People have completely lost sight of the importance of small forums.

Forums, perhaps. But small group chats (which I suppose are technically "dark") are the bedrock of the current internet writ large and where most of the content that filters up to places like Twitter comes from.

You're absolutely right and this is something I've studied and thought about quite a lot. The dark aspect of group chats does fundamentally separate them from forums, which had the benefit of searchability, permanence and topic longevity.

At least we will benefit from what forums are left in the form of model training data. People give LLMs a lot of shit, but it's possible one day that a language model ends up becoming a go-to oracle of future archeologists studying the present day.

Sometimes it's easy to take for granted how historic the current times are, and how interested people will be in the minuet and institutional knowledge which few bother to expend considerable resources preserving.

Wow, I hadn't made that connection. We should somehow bundle a current state-of-the-art LLM in a timecapsule right now, and maybe another one every decade.

If, a thousand years from now future historians need to study our time, they can just ask the LLM.

There's a SF story in there somewhere.

That would be an incredible modern analogue to the Arecibo message or Golden Record. Imagine being on the receiving end of such an artifact and not knowing how to operate it and being worried about breaking it.

Makes you also wonder if the future of long-range communication between planets or galaxies would involve LLM-based compression, embeddings, etc.

We definitely need to fix the hallucination problem though, or a receiving civilization might be extremely confused about our nature.

Local social media used to be huge here in Sweden, we had options for everyone long before facebook or x/twitter was a thing. Great times.

At the extreme level of “regional”, that’s Nextdoor.

Sure but Nextdoor is still a huge business trying to reach the widest possible audience of local areas. Something limited by if you’re awake when it’s up is different IMO

Night workers or shift workers would have a different take on it. They’d be the ones posting in your area maybe?

I mean night workers also don’t get to do other traditional evening events like go to a concert or bar so this doesn’t bother me. Night workers in nearby time zones would be able to use it either before or after their shift depending on their location

Some places have bars that open at 7am for people coming off the night shift.

Location-based subreddits get close to this also.

Ironically that's what Facebook initially was.

Isn't that just YikYak?

YikYak had nothing to do with time, it was geofenced to certain locations. I loved it in college, it was so much fun.