In 2004, prolific online poster humdog wrote a extremely insightful analysis of the nature of internet communications and the “board ho”.

people do amazing acts of self-disclosure online. they do it, and i think they do it for one reason only. there is a different economy online and the payout is in attention and in time, not money attention is the big payout online.

The idea is that internet forums grow and thrive on the irrational self-disclosure of Too Much Information by people who commoditize all the private details of their lives and give it away in return for attention.

one of the things i see on blah blah boards is that many of the people who frequent them regularly appear to be people whose lives are not working for one reason or another. voices on the boards seem to have challenges, for example, with health, addiction, or socializing, to name a few. they seem lonely. they seem conflicted. these are voices in pain. these voices don’t seem to have people in their lives with whom they can talk openly. gail williams, now community director for salon.com once observed that:

“the key people to bring into a community are people who are hungry for friends, who don’t have any email yet – not people who already have tons of stuff to deal with online…” (wired news, nov 18 1996)

humdog’s article is very cynical about the motives of corporations who run online discussion communities, milking the posters for private information and using them as lab rats for motivational marketing techniques. The entire article is worth reading in full, but one point sticks out, and is worth highlighting here (emphasis mine). humdog points out that early internet posters in the 90s

 would type extremely personal information into boards like the whole earth ‘lectronic link (the well) and usenet. on these boards people revealed absolutely amazing bits of information about themselves, including personal sexual preferences and behaviors and stories of their struggles with various substance addictions. they did this to some extent because it appears that at the moment they pushed the send button on some level they believed that nobody was actually listening or recording what they said: they were usually alone in a room & the audience was invisible to them. some people, who understood how information systems actually worked, were horrified when they witnessed these increasingly numerous acts of self-disclosure. they knew how hard it is to get rid of information.

Since this article was written, nearly 15 years ago, the phenomenon called Social Media has been disseminated to everyone in the guise of an upgrade of the old-fashioned telephone. Twitter, which is an online community, is not marketed as such. And the community you are joining is not some niche of internet users; that would be too arcane and uninteresting. It is, rather, society itself, regular people out and about in real life. And one believes that others, in fact, are listening: that the most important discussions are happening there. Internet posters aren’t alone in rooms anymore, now they’re next to you on the bus.

This matters when we get to humdog’s idea of the “Diva” board ho; the one whose personality drives all the drama and social dynamics of the online community.

every blahblah board has its board ho. the board cannot exist without the board ho. the board ho drives traffic to web. the board cherishes its board hos, and it especially cherishes the diva or queen board ho. the diva or queen board ho is untouchable and can do anything. people know this, on the board, by intuition. the board and the board ho nurture and cherish each other because the board ho drives eyeballs to the board. i am not speaking of unique visits although those are nice. no. i am speaking of repeat traffic. because of the board ho the board can dream of growth and expansion. the board leverages whatever it is that drives the board ho, unto the board’s success and growth. in return, the board ho receives attention and a following. negative or positive does not have a value relative to attention. to the board ho, attention is all good.

Back in the pre-social media internet, when writing things on a screen felt like entering some backwater, or another universe, the board-ho was some total unknown with a big name on a website nobody beyond a few thousand people had ever heard of. But when the website is Twitter, and the people driving discussion and influencing opinions and board policy are real-world celebrities or notable people in other regards, instead of being nerds tethered to a desk, then what changes, and what is different?

I think that the shift to thinking of social media as a web forum, in the historic sense of the term, is essential to making sense of the world today. And that means looking at documents and ideas like this. When you think about social media policy questions, like what to do about “free speec” or “cyber bullying” or anything else, keep in mind that you’re not dealing with some communications provider. Twitter is not your telephone company, or your local copy shop, or Speaker’s Corner. They’re the latest in a decades old line of internet communities, working under the same model except scale and public outreach.

If you see your phone as merely a thin channel – like a telephone wire across space – which connects you with your friends, then you miss the massive gulf of cyberspace which is rising up between.