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by dingaling 3343 days ago
It's not quite 'elite' but The Well is a fairly exclusive and well-connected social network, which has been running online for over 30 years now:

https://www.well.com/join.html

I dabbled in it a couple of decades ago when there was a special-offer for a month's membership, it was certainly highbrow compared to Usenet at the time.

$150 is a fair chunk of cash for a year's membership, but does keep the rabble out whilst not being much of a road-bump to those who are keen.
3 comments
ThomPete 3343 days ago
Yeah I used to be a member there too, was an amazing community. Jaron Lanier used to hang out there plus a bunch of other cool people.

It had a very interesting commenting system which was non threaded. Instead you referenced the number of the post you were responding to.

It gave some very interesting dynamics in the conversation, something I have never experienced since and I have often thought about doing some exploration around the non-threaded discussion forum.

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SamReidHughes 3343 days ago
Non-threaded as in there being exactly one global stream of comments? Or were there separate threads, each of which was a linear stream within which comments reference each other by number? 4chan and such have the latter.
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ThomPete 3343 days ago
Separate threads and channels. But it also had some other interesting features in the HTML version based on picospan the underlying discussion forum software.
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pmoriarty 3343 days ago
Another great one was c2.[1] I've found a lot of really interesting programming-related discussions on there.

There's also Lambda the Ultimate (LtU)[2], which had about the deepest language development related discussions I've seen anywhere.

Yet another interesting one, quite different from the above two and from most anything else out there, was everything2.[3] It was kind of like Wikipedia, but not limited in subject matter to "encyclopedic" entiries, nor to "neutral point of view", so it has a lot of really opinionated, creative, and funny entries. Most people don't know about it, and it's been pretty inactive for many years now, but it does still exist and still has a ton of great content.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2.com

[2] - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

[3] - https://www.everything2.com/

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hammock 3343 days ago
What do you get out of it? What type of people?
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