This Guy is Mapping Every Community Bulletin Board in SF
I’m extremely lucky to be part of the last generation to experience college before social media and the internet took over our lives. Friendster (which preceded Myspace), didn’t come out till the summer after I graduated college, so I very much remember what life was like before the shit show we’re living through now.
And let me tell you, there were community bulletin boards everywhere. Coffeeshops, record stores, laundromats, restaurants, bookstores, arcades…pretty much anywhere people gathered, you’d find some cork stuck with pushpins the held up flyers offering and asking for anything you could imagine. It was like Craigslist in real life.
While the world has changed vastly since then, there still are a smattering of community bulletin boards scattered throughout San Francisco, and Pursarth Tuladhar has made it his mission to map them all.
Pursarth emailed me recently to tell me about his quest saying, “Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited hundreds of local businesses and just published a guide with over 101 verified boards—organized by neighborhood, with addresses and map links.”
It seems he got the idea to catalog all the bulletin boards while putting up flyers for his startup Simbasite.com, a company that builds websites for local service businesses. As he explained in his email, “I found it very hard to locate these community bulletin boards. Searched online for a list but couldn’t find any. Asked ChatGPT and on Reddit and realized there was none. I just decided to walk the “main” streets of SF neighborhoods to find them myself.”
Pursarth then scheduled several days over the next few weeks to target specific neighborhoods, buying a muni day pass and traversing the city. He’d walk into local businesses, ask if they had a bulletin board and if then post on it if they did. There were multiple days where he logged 30,000 steps. “It was an amazing experience meeting a ton of small business owners — hearing their stories and sharing mine. They are a generous bunch!”
Besides getting hella exercise and meeting cool store owners, Pursarth also learned some things about the kind of people who still post on bulletin boards. He explained, “I noticed a lot of local service business flyers on these boards. Most of these businesses have no storefronts and no online marketing expertise. For them, this is their primary source of marketing.”
So to make it easier for them to get the word out, he decided to create the list of bulletin boards as a community resource. It’s “a gift to these hard-working local service business owners who are overwhelmingly first-generation immigrants like myself.” This is an ongoing project and Pursarth is continuing to update the list.
You can check out the whole list right here.
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