What Abuzz Was(Thats an independenteuphoniousphoneticdevice)

I had heard a great deal of talk about Abuzz and not being a member, I began to wonder why people flocked to A2k to get away from it. Thanks for the explanation.

I moved from Abuzz to Raven's Realm to A2K.

Abuzz had the NYT brand on it. It attracted a lot of people (me included), who thought it would be a good place for civil discussion/digression/fun.
On its best days, Abuzz was half way between a discussion forum, a plaza in the Greek sense, and a community on the making.
As it developed, it became neither.

I am sorry to have lost some nice acquantainces from Abuzz. Bright people, interesting people, funny people.
But I like A2K a lot better. I find it more user friendly (even if it took a while to get used to it, after the big pages of Abuzz), more fun to play with :wink: , with the possibility of quoting, posting pictures, and making long, long, interminable discussions (I remember one thread for Craven's birthday, 200 posts long and it took ages to unload: how much would it take, with Abuzz technology, to unload any of our neverending games?).

Abuzz had this sucker meritocratic thing. You could rate other users, and there were "top abuzzers" for every category and also all-around. It made competitive folk go beserk for their smileys, their "valuables" and schoolish stuff like that (I admit I liked it, until I realized somebody was "unvaluabling" me in film or trivia, because of my nationality or my stand on migration).

The biggest flaw of Abuzz was that it didn't check if your e-mail was real. An easy prey for mentally deranged persons and their multiple personae. When moderators were there no more, the sickos thrived.

The e-mail update was a hassle. I watched my threads, but had to clean very often. Every reply was 25k. 20 replies in one day: 250k.

The best gadget-feature were the invitations sent. But the system went crazy at least since early 2002. I kept on receiving invitations to threads about cars, about the schedule of current shows in Boston or tax deduction schemes. Things I don't care a damn about.

I like A2K, it's not a close-knit self-indulgent community of think-alikes, but it has some warmth.

And I agree and don't with Craven.
A2K was not meant or created to compete with Abuzz. It's different.
Yet, somehow, I saw it's initial core (or at least the inicial core of Raven's Realms) as some sort of "splinter group" from Abuzz: people who got fed up with the way things were being run there and chose to travel and build a new cyberland.

Unfortunately that was the cause of a lot of the post-order bugs.

I miss the type of writing we saw on Abuzz - right to the last day. As craven noted, the size and setup of Abuzz allowed pockets to develop - where posters lived that you never saw - even if you were both there for years. In some of those pockets, extraordinary fiction and non-fiction continued to be presented.

Some of the same posters are here, but the quality of writing isn't. I don't know why. I've wondered about it since the beginning. At first I thought it was the phpbb, but then I went to boards that used non-phpbb/non-Beehive platforms. I haven't seen anything like it anywhere else. I'm gonna keep searching.

We used to have it, but it had an elusive bug so I took it down, I'll tackle it again soon.

Smartsux--

A poet? No, just a lippy old lady with a fondness for the English language.

About that member/interaction rating thing, fbaezer - I seem to recall a vote in the very early, formative days of the site, and based on the abuses in Abuzz, the decision to leave out the ratings was just about 100%.

After the big change at Abuzz in September 2000 Abuzz wasn't Abuzz any more.

As for e-mail I didn't know if the checked it until sometime in 2002. In any case my in box, level of invites, on Abuzz did not work correctly after the change.

I was absent for the KAK bobsal wars. When I got back to Abuzz it was destroyed.

However the first time I was fooled by an imposter was way before any of the really awful stuff started happening.

I do not miss it and I am grateful that CDK and Jespah started this site with the help of many other former Abuzzers.

ehBeth, I think part of it may have been that the New York Times marketed Abuzz in a way that I have never seen another discussion forum marketed. Remember those full-page ads? Oh geez what did they say? There was some short catchy slogan, a portrait of a cool-looking regular person. I remember, later, wondering if one was Mary Pope; seemed to match her personality.

Anyway, I think that because of this marketing, lots of people were drawn in who had never experienced a discussion forum before. I think that meant a lot of freshness, originality, care, and also inspiration and excitement.

Also, I love the editing feature to death and would be sooooo sad if it was gone, but I wrote very differently when I knew that once I clicked submit, that was it! Gone! Here I kind of rattle things off, click submit, and then re-read -- if I see anything too egregious, I edit. But it makes for a different, less... wrought... style.

I think the main thing I love about A2K vs. Abuzz is what fbaezer said -- that it feels much more open, there are more new faces coming in on a day-to-day basis, not so much of the close-knit self-indulgent think-alike thing. I only got there in about November of 2000, though, which by all accounts at the time was already past the golden age.

I too loved abuzz for the pockets of great writing, which many times seemed to appear spontaneously like a fully plumed peacock landing in a yard of mudhens, but more times was part of a group involvement, almost a group hysteria, in the good sense of the word. I see good writing all the time on a2k though, and expect to see more.

"I only got there in about November of 2000, though, which by all accounts at the time was already past the golden age."

Ack!


The nature of golden ages is that they are always just a while ago, or a while away.

The post-golden age that we joined in is the golden age that those who joined after us harken back to......

Exactly!

I'm sure at some point this will be seen as a golden age... and so it goes...

Yeah, I mean, have you seen Noddy? In one sentence, she gets more across than I could in an essay!

I joined in late June of 2001, so I am one who harkens back to when you were harkening. I really liked it, it was a kind of wonderland for a first time poster on any site.

Noddy rocks.

Well, any friend of Noddy's.....

*passes on her Noddy duties to sozobe*

AFTER I say one more thing:

Yeah, go back a coupla pages and see how she told me off!

heehee - us a golden age....heeheheeheeheheee....

Smartsux--

I'm the neighborhood battleaxe. You too can become an A2K neighborhood institution.

Thanks, all, for the kind words. I treasure them.

Hold your dominions.