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This is one of those topics that makes me wish I could take a peek at all of the other answers before publishing my own! Will most folks choose serious or frivolous answers, I wonder?
I’m going to bend the rules slightly and give two answers this week so that I won’t be out of place for giving a serious answer while everyone else bemoans the loss of their favourite snacks from decades past or for giving a lighthearted reply while everyone else soberly talks about recently extinct species of animals or something.
My Serious Answer: Winter
Winter was better when I was a kid because it was colder and snowier. This meant that there was more water to fill our aquifers when spring came and that fewer harmful species like ticks survived the deep freezes of that season.
Last winter was worryingly mild and dry in Ontario. We received less than half the usual amount of snow and some veterinarians here are now recommending that pet owners give their dogs tick medication year-round because they were still finding ticks on dogs in late December when the ground should have been far too frozen for any of those creatures to be crawling around, much less being alert enough to bite.
Climate change is here, and it’s rapidly affecting everything in our environment.
My Lighthearted Answer: Message Boards
I remember a time when there were active forums and message boards everywhere online for any topic you could imagine and probably many more for subjects you’d never think would have such numerous or devoted fans. Sometimes a thread would be started about a specific question and it would sit dormant for weeks or months until someone with the right knowledge discovered it, bumped it to the top, and answered it.
Social media is useful for a lot of other things, but it usually does not inspire deep conversations on niche interests that unfold over many years or reward people who are experts in their fields and genuinely know what they’re talking about.
I desperately miss having access to all of that knowledge and having the opportunity to add to it when I could.
If only we could experience both of these things thriving in 2024: social media for what is predominantly lighthearted, surface-level conversations and forums for people who want to dig deeply into a specific topic and either share their knowledge of it or become well-versed in it themselves.
Message boards are still around, at least for some audiences. I’m a member-moderator of CivilizationFanaticsCentral, for instance, and a member of an SFF forum as well as a StarDew Valley one. But they’re not as numerous and certainly not as popular as they were in the 2000s, I agree. Reddit has consolidated a lot of what made forums popular, unfortunately.
Glad to hear it! I could only think of one or two I knew of that are still going.
Ah, Lydia, you are so right about winter. I feel like a broken record every year – I’m always saying how it used to be colder when we were kids. It was definitely snowier. I remember making snowmen most winters growing up and now, when it does snow in the northeast of England, you’d be lucky to make a decent snowball.
It’s such a shame! I used to love making snow people and stuff.
There are some message boards, but yeah: they just aren’t as common as they used to be. I used to do online roleplaying on one, and had a grand time with it.
I used to do online roleplaying, too, a million years ago. I don’t think it’s really a thing now anymore, though.
Serious academic blogs/boards/fora like The Language Log, yes! Blogging was better a few years ago, but probably invented after everyone here was adult.
🙂
OMG, you got me with your first answer! I grew up in Iowa and recall snowy winters so fondly. One year we had two solid weeks off from school because of snow. They came on the radio (yep, no internet) and announced one day that they had managed to open the grocery store for the day and my parents walked over with my brother’s sled to restock food. But now I live in Philadelphia where my winter coat is water proof because it rains much more than snows.
Thank you. Yes, I had about two weeks off in a row from school during a big storm, too!