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There was a time when I would read the whole internet, every day.
Oh, not all of it. But when Usenet — the internet’s first widescale social media — was bridged into Fidonet (a network of dial-up BBSes), my local free bulletin board system began to import several hundred Usenet newsgroups, updating several times per day. I would dial up to this BBS and read my way through all of the new posts on these groups.
Early on, this was easy. Then, as traffic picked up, and as more newsgroups entered the feed, it got harder. Then it got impossible.
Luckily, I knew exactly how to handle this: I relaxed. Rather than reading all the newsgroups, I culled the low-interest ones. Rather than reading every message, I skimmed — and backtracked when something caught my eye.
This was the method I’d already used in the past, when the local BBS’s own forums went from manageable to busy to firehose. The cull-and-skim method is part of the evolution of every communications medium: from deterministically reading everything posted to a probabilistic approach that assumes the good stuff will “bubble up.”
In the Usenet days, that bubbling up happened when a message would turn into a thread and then a mega-thread and then a brawl. Message after message would pop up, day…
