zarmanto

Discovering the internet in the '90s was… different. Let me see if I can paint a picture for you.

Initially, many people used dial-up BBSes to get their fix of “Usenet” groups… which I think may be the best analog to the “federated” communities on Lemmy/kbin and such. If you looked hard enough, you could find groups for just about anything surprisingly easily… and I do mean anything. ISPs like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, along with some of the more sophisticated BBSes, would all connect to each other periodically – in some cases, not necessarily by way of live continuous connections – and the groups that the service provider had chosen to subscribe to would be mirrored to their server.

Those dial-up modems eventually topped out at 56Kbps – long before blazing fast 384Kbps DSL became a thing – and you had to disconnect if Mom or Dad needed to make a phone call. Worse, if they were expecting a phone call, you just had to stay off until they gave you leave to get back on… but really, the “addiction” phase of the internet hadn’t even kicked in yet, so that just meant you went and did something non-internet related, like ride a bike or watch a VHS video tape – or just whatever happened to be on TV. (Uh-huh… I can already feel you shuddering at the very thought of actually disconnecting for a while…)

The entire concept of a “web browser” was brand spanking new; my first exposure to a web browser was the AOL browser. It… wasn’t great. Discovering Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Firefox) was a night-and-day difference… way better at pretty much everything. Geocities, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo… all the things were at your fingertips, at that point.

But really, once TCP/IP and “web browsing” became a thing, the nature of the internet has remained relatively static in some very significant ways, since. The speeds cranked up periodically, and the websites have changed from time to time, JavaScript and stylesheets were added to the mix, and the most popular web browser has changed several times… but the fundamentals are still much the same. If you dropped late-'90s-me in front of any web browser today, I’d have to learn which websites have replaced the ones I used to know… but that would essentially be the full extent of the browser learning curve. I suppose it might also take me a moment to grok that all of my favorite newsgroups have been entirely replaced by web-browser-accessible systems at this point… but in the end, I’m pretty sure that I’d quickly get how that makes far more sense from an end-user usability standpoint.

So yes… many things have changed. And a few things haven’t.

Of course, nobody with two brain cells to rub together who reads that answer is sitting there thinking to themselves, "Huh... I guess I've had it wrong all this time, focusing so much on money." Rather, they're instinctively blurting out, "Yeah right -- I call bull!"

But I'll give them partial credit; frequently it's about money. Sometimes, it's just about a work environment that used to be great going to crap. And sometimes, it's about the employee coming to an epiphany, and realizing that their work environment was actually crap all along.

That said, it may be true that not every job that I've ditched was entirely because of money... but it should go without saying that it's always a factor in where I went for the next job. Also, it's never the only factor -- but it's certainly one of the more significant ones.

Don't forget to go back a week out and verify that your deleted comments didn't mysteriously reappear. Seems like that's been happening a lot lately, according to various reports. (I haven't really had the heart to go delete all of my own comments. Yet.)

Discovering the internet in the '90s was... different. Let me see if I can paint a picture for you.

Initially, many people used dial-up BBSes to get their fix of "Usenet" groups... which I think may be the best analog to the "federated" communities on Lemmy/kbin and such. If you looked hard enough, you could find groups for just about anything surprisingly easily... and I do mean anything. ISPs like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, along with some of the more sophisticated BBSes, would all connect to each other periodically -- in some cases, not necessarily by way of live continuous connections -- and the groups that the service provider had chosen to subscribe to would be mirrored to their server.

Those dial-up modems eventually topped out at 56Kbps -- long before blazing fast 384Kbps DSL became a thing -- and you had to disconnect if Mom or Dad needed to make a phone call. Worse, if they were expecting a phone call, you just had to stay off until they gave you leave to get back on... but really, the "addiction" phase of the internet hadn't even kicked in yet, so that just meant you went and did something non-internet related, like ride a bike or watch a VHS video tape -- or just whatever happened to be on TV. (Uh-huh... I can already feel you shuddering at the very thought of actually disconnecting for a while...)

The entire concept of a "web browser" was brand spanking new; my first exposure to a web browser was the AOL browser. It... wasn't great. Discovering Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Firefox) was a night-and-day difference... way better at pretty much everything. Geocities, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo... all the things were at your fingertips, at that point.

But really, once TCP/IP and "web browsing" became a thing, the nature of the internet has remained relatively static in some very significant ways, since. The speeds cranked up periodically, and the websites have changed from time to time, JavaScript and stylesheets were added to the mix, and the most popular web browser has changed several times... but the fundamentals are still much the same. If you dropped late-'90s-me in front of any web browser today, I'd have to learn which websites have replaced the ones I used to know... but that would essentially be the full extent of the browser learning curve. I suppose it might also take me a moment to grok that all of my favorite newsgroups have been entirely replaced by web-browser-accessible systems at this point... but in the end, I'm pretty sure that I'd quickly get how that makes far more sense from an end-user usability standpoint.

So yes... many things have changed. And a few things haven't.

You know, if he could find a way to re-hook Apollo over to one or more Lemmy instances, I think Apollo would immediately become the default Lemmy client for a whole lot of people. What’s more, I expect that a fairly large subset of those people still haven’t even heard about Lemmy yet, and would suddenly be creating new accounts. That would also help to incentivize people to grant his request, and turn down the refund.

Just a thought. I know there would by necessity be an awful lot of work involved to make such a thing happen… but it would probably be worth it.

I hear you... but imho, you can usually only go back so far before you lose your audience. ;-)

I think my first modem was either a 1200 or a 2400 baud as well, and if we're going to back that far... I can remember logging into BBSes that turned out to be outside of my "billing exchange" or something. That meant that they weren't technically long distance calls -- so you didn't have to add 1 and the area code when dialing -- but they were nonetheless an extra charge. My dad was very annoyed with me when he got those bills. He finally made me dig into the phone book to find out which exchanges were an extra charge for our area, and I printed a list of those exchanges and posted it on the frame of my monitor. Henceforth, I was no longer allowed to call any of those exchanges. (There were still dozens of BBSes that I could call within my area.)

And of course, at some point after that, Dad went ahead and subscribed to a second phone line to the house, so that I no longer monopolized the main house line.

And yeah... Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves... I had almost forgotten how many search engines we had, back then. Your mentioning that reminds me of one of my first experiments in writing my own html files: I created a miniature bar that had a select box listing a bunch of different search engines. I could select one, type in my search term next to it and hit the Search button to immediately be redirected in the frame below the bar to that engine's results.

Good times.

I kind'a wouldn't blame him if he did that. The level of vitriol aimed at him in the comment sections of various articles that I've read on this topic is positively staggering. People can be really awful sometimes... and people who are seemingly uninformed and/or misinformed, even more so.

I’ve noticed some of this in non-reddit forums, where we’ve discussed the situation at some length. I agree; it’s quite disconcerting.

Some people have even made it clear that they’re incensed at Christian Selig, like the situation is somehow his fault, and they consider him to be a gold digger who is just profiting off of the platform that Reddit generously provided, and they even go so far as to suggest that Selig needs to “pay his dues!!!11!!1” Even a well-reasoned argument (including a full explanation of the actual math) was ineffective at convincing them that maybe they don’t quite grok the situation… one person actually stated bluntly that he doesn’t even care; he basically just wants his subreddits back.

The mindset behind these kinds of comments just utterly baffles me. (shrug)

I'm going to have to concur with this. I attempted to contribute to a number of subreddits over the past few years; some of my posts went up and got lots of up votes, so yay. On the other hand, posts in some other subs would immediately get rejected, and once I even got temporarily banned for my post. I had read and followed the sub rules to the best of my ability. I was left feeling like maybe the mods there just didn't like my sense of humor, or something... it was really weird.

So yeah... to take a slight twist on an old saying: everything in moderation -- including moderation.

Depends on the sub: in my experience, some subs were just plain more picky than others, and the reasons didn't always map to a published rule. I was actually temporarily banned from one sub for posting something fairly innocuous -- or so I thought. That was my first and only attempt to post to that sub; I promptly unsubscribed and never went back.

As to whether or not lemmy is "better"... we can hope. But if we assume that the issue is caused by humans who are fallible, (or by code that humans wrote, which is by extension fallible) than I'm afraid the source of the issue isn't particularly likely to change with the platform.

Well... I think your conclusion is absolutely right, but it's actually more complicated than that.

Executive summary of the math from the conversation to which I alluded: If all things went absolutely perfectly for Selig, he couldn't possibly have made more than about $450K per year, (gross) at the peak of Apollo's popularity. The app was around for less than six years. Therefore, excluding expenses, his maximum theoretical gross income was still somewhere short of about $2.5 million. (There was a lot of math stuff that led to that figure.)

Reddit is demanding fees essentially equivalent to seven times that figure... per year.

That math doesn't add up -- unless you assume that those existing third-party devs aren't the target audience at all, for that proposed fee structure. At no point did Reddit ever think that these small time devs were going to be able to cough up those exorbitant fees; the target audience is and always has been large language models.

The thing is, I don't actually think there is much chance that the LLMs are going to be any more likely to accept the new fee structure than those third party add on developers. Thus, as you've stated, there will ultimately be no payday for Reddit.

I've noticed some of this in non-reddit forums, where we've discussed the situation at some length. I agree; it's quite disconcerting.

Some people have even made it clear that they're incensed at Christian Selig, like the situation is somehow his fault, and they consider him to be a gold digger who is just profiting off of the platform that Reddit generously provided, and they even go so far as to suggest that Selig needs to "pay his dues!!!11!!1" Even a well-reasoned argument (including a full explanation of the actual math) was ineffective at convincing them that maybe they don't quite grok the situation... one person actually stated bluntly that he doesn't even care; he basically just wants his subreddits back.

The mindset behind these kinds of comments just utterly baffles me. (shrug)