Bob 2010: Best of babble

We used to have long discussions about basic-principle ideas (one of the things that attracted me to Babble in the first place) and we had the patience to discuss them fully.

Most of the threads today seem to be primarily about current events and concerns. There also seems to have been more fun and humour back then but I may be wrong about that -- I have not read all the current threads to form an opinion.

Maybe some of us were a lot younger back then?

One huge difference I think involves numbers.  We were a much more intimate group back at the beginning, and as a small community could handle dissidence differently.  Also, what may now be firm written policy we were just figuring out back then.  I often refer to the first summer before 911 as a golden time of innocence on this board.  I fondly remember the parties we had for people's 1000 post mark.  I remember the very first banning, and the surrounding angst about having to jettison one of our members.  He was a lefty, too, just didn't play well with others.

The summer of '01 was indeed a golden time of innocence -- I will never forget it, and I am grateful to everyone who was here then. Then. and really for a long time afterwards, because we were feeling our way along and building together, we were relatively cohesive. There was a lot of shared understanding and shared history and mutual trust, even when we had arguments. Maybe there's a limit to how long a single community can go on like that as it continues to grow; anyway, we reached ours.

We used to worry a lot that we were too cliquish, and newbies sometimes accused us of that, maybe fairly sometimes. I never thought that was an entirely bad thing, and now for sure I don't think it was a bad thing. We needed to change in some very particular ways, via the anti-oppression forums most obviously, which have been very valuable to a lot of people including lurkers, I suspect. But there was a clearer allegiance to basic principle, too, less need to go back and re-argue first principles, because we'd all grown into those together.

I've thought for a long while that the discussion-board format is actually a dying breed on the internet, and as a cultural materialist, that's what interests me most. Blogs, twittering, social networking--this seems to me to be the way political discussions like the one we have (have had?) on babble are going. Certainly, when the best rabble can do is pick me for a mod, there is a death knell sounding somewhere. Too many pale shadows to live up to, I think. Kind of like Brian Clough and Leeds United. Inheriting a champion team is about the worst thing that can happen to your career.

Interesting observation. I can't speak for the babble experience but I definitely noticed a peak in the political discussion-board forum that I used to moderate at, its height being between 2001 and 2003. That board was similar to this one but connected to Alternet. At some point, Alternet decided to introduce direct commentary to the articles they posted, similar to what most bloggers and media outlets use today, and decided to disband the Alternet discussion forums. This happened around 2005 and arrangements were made to absorb the online community under Cafe Utne boards. Soon after Cafe Utne, as a formal board attached to Utne Magazine, was let go and all their groups and sub-groups were carried over to a new server. By that time, membership for both Cafe Utne and Alternet's original forums had dropped significantly.

Jesus Christ, I long for the days when I could be offended by someone here.

I always give everyone credit for being able to read the stuff I can read.  My referee is my ability to write, to communicate and if there's a bad call by the referee, I only have to look to my own fingers.   And, if someone is being an asshole towards me, I trust that most everyone else can see it too.

I am a little confused here... was that a "Golden Age" of [babble], or a "Gilded Age"?