Salon Table Talk

» see salon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

My forums were in turkish. When i got serious about message boards it was donanimhaber and frmtr, hardware talk and signature files with my component list at the bottom. Table Talk was the same instinct in another language, the english-speaking web's idea of a place to sit down and argue, and it opened years before i ever loaded a board.

It went live on november 20, 1995, the same day salon.com launched, and it was built on the model of the well, the berkeley dial-up community that half the early web copied. Threaded discussion, anyone could post, and for a good stretch it was one of the busiest conversation spaces online.

In 2001 salon folded it into salon premium, the paid tier. You could read table talk for free but you had to pay to post, which kept it alive and made it marginal at the same time. It ran on webcrossing software that looked more dated every year, and it drew a lot of page views from a small number of devoted regulars, which is the exact profile that advertisers ignore.

In may 2011 salon gave the whole thing thirty days notice, and in june it deleted the message base after sixteen years. Archive Team grabbed the public threads before they went. I never posted there and could not have followed most of it, but i know what a sixteen-year-old board feels like from the inside, the regulars, and the certainty that the place is older than most of the web around it. That is a real thing to lose, in any language.

~ the case file ~

~ the model it came from ~

The WELL taught the early web that an online community was a place, not a feature. Table Talk inherited that directly. It was not comments under an article and it was not a feed. It was a room, with its own culture and its own long-running arguments, attached to a magazine but living its own life. That model is almost extinct now. The web decided it preferred feeds to rooms, and the rooms got quietly demolished.

~ what really happened ~

Nobody killed Table Talk in anger. Salon considered shutting it down for years, and every time the math was the same: heavy engagement, tiny audience, no advertiser interest, software nobody wanted to maintain. Eventually the math won. The announcement was matter-of-fact, the thirty days were real, and the archive went dark on june 10, 2011. Sixteen years of conversation, unpaid for and unloved by the ad market, switched off on schedule.

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