zarmanto

Started with classic Who as a kid -- but that was a long time ago, so I can't really be certain which Doctor was my first. Tom Baker will always be my favorite classic Dr, but honestly, Matt Smith has probably replaced him as my all-time favorite. I particularly enjoyed the dynamics between Smith, Karen Gillian (as Amy) and Arthur Darvill (as Rory) and the various long-running plots that came from their seasons.

I also greatly enjoy stumbling upon a former Dr Who actor/actress in a non-Dr Who role, like Tennent showing up as Barty Crouch Jr in Harry Potter or Gillian as Nebula in Guardians. That kind of thing always makes me smile broadly.

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 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.

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.

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.

I'm not so sure about that; I just took a good look at beehaw... there is some very strong and obvious left wing bias going on over there. Judging from the many "removed by mod" posts, that may be true here, as well.

US Politics was never intended to be something that divides our nation; it's meant to bring us together. The entire point of a voting republic was to enable the people to feel like they have a voice, even when they don't always get what they want. When one party or the other pushes hard against even the existence of any dissenting voices, that's when you know that you have a real problem. And that's exactly the kind of single-voiced government that the US Constitution was drafted to fight against.

So don't think about "the opposing side" right now; rather, ask yourself:

• Have I ever bristled at the very thought of a dissenting opinion being expressed around me?
• • For example, have I ever rage-changed the station, just because I found the television at work on "the wrong" news channel?
• Have any of my politically motivated friends ever behaved in this manner?
• Do my party leaders ever appear to exhibit these kinds of attitudes?

(Be honest with at least yourself... you know the answers all too well.)

If any of those things are true, maybe the change you're really looking for needs to start from within.

Hi, folks; another victim of "Rexxit" here.

What's happening at Reddit is unfortunate -- and more importantly, it would have been easily avoidable. Thing is, the powers that be there didn't want to avoid it. So, let them have whatever is left behind. It may still be salvageable for them... or it may not be; only time will tell. Regardless, the world overall is a poorer place for what they've chosen.

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.

Oh yeah... I got this.

Years ago (before most people even knew the word "autism"), my parents offered to send me to a therapist to work through some things. I was all in -- I even had my own ideas about how to go about it, and enthusiastically presented those to the therapist during our first session. He listened with what appeared to be rapt attention, until the end of the fifty minute session, at which point he abruptly stated that we would pick this up the following week. The next week was much the same. And the week after that, I started running out of things to say.

Thing is, he never really offered anything in the way of feedback. He had even stated that this would be the case, as his silently absorbing everything I offered was supposedly part of his therapeutic method, or some such thing. But over the course of time, I started to recognize a few things. First off, it didn't even matter if I said anything; he would very contentedly sit there the entire time and just wait me out until it was time to leave. And the vast majority of the time, regardless of whether or not I said anything, his gaze was fixed on a point over by the windowsill, just out of my line of vision.

Well, I mean... even as a kid, I was certainly no dummy. I made a point of looking at that windowsill as I passed it one day. Situated up there, where he could easily rest his gaze without his less observant patients ever even suspecting, was a clock. He was quite literally just relaxing as the minutes passed and counting the dollars as they tallied onto his bill. Two dollars a minute. That's what he charged.

I don't remember exactly how many months I went to him, but it was easily more than a year. Eventually, my parents informed me that he was moving his practice to a bigger office about an hour away in a much more expensive part of the area, and they asked me if I was interested in continuing to meet with him. I told them very bluntly... no. He very literally did absolutely nothing for me.

I recognize intellectually that this was probably a one-off situation... but nonetheless, I still haven't been able to fully get over my distrust of any form of therapy nor of any therapists, since.

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'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)

Not sure if this was intentional or not... but you seem to have missed a couple of copy/pasted references to subreddits: one in paragraph two of rule 3 and one in the rule 4 paragraph.