BACK IN MY DAY (jk my day is ongoing 😜), many popular sites were called “e/n” sites. This was like before blogs, before Google, etc. Back then, the web wasn’t very feature-rich, but it was “loud.” Contrast that with now: there are more sites than ever and wayyyyyyy more users than in the late 90s, but the www is very quiet and isolated (or isolating? I’m not sure how to phrase it).
Anyway, I think about this a lot, and I came to Lemmy to escape the labyrinth of marketing funnels that we call the www, but the element I can’t quite figure out is like where’s the social element on the web? I see many forums for like whatever niche subject, but where is the e/n chatter? Where do people like…be people in a very general sense? I was looking at the …sublemmies I follow, and they’re all like niche stuff. I really don’t even know where to post this question (so please pardon me if I screwed up and feel free to redirect me).
In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?
E/n?
I’ve never heard this term before.
Me neither, and I think I’m a similar vintage to op.
I’m old enough to remember 9600 kbps dial up modems on POTS line as a long distance call to the next major city who had a BBS. The internet was not yet common in the public and was still mostly universities. I was doing internet tech support when ISPs were rolling out publically. I have no idea what e/n is. A guess given the 90s was like an IRC channel named as such.
9600? Oh wow, you were fast! Haha
Me too - wrote my first program in Fortran on a Sperry-Rand using punched cards.