Has anyone here been to the online community called 'The Well'?

Come to think of it The Well isn't all that different from ILX.

No. Back in the day the only giant BBS/online servers that advertised were the national ones like CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.

No I haven't. There's a great article in Wired about five or six years ago that covered the Well's history.

the well also had a lot more shared history, so it just seemed a lot bigger/intimidating (kinda, although i did meet a lot of people there who i really like); i've thought about going back every so often, but i'm not sure if i'd have to use the web interface, and i loathe pretty much every web-based community interface that isn't this one (cue the 'awwww's).

Come to think of it The Well isn't all that different from ILX.

― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus)

i agree. dow started a thread the other day (Have You Been To The Well? Online community, founded in mid-80s) for the same reason that i almost did just now - to mention this really, REALLY good (and really, REALLY long) article in wired from 1997:

https://www.wired.com/1997/05/ff-well/

it really is one of the best articles i've ever read, but a good portion of my enjoyment came from thinking about the parallels to ILX as i read through it, as well as what makes ILX different. if "longread" is a thing, this is a "looongread", but i found it fascinating.

also as a sidenote it made me even more grateful for the efforts of stet/keith/whoever is in charge of code these days, and mods. and that somehow we have avoided making everyone pay $15 a month to use it.

I have definitely read some 90s whiz-bang age-of-theory architectural conference proceedings where the conference in fact took place on 'The Well.' Always figured it was just the name of some CompuServe chatroom or something that they were just dressing up to make it sound more like a cool intellectual cafe out in the wild netherworld of cyberspace.

The Well had an uncanny knack for provoking arguments. The dynamic was sometimes frenetic, always reactive. People who started out attacking an idea often ended up attacking each other; even its least confrontational posters often found themselves snared into a heated debate. At these moments, The Well was a Roman circus gone overboard. Quiet spectators who came to watch armor-clad gladiators such as Tom Mandel pound opponents to a virtual pulp would suddenly find themselves pulled into the fray. Rhetoricians might square off in displays of grandiloquence, but a good deal of the time all the well-crafted satire, backstabbing witticisms, and literary fireworks served little purpose other than to incite still more verbiage and draw more people in.

yeah but did they have zings

they were zinging when i was crapping my pants for some of the final times of my life. actually i'm not sure if i was still crapping my pants when i was 2. i probably was. and i ended up crapping my pants a few times after that, as an older child and adoloescent. and then a couple years ago i had a close call. but basically what i'm saying is you bet your ass they were zinging

Thanks for that article - fascinating. Just read the whole thing while up all night with the baby. Had missed that it was from 1997 though. also I briefly kind of worked alongside one of the ppl named in it!

man I know that reading long articles while up all night with the baby feel, kinder, that's the good stuff

i started I Love Books because of up with baby all night.

i do love the name LARRY BRILLIANT. always have. always will. and i love the humble title of his autobio:

Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History

larry brilliant is one of the best names of all time

Fig decided to follow Tex out the door. "I am too much identified with the permissive and accommodating attitude that has been part of The Well's growth to preside over a more restrictive régime," Fig wrote to the board in his resignation letter.

Before leaving, Fig found a successor in Maurice Weitman, login (mo), who was hired as general manager at $75,000 a year. (By the time he left, Fig was earning $54,000.) Though respectable, the pay was about half of what Mo could have made at a similar job elsewhere.

it's so weird to imagine ILX with a profit-motive layered on top, a board of directors, a general manager paid handsomely to not only keep things under control but also increase user registrations and participation. the time, money and effort involved in running the well seem staggering to me now - $250,000 for the initial computer and software to run it! $60,000 to buy a newer, better computer a few years later! a team of 6 customer support representatives! i often have a misguided perception of the trajectory of the internet, from a more altruistic hippie-driven era of idealistic die-hard visionaries to ...whatever corporate hell hole dimension we're in now. but stories like this remind me that even these early internet pioneers were also heavily tied into worlds of wealth and tech, from the very beginning. the primitive tech that they were using was groundbreaking and expensive to maintain. would the well have survived if it didn't have all of this money injected into it from the beginning, to keep it afloat?

today, we have the means to recreate the spirit of online communities like the well at a fraction of the cost, and of course, ILX is an example of that. all the possibilities that thrilled the early well beings are still possible, and now without the constant dilemma of how to make a profit on these kinds of interactions, or the whims of a board of directors. but the vast majority of internet communities moved to places where the profit-motive still dominates - eg facebook - and even controls the content that we see and the order in which we see it.

don't know where i'm going with this, as usual. i guess it just makes me appreciate what we have here even more.

hear, hear!

Karl, have you watched the show Halt and Catch Fire at all? The middle part of the show includes the characters running a popular local BBS, then later having a regional online service (right before AOL and others are about to go national), and eventually by the time the show ends they're trying to triangulate what they're going to create on the web.

It's not a history by any means since it's fiction, but for anyone who used these things it really resonates

i have not but it sounds really good! i'll try to track it down.

We have a thread including all the caveats. The main one would be that season one is very tonally different but the plot parts I've referenced really pick up in season two