Compuserve's forums, once the premier destination for all online conversations, are finally shutting down on December 15
even if it was 20 or 30 years ago—this is sad news. http://www.fastcompany.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The forums' end date is not arbitrary: December 15 is the same day AOL shut down Instant Messenger after 20 years, meaning two of the earliest pillars of online conversation went dark together under common ownership. The closure closes out a service that predates the web itself.
It also extends a retirement wave already visible in the corpus: AOL earlier retired TUAW and Joystiq, both among the earliest tech blogs, Yahoo Japan wound down GeoCities after 22 years citing profitability and technological issues, and Yahoo Answers would later shut with no comprehensive archive provided.
First-order effects
- Longtime forum members lose one of the internet's original discussion spaces on December 15, with the corpus indicating no preservation commitment comparable to what Yahoo Answers declined to provide.
Second-order effects
- Each high-profile shutdown of an early-community service raises the archival stakes for the next one — Yahoo Answers' explicit refusal to provide an archive set a precedent other owners of legacy communities will be measured against.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pre-web-era community platforms held by large portal companies get sunset rather than maintained or sold, making independent archivists the de facto custodians of early internet conversation.
The trend: The first generation of online community services — forums, Q&A sites, personal homepages, instant messaging — is being systematically retired by its corporate heirs, with archives treated as optional.