Do you remember forums? I do.

[del_chan]

Around the year 2000, I joined a forum for a webcomic about God and the universe, where God was a cute little girl and the universe was a goblin-lookin' thing named Irving who accidentally ate her.  There weren't many webcomics back then, but more importantly, there weren't many ways of meeting internet strangers back then (not ones I felt were

Comments

[foxinthestars]

Oh, yes, I've had some wonderful experiences on forums... Facebook and Twitter and such have always rubbed me the wrong way (I gave up Facebook and my twitter is reading-only). I love LJ/DW to bits, but they're not as good for meeting people as a good forum... (I ought to try to find one...)

[skh]

I was never a forum girl. In fact, even tho I've been on the interwebs since 1994, been on IRC, LJ since '01, etc. I just never got the hang of them. I could never figure out the flow, the structure of the posts and comments, where to click to reply or who I was replying to... probably due to my brain being wired funny.

[del_chan]

Well, some forums are more complex than others, and all of them develop different attitudes of what constitutes a new thread, how long is too long to pick up an old conversation, and stuff like that. So I can definitely understand the confusion.

IRC! That was pretty fun, too. Reminded me of AOL chat rooms, only with a higher barrier to entry so the stupid people couldn't find them. Actually, I think barriers to entry have a lot to do with how much I enjoy something.

[lady_of_entropy]

I think forums and lj are the only online places I've met people who I went on to have lasting and/or irl friendships with. As you say, I believe this is because of the vastly better format for lengthy discussions. You just can't probe the depth of a person's soul (or even their opinions on a single matter, no matter how silly the matter) in compact chunks of 150 characters or less.