Originally posted by: MichaelD
Originally posted by: gorcorps
Hey, it's unlocked! Hooray
Unlocked after a Mod edit. The full feel of the original thread/post is no longer intact.
It's all there, I checked
Originally posted by: LtPage1
It's threads like this one that make me wish I'd been here when there was more of a community. I think there are too many members, and too few well-known posters for something like this to happen today.
LtPage1,
I don't think it's just here...it's the Internet in general. It's everywhere now...I can even browse the web from my cellphone while riding the bus into work. From the late-nineties to maybe the first year or two of this century, places like this were the domain of the early-adopters while everyone else was just trying to figure out what email really was. Hell, I went
years without getting a single peice of spam because I never used my main email to sign up for anything. There really was a sense of community here and a lot of other places. I used to just assume people were being honest...certainly there were plenty of bullshitters, but they were easy to spot, and you could usually assume that anything major was genuine. NOWHEREMOM was my first lesson that things had changed, and these days I tend to [rightly] be suspicious of most everything I read online.
Once everyone and his mom started getting broadband accounts, I think, is when things really started to change. Certainly there are still places online where the members feel a sense of community, but you can't just click a link and expect to find one, and everyone's bullshit detectors are a lot more sensitive than they were ten years ago.
I like to write...not necessarily the act of writing, really...but the act of putting down my thoughts and putting them up for other people to read and respond. And I like to read detailed, well-though-out responses. A friend gave me the link to AT when I was a freshman in college (1997) and just starting with my new (and now long since retired) hobby of learning about computer hardware. Initially I just lurked in the General Hardware forum and read as much as I could, and eventually I clicked on the General Non-Hardware Discussion forum. The first topic I read was, "What do you look for in a woman?", and one of the first replies was from Red Dawn:
...no arms, no legs, no teeth, and a flat head I can rest my beer on...
Instant thread-derail, and then the rest of it went on like that for another thirty posts. I laughed my ass off and was hooked. What I found here was an outlet where I could write something entertaining and/or thought-provoking, and receive a number of responses in kind. I'm a wordy SOB and certainly most other posts weren't as long as mine, but still there was plenty of quality discussion.
As I branched out across the Internet, I found similar forums all over the place. That's mostly changed, now. It's difficult to find a place where one can have a thoughtful, back-and-forth discussion. There are blogs, but those are mostly one person's thoughts with a bunch of one line responses. There are My Space and Facebook, but those also cater to the one-liners, and they're not really set up for written discussions. There are still web forums, but they tend to either be monstrously large with a very low signal:noise ratio, or very small, closed communities that aren't really looking for new people to show up and compose 1500 word posts. I don't really have an outlet to write anymore...and to be fair, I don't really have the time.
When NOWHEREMOM was becomming a part of Internet history, I shared an apartment with my best friend, had a job I didn't particularly care about, and had a ton of free time. Now I have a wife, eleven-month-old twins, a career, two cars to keep running, and a home rennovation project that's only about 80% completed...and a few new hobbies that consume what remains of my free time. I imagine that's probably part of why places like this went the direction they did: when it was still relatively new, and our hobbies were still fresh, it was easy to spend a lot of time online interracting with other people; and as our lives changed and old hobbies gave way to new, and as new users flooded the Internet with their own attitudes and expectations, we simply stopped putting the same amount of time and effort into writing and interracting as we once did.
It's maybe a shame, and I occasionally do miss having a place to log onto and read other people's thoughts and share some of my own, but things change...and they almost never go back to the way they used to be. I don't really have my outlet for the thoughts that bounce around in my head and still occasionally look for such a place, but now I generally tend to compose a long email to a friend I haven't talked to in a while (or post a 1500 word monstrosity here) when the itch strikes.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for reading and responding.
And since we're all taking a trip down memory lane, and since I'm really enjoying banging away on these keys, here's another unsolicited anecdote about AT from the mind of reitz:
I used to work for a [now defunct] company called Stargate in Pittsburgh. It was a regional ISP, with a small data center that I could see from my cubicle where we hosted servers for two dozen or so companies. One day on my way in, I noticed a brown kid and a few others - all my age or younger - putting together servers in one of the cubicles. The brown kid looked so familiar that I did a double-take...I had to know him from somewhere, but I couldn't figure out where. He and the others had taken over two cubes that would otherwise be occupied, so I figured they had to be big customers...but they were so
young, and I didn't think I'd ever seen them in the office before.
I sat down at my desk and opened up the front page, and saw the news update that said, "In Pittsburgh for a Server Upgrade." I did a tracert to anandtech.com, and saw that it was two hops from my workstation. I looked through the window nearest my cube into the server room, and right there in front of me were the servers for Anandtech, with the hostnames and IPs taped to the front. I'd worked there nearly two years and this site was by far my number one stop on the Internet during that time, and I never realized that the servers I spent so much time on were less than fifteen feet away from where I sat at work every day.
Of course the brown kid was none other than Anand lal Shimpi himself. I went over to introduce myself to him and shook his hand...and I was actually a little nervous and stumbled on my first words. He was really nice and talked to me for a minute, and stopped by my desk to say hello when he came in to finish the build the next day. I've met a few other notable people in the years since, but no one that I was as interested in talking to as Anand.