by Gene Michael Stover
created Thursday, 2026 January 8
updated Thursday, 2026 January 8
original at cybertiggyr.com/r9gj0n6.html
I have a pessimistic opinion of the quality of online discussion. Here's how I formed that opinion.
In the early 1980s, when I was learning to program on my Atari 800 and on Apple ][e & TRS-80s at school, I remember hearing that home computers were making desktop publishing possible to many people & that this would create a new age of democracy. Actually, I'm not sure the prediction was a “new age of democracy”, but it was something like that. I could see the truth in how home computers were making publishing more accessible, but it was not clear to me that this would necessarily improve democracy. It could, but I didn't see it as inevitable, & I still don't.
I got a modem & would visit many BBSes, mostly for their forums. Soon after that, I also discovered FIDOnet & even setup an end-point node.
Around 1986 or 1987, I discovered Usenet on the college computers. I also dabbled with subscriptions to CompuServe, GEnie, & (years later) Prodigy.
For all of those except Prodigy (due to its more complex & proprietary protocol), I wrote programs that would download forum messages so I could read them offline, often after reformatting & printing them so they were more readable. I was looking for information that was insightful, useful, or at least delightfully interesting. (This led to my understanding of file formats, content vs markup, & printing, but that's another topic.)
Nowadays, I'd say I was like a wizard's apprentice or a character in a Lovecraft story who searches the oldest & most forgotten books in a library for valuable secrets. Initially, I was hopeful, but after years of reading those messages & finding very little worth repeating, I became skeptical, including of the claim in techie circles that the anonymity provided by online communication created a fair forum for discussion where academic credentials didn't lead to undeserved reverence.
In 1991 or 1992, I decided to run one final experiment to determine whether online discussions were useful. At that time, I still subscribed to either CompuServe or GEnie. I searched for a forum whose subject matter appeared less likely to create angry arguments. In that forum, I searched for a new topic, one where I would be an early responder. I planned to participate in that single topic to help create a useful discussion or to see it become an angry uninformed argument in spite of my efforts.
I don't remember the forum's subject, but the new topic I found was “Do election polls change the opinions of voters?” It was so new that mine was the very first reply. I remember that reply clearly enough that I can nearly quote it: “We know from physics that you can't measure something without altering it. In that respect, a poll surely affects voters. That's at a philosophical or theoretical level, though. Does it change the outcome of elections? I don't know.”
When I checked back the next day, my straightforward reply had sparked many messages from irate people. Someone called me stupid because “when I look at my red car, it doesn't become a green car”. Someone replied to that person to tell them how shamefully ignorant of physics they were. And it went on. I don't recall any messages addressing the original topic.
I concluded that online discussion was so rarely informed, friendly, useful, or enjoyable that it should be mostly ignored.
I still visit a few aggregator sites, such as Slashdot, regularly but not frequently, & I don't hope to find anything more than momentarily interesting much less useful. I grumble when people want me to “join their Discord”. I practically never comment on YouTube videos or elsewhere that would allow comments; neither do I read comments in such places.
I guess I'm happy with my chagrin about the quality of online discussion, & I wonder if the rest of the world will ever come to the same realization.