assistant type service it would be limited to a very small niche of very wealthy/no time users. I'm very excited by all the support this is getting and am going to get started on a MVP soon. You'll be one of the first people I'd reach out to :)

<comment><USER3> > "do things that don't scale"

Indeed.

What exactly do you need to build that isn't already available?

Somebody else is going to start emailing me summaries for $100 a month while you're messing around with whatever it is you think you need to build first. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I will reach out to you shortly and we'll work something out. :)

 _What exactly do you need to build that isn 't already available?_

A couple I can think of:

1) A community of people with diverse interests who can analyze articles across topics. (I can't summarize an article on a quantum physics theory for example)

2) I reasonable number of consumers who can bring down the cost/consumer.

<comment><USER4> How would a technical person get paid to summarize a technical article?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have had some feedback and time to evolve the idea and have come to realize that there is a power law of online content consumption (something like 10% of the content gets 90 percent of the eyeballs).

So the way to kickstart this idea would be to identify the most popular content (ideally before it starts trending) and have it analyzed by a real human who could be paid hourly. Niche topics like high tech should be left to the community to summarize (wikipedia style).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hello abhi3,

I've been thinking to the same (core) idea recently, but was not planning to launch it on hackernews but on my friends. I'll be glad to talk with you about that :)

If you want to, please reach out at dumon.david at gmail dot com.

David

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll mail you right away!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For someone just coming here, TL;DR version of my idea was: Some people are busy and have very little time for casual reading, having a fair idea of what an article is about and what to expect will enable them to spend their precious time reading quality pieces which will really enhance their knowledge (Kind of like having an Amazon reviews and human written summary for every popular article on the web).

</comment><comment><USER6> Great service. I wish you all the best and I hope to see many more of your summaries and corresponding analyses. Godspeed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea, great strategy to promote it with the summary comments (even if some people are complaining).

If you want a little help/advice on making this happen, email me (it's on my profile). No equity, or any formality, just a peer wanting to help.

Put a email on your profile too so you are more open to opportunities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support, I'll email you right away :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Summarize service on OS X does a decent job at summarizing content, and it integrates will any app that uses Text Services. On the article about Apple's recycling[1], the summary it produced was similar to the one you produced.[2] One advantage with the OS X Summary is if something looks interesting, the slider can be moved to reduce the aggressivity of the summary, thus yielding more details.

From WiseGuy:

 _Various media sites claimed apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from iphones, they were dead wrong. What actually happened is that Apple is under statutury obligation to recycle a certain weight of e-waste depending on it market share or weight of electronics sold (depending on state laws). The e-waste doesn 't have to be of the manufacturers own products._

 _Apple paid third party recyclers to recycle mostly CRT 's and PC's (iphone have hardly any gold and are much more valuable refurbished, In fact, phones and tablets often don't count toward the overall recycling requirements in many state laws.) and probably incured a loss rather than a 40 million windfall as claimed in news articles._

From OS X Summary:

 _The most egregious and inaccurate storyline goes something like this: Apple, out of the goodness of its heart or perhaps fueled by monetary incentives, took old iPhones and iPads that were brought back into its stores, took them apart, melted down the roughly 30 milligrams of gold in each phone, and ended up with 2,204 total pounds of gold._

 _...More commonly, however, it was reported that Apple recycled "90 million pounds of e-waste through its recycling programs," with much of this e-waste being iPhones and other old Apple products._

 _...Linnell told me that, generally, Apple is considered to be a good faith participant in many states' recycling programs, and said that the company has also set up recycling programs and contracted with e-waste recyclers in states where there are no e-waste laws._

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536543)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11537017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11537017)

Edit: I should add that anything that helps people get more out of their day is somthing that can be inserted in the time vs. money equation, so your idea is definitely on the right track.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have tried several summarizing services but none does as good a job as a real human. Try to take some article that you haven't read and run it through an algorithmic summarizer, most of the time it wil be a very poor experience, specially so when compared to say a friend explaining it to you in short. Thats what wise guy is. I don't believe in the forseeable future AI will be able to beat humans at this but if it gets close it'll only further improve our unit economics.

Currently our unit economics on staff analysers look something like this WITHOUT any tech assistance:

Median wage in low-income english speaking country: $2/hour

Analysis time for a average length 1000 word article: 6 minutes

Actual cost/article: 20 cents

Average Views per summarry at scale: 20 (Extremply conservative estimate, the Apple summary got 1000 views in an less than an hour)

As you can see the average cost of Human summarizing/view is less than a cent. Such a service at such a low price point should be seen as valuable by a large number of people; or at the very least sustained by advertisment (though I would very much prefer a subscription or micropayment based business model)

<comment><USER9> How do you determine how many views your HN comment received?

<comment><AUTHOR> I estimated from the number of people who clicked through the link in the post and further to the medium post on the headline links to. The number would be very close to 1000 at the very least, but most likely several thousand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is your Pocket reading list too long for you to keep up with?

You find articles/news to read from multiple sources (twitter, facebook, rss, media outlets, Hacker News, Reddit etc etc.) but can't find time to read them all?

Are you irritated by all the clickbait headlines and manipulative snippets and wish you had a fair idea of what you are getting into before reading a piece?

WiseGuy (placeholder) aims to solve your problems.

There is a small (maybe large?) consumer segment that loves to read stuff and is hungry to absorb as much knowledge as possible. I have a morning and before bed ritual of going through my favourite news/article sources (which includes HN) and just reading stuff, but of late I have started feeling overwhelmed by my "addiction". Clickbaits and manipulative snippets designed to make me visit the site only to later find the piece pointless are the most irritating. I'm sure many on HN would relate.

WiseGuy will be an app that I wish someone made for me, but no one has yet so I will solve my own problem + maybe millions of other people.

How it works is simple:

1\. You find a piece that you would normally read.

2\. Share it to the app just like you would "Save to Pocket".

3\. A real human will read and craft a summary of the piece for you and tell you if you should invest time to read it yourself. Some articles will be insightful, include deep analysis that should be read in detail to be properly absorbed, while others could be summarised in 2 sentences to tell you what you need to know. WiseGuy will do it for you.

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Examples:

1) This piece was on HN front page for quite a while yesterday: "How cheap does solar power need to get before it takes over the world?" ([http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs- inno...](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs-innovation))

WiseGuy Summary:

Article is based on a study by researchers on what is termed "value deflation" of solar energy. In a free market where the marginal cost of producing solar electricity is zero, the value of solar energy during the day (the panels most productive time) will deflate as more and more panels come online. This will happen because there will be a LOT more electricity available at say, noon, than there is demand for, leading to a huge drop in wholesale prices. Batteries can help but not completely solve this problem. Researchers calculate that the price needs to come down to $0.25 per watt by 2050 — down from around $3 per watt today. We are not on track for that given current pace of incremental improvements. Value deflation could be the difference between solar staying as niche technology in the grand scheme of things or it taking over the world.

Original Article: 2700 words (~20 minute reading time) WiseGuy Summary: 148 Words (less than a minute)

WiseGuy Analysis: The article is very well researched and goes into deep details. It references to several other studies and analyses the situation, solutions and future in detail. It includes useful graphical data. Reading of the full article is highly recommended if the summary and the subject intrigues you. Rating: 4.5 Stars (maybe crowd sourced?)

Another example:

2) Original headline: "How is it that Bernie Sanders still averages $27 per donation?" ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2016/04/18/be...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2016/04/18/bernie-sanders-keeps-saying-his-average-donation-is-27-but- it-really-isnt/))

WiseGuy Summary:

Piece questions how is it that over months and months the average donation has stayed at 27 dollar. It gives out a few possible reasons and then proceeds to calculate what the latest average is. First, averages involving millions of numbers change slowly. Second, the campaign encourages a $27 donation explicitly (with a button on its fundraising page) and implicitly (by making it a point of pride). And, third, it actually does waver from that point. It finally concludes based on public data that the actual average should be 27.88, 88 cents more than claimed.

Original Article: 800 words (~5 minute reading time) WiseGuy Summary: 96 Words (less than a 30 seconds)

WiseGuy Analysis: Clickbait headline, not much new information. WiseGuy summary is sufficient to explain the piece, feel free to skip it. Rating 2/5

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How is WiseGuy better than alternatives? Well for one it is powered by real humans. It is much better than NLP based summarizers which are not even close in quality, they are actually terrible. Also while there are sources where one can get curated human summarized content, they actually only summarize news and not any random article/blog that you want right now. WiseGuy is for whatever you want summarized, whenever you want it! You can send your entire Pocket Reading list with a 100 saved articles to Wiseguy and have all of them analysed on demand.

Business Model- It will work as an ad supported community where the analysis will be provided by members of the community who have actually read the piece. If possible ad revenue will be shared with top contributors based on quality.

There will also be a subscription based plan which will remove ads and will guarantee an analysis from our staff summarizers in case no one from the community take it up within a reasonable time. I have run numbers and the economics work.

Does this have the potential to be a unicorn? I would assume not but so did the founders of AirBnB think of their company.

I can't say how big the market for this service will be but I do know that it will solve the problems of a large number of people. A future where all consumers of online content will first run it by WiseGuy, or make it the primary source of discovering useful community rated content is not unimaginable at which point this could be a 10 billion dollar business. One study I came across that made me realize this _might_ be more than just a niche problem: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2014/03/19/am...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2014/03/19/americans-read-headlines-and-not-much-else/)

Besides I have some ideas of how such a basic service might evolve into something that solves other related problems as well.

How will I use 20,000 dollars? Firstly where I am from adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, $20,000 dollars will be worth $200,000 so I will be able to do much more with it than a founder in Bay Area.

I plan to use it to pay my living expenses while I take a semester off at grad school, build an initial team, site expenses and paying staff summarizers to solve the chicken and egg problem of building a community. I'd work out of my apartment so there will be no office expenses.

Best Case WiseGuy would be able to save millions of man hours, help hundreds of thousands read quality stuff and avoid the rest, absorb more knowledge from the limited time they can spend on casual reading and pay thousands of people to basically.....read.

 _BTW if HN is going to help us get into Ycombinator Fellowship then it seems proper that it also helps us come up with a name (or keep the current one), so PLEASE suggest away!_

Also I will be analysing some posts on HN front page every day to demonstrate how WiseGuy might work. Look out for them. Feel free to share articles you want analysed in this thread too, I am just one guy but I'll do my best!

Don't worry too much about being nice. I am going to give this a shot even if I don't get through YCF so I appreciate any suggestions/criticism, especially from HN community as most of you would be the ideal target market and early adopters.

<comment><USER10> _Are you irritated by all the clickbait headlines and manipulative snippets and wish you had a fair idea of what you are getting into before reading a piece?_

Might I suggest using your product to come up with a better headline for your submission? :P

<comment><AUTHOR> I did try to make it better within the 80 character limit :)

<comment><USER11> You did not need to add the "most Hacker News users" part of you were trying to avoid linkbaiting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its in most content publishers interest to have headlines which give out enough information to make one curious but not so much that it make clicking through unneccesary.

As a reader with limited time it is in your interest to get as much info in as few sentnces as possible (best case, just from the headline).

Headline: "Trump Calls megan kelly bimbo" okay so now I know enough and don't need to actually readd a 800 word article. No need to click through; as a reader this is what I want.

Headline: "You won't believe what donald trump just called megan kelly": now I'm just the right amount of curious, i'll click through, read the artcile and then wonder why couldn't I just get it in one line. But the publishers gets the adviews. Thats what he wants.

This is a situatuion where inerests of the consumer and business are mis- aligned that's what WiseGuy is trying to fix :)

It was in my interest to have a headline that'll make HN users clickthrough (but not an inaccurate one) and read, so I did exactly that.Hope you get me now and understand how WiseGuy is solving a real problem. :)

<comment><USER11> "The person reading it will like it!" is an age-old justification for spammy advertisements for products that cannot market on intrinsic merit. It does not automatically make it not-spammy or non-baity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never said that.

<comment><USER11> "It was in my interest to have a headline that'll make HN users clickthrough (but not an inaccurate one) and read, so I did exactly that."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _My experience as a solo founder applying to YC Fellowship with just an idea on Hacker News and making it to top 5_ : [https://goo.gl/bRUfi7](https://goo.gl/bRUfi7)

<comment><AUTHOR> For someone just coming here, TL;DR version of my idea was: Some people are busy and have very little time for casual reading, having a fair idea of what an article is about and what to expect will enable them to spend their precious time reading quality pieces which will really enhance their knowledge (Kind of like having an Amazon reviews and human written summary for every popular article on the web).</comment></comment>