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What brought you here?
Hey guys I'm a new account here just wondering what brought everybody here. I'm sure this has been asked to death but I'm quite curious.
I'm originally a redditor, as I think all of us are, and I came here hoping to escape the growing toxicity of reddit and also to help developers a new community. I also personally believe reddit is making anti consumer choices as of recent and want to move to a nonprofit site such as this one.
I had a lot of respect for Deimorz based on his time as a reddit admin, but also before that as the developer of AutoModerator. When I heard he was working on a new site I became immediately interested in checking it out. I emailed him to request an invite that day.
I'd also been losing faith in reddit for... a long time now. Even before the Digg migration. I signed up some ten years ago and enjoyed the programming discussion, but it's become something else completely. I still visit often and moderate a mid-sized sub, but my heart isn't in it anymore.
I was excited by the prospect of a new start. I like the underlying technology. I like the community. I respect the admin. I hope to be able to contribute to a good thing.
I grew tired with the low effort posts and abundance of fluff on 'technical' subreddits like r/vim and r/archlinux. r/vim displayed open hostility towards newbies who were trying to switch from other editors. Quality posts got buried while vim puns got upvoted like crazy. It's hard to find good posts when sorting by TOP and when I heard about tildes.net I decided to give it go.
I still haven't found a vim community but I'm liking the overall group here!
/r/vim is one of my go-to examples for "even technical subreddits aren't safe from being taken over by low-effort garbage posts". It constantly ends up with the top posts being things like photos of t-shirts with vim jokes on them, 20 different people submitting photos of their keyboards to try to one-up each other, etc.
Yeah, and they have no excuse for being so slack when r/machinelearning is laser-focused and tightly moderated. Now that is how it should be run.
Like many others here, I grew disillusioned with reddit. I'd originally joined reddit back in 2009 and loved it. It felt very similar to how Tildes feels right now.
Over the course of the next seven years and various different usernames, I watched reddit grow and become unrecognizable as the community I'd originally been so ecstatic to join. Some of that I place on the platform itself, and some of it I put on broader internet culture at large, but it wasn't until I experienced direct, widespread harassment for a reddit post that I really saw behind the curtain and was exposed to the abject ugliness of what the internet, and reddit in particular, can be.
Though that was a huge nudge, that wasn't what caused me to leave the site. It wasn't until 2016, during the leadup to the United States Presidential election, that I finally left reddit and Facebook. Everywhere I went on the internet was a battleground. The behind-the-curtain ugliness was now front-and-center. It was unavoidable. I felt like I was watching every social landscape I knew burn down in flames. I lost a lot of respect for people, even people I was politically in alignment with, because it seemed like everyone was forgetting the human.
Concurrent with my own disconnect with the more toxic aspects of internet culture was a growing distrust of companies overreaching on privacy issues. I learned that nearly everything I was doing online was being watched, tracked, and aggregated by companies--many of which I'd never even heard of. Even companies I'd previously trusted and loved, like Google and Facebook, were acting in incredibly concerning and predatory ways. This was another curtain behind which there was only ugliness.
So, I left reddit, left Facebook, and de-Googled. In some ways it was great, and in others it was awful. I'd never been more isolated socially, and instead of feeling liberated, I just felt like I was alone and adrift. Deleting Facebook took away social interactions with people I know in real life, and deleting reddit took away social interactions from people I didn't know. Given the hostility of the time and the buildup to those deletions, these were desired outcomes, but the fallout was difficult in a different way. I already felt socially alienated, and choosing to step away made that even more acute.
After a roughly two-year internet detox/socially homeless period, I felt the acute longing for a digital community again. I wanted a place that felt like reddit when I first joined. I would occasionally check in on /r/RedditAlternatives, hoping that something would come along and actually take hold. Several options came and went, and they either failed to launch or became heavily politicized ideological islands. When I saw that a former reddit admin was throwing his weight behind one, and then when I saw that it had pro-social and privacy priorities, I was excited but cautious. And then, later, when I saw that it was successfully up, running, and had enough of a userbase to not be a ghost town, I figured I'd give it a whirl.
I've now been here almost a year, and I couldn't be happier. I like what Tildes is, and I like what it has the potential to be.
Yeah. This seems pretty nice and I quite like the minimalist UI. Reddit dying is making me sad though.
If I may, how do you hear about stuff to alpha test? I've always liked being an early adopter and alpha testing stuff, but Tildes is the first time in my life I got on something early. Is there some kind of news service or something?
I saw Amarok shilling Tildes in a thread complaining about the redesign, I read the docs and lost my shit telling my friends this was exactly what I (and the internet as a whole) needed. Tildes looks back at the past but thinks toward the future in a way that I'd like to see become a trend. Similar design and moderation principles applied to other kinds of sites are my dream, I immediately found myself wanting to see this kind of thing but for image boards and various formats other than Reddit-likes. Anyway, shortly after I got an invite. Go a little bit beyond that and I deleted my Reddit account, and here I've been ever since.
We've also had a significant influx or two from Hacker News as well.
That's interesting. I never really thought about sites like hacker news. In fact, I've never even heard of the site. What's the issue there?
Hacker News has a history of really great conversation, super intelligent and in-the-know people (Dropbox as a startup was announced there).
Reddit refugees and what not have been driving the quality of the conversation down over the last few years. The conversation used to be free of fluff, jokes, and other nonsense. It's still really good, but it is definitely not like it was 5 years ago.
My impression is that the site is full of "startup bros", for lack of a better term. It's always been like that; it is Y Combinator/Paul Graham's creation after all. There's just a peculiar atmosphere that I can't quite get a grip on. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not. Downvotes and moderation feel fairly arbitrary to me in a way it doesn't on other sites. For the record, I just checked and I registered in 2007. I still haven't earned the "right" to downvote, however that is determined. I haven't been the most active member but have lurked and occasionally commented on the site for 12 years.
Downvote rights on HN are given when you reach 501 karma.
That makes sense, I get that. I actually really like the moderation, it has kept the content consistent for a long time. Sort of like /r/askhistorians, just not as good obviously.
I've been registered for about ten years, and I still can't downvote. Downvote rights are granted on activity, so you need to comment regularly and thoughtfully.
It definitely is full of the startup bros, although I don't really mind all that much. Its the only place on the internet that has/had the type of conversation it has. Plus, you hear from people that would never participate anywhere else. Hearing direct from owners/founders and grey beards and admins and whoever else, haven't found a place like that anywhere else.
I'm not so sure that's right. From what I've read and experienced it's based on a karma threshold. Specifically 501 according to the "undocumented HN features" page.
I guess they
>rather than>=.It's got quite a lot of very pro-business, pro-capitalist users with often questionable views on race, gender and class. They don't always dominate threads though. I consume a lot of left media and hold left political views, and sometimes I enter some politicized threads and my jaw drops a little at how right-wing the comments are. Other times though, the most upvoted comments are decidely leftist.
I, too, came here through a random mention in /r/beta or somewhere similar, although I don't remember who did it. Since then, I have become the “mentioiner” myself :-)
Unlike many people here, I was not actively looking for Tildes.
I was reviewing the meta-subreddits on Reddit (as I did regularly) and followed a thread of discussions back to this post which mentioned a new Reddit alternative. A co-mod and I were continually on the look-out for places to eventually migrate our subreddit and its community because we knew Reddit was deteriorating (we looked at Voat while it was still WhoaVerse, and we also checked out Imzy before it collapsed). In that context, I messaged him to ask if he knew about this latest attempt to create a Reddit alternative.
He did know about it, he was already signed up, and he sent me an invite code.
I signed up out of curiosity, and started poking around.
It didn't take long for me to realise that this was what I'd been trying to find on Reddit for years. I had always been drawn to subreddits which were discussion-based, anti-meme, highly moderated, and generally high quality. Suddenly, I'd stumbled across a whole forum which was intended to be these things, rather than having to find (and defend) small islands of civility in a sea of barbarity.
It also helped that I was disillusioned with Reddit's administration due to their redesign: both the design itself and how they handled it. (I'd been on the front line dealing with complaints about it, due to my role as a moderator of /r/Help.)
Without intending to, I found myself spending more and more time on Tildes, and less and less time on Reddit. A few months in, I embraced it: Tildes was my new internet home.
And here I am!
I discovered Tildes early on a little over a year ago via the Tildes subreddit. I have been looking for a good internet community for I believe over two years now. I was heavy into NeoGaf for awhile until it fell apart, tried ResetEra for awhile and it eventually started leaving me feeling worse after visiting it than I felt before. With Reddit itself, there is such a large variety of people and perspectives that are completely anonymous, that I can't relate to posts or comments. When I read comments on Reddit, I honestly can't tell if its written by a 13 year old who has no life experience or a ~30 year old dude who never lives outside their bubble. For certain sensitive topics, knowing the background of who is saying what lends credibility to their voice. Otherwise, its all just mindless, idle chatter that does nothing but waste time.
I will sound elitist here but in general I wanted a community that relies heavily on sources to understand how an opinon got from Point A to B, compassion for the other users, high quality articles, and very little reactionary posting. My main focus has been to consume wholesome/beneficial online content and avoid the unwholesome. I want to be around people who know when to listen rather than force their opinions on others. Tildes seems like its going in the right direction for what I am looking for. The only downside is the lack of user activity for certain topics that I am interested in. And I do have to filter out hot-button issues occasionally here but thats okay because I understand everyone here has different interests and things they want to talk about, its my responsibility to not complain at the wrong time and use the tools given to me for my own content moderation.
I don't mean this as a troll or anything like that, but why do you believe that it is elitist to have compassion for other users? I would never make that connection, and it feels more elitist to make the claim that it is an elite position.
I was referencing more of the combination of all those things, rather than one particular thing. In my view, there are very view people who can capture all those qualities in their interactions online, myself included for the most part, though I try to strive towards those ideals.
You would need a group of users that fit all those qualities to drive a forum's culture so that others will be aligned with those qualities.
I was invited relatively early by Deimos (iirc, there were ~20 users when I joined).
I still have dreams of actually contributing worthwhile code to this project!
Crazy how fast it expanded. I joined about three weeks later and there were already ~250 users when I joined. Been a year and we're over 10,000 now, although tbh, it doesn't feel like there's all that many more users here haha. Which is kinda nice while it lasts, I like the lowkey and small feeling community we've got so far.
Some newcomers become so-called “power users”. One day, they don't exist and, the next day, they're everywhere. And some “power users” drop away (but it did take a fatal condition to force one to leave ☹).
I came here looking for a smaller forum experience like I had in the 2000s. I miss the sense of community and higher-quality discussion that reddit has been losing. It's obviously a lot slower-moving here, but that's ok for me.
Partly as a way of getting off the brain candy that is Reddit. I noticed I'm thinking a lot more before I comment here, I'm reading articles I would have normally avoided, and it's been great.
I found it by stalking Deimos on Reddit for a totally unrelated thing, and all the documentation screamed at me that I should join.
I got here thanks to a post by Warmo161 I happened upon while reading AskReddit, and really liked what I saw once I looked about. The values of the site really appealed to me far and wide, and covered virtually every gripe I'd come to have with Reddit over the years.
It wasn't just quality content that drew me – although that was definitely valuable – but other things, such as the notion that, for Tildes, "the mobile site is the app." Reddit's incessant need to obnoxiously hammer you in to using their app instead of the mobile site was absolutely loathesome, especially as my phone is a toaster and has no space for an extra app. Not to mention the fact that the prospect of "giving in" after being so thoroughly badgered by Reddit to get their software was appalling.
For me, Reddit was already becoming pretty terrible in general anyway. I hadn't been around too long in it's history to really see the decline per se, but I still began to see all the cracks that'd developed in my preferred subreddits. I liked visiting /r/gamedev, but have since realized that a lot of it's potential value is hampered by the fact that it seems to only get two kinds of content: either new developers asking for advice, or "look what I did" posts; little room was left for informative things or posts about new resources. If I go to any subreddit for a game I like, such as /r/tf2 or /r/riskofrain, all I see are dramatically low-effort memes. There are still some good subreddits – /r/games in particular seems to be doing reasonably well – but in general it's become disappointing as hell.
I've not been on Tildes very long yet, but I can say with certainty that for the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm actually learning and improving myself by reading what I see here. It really is the quality that was promised. I even feel like I could talk about sensitive subjects and still end up in good discussion; I mean, I've seen people change their minds about political issues here. I've never seen that happen on Reddit.
It's just really nice to have a site where I not only feel comfortable posting, but one where I have confidence in it's future. I haven't dropped Reddit completely yet, but this place has been fantastic so far, and I've no doubt that'll continue to change.
(Thanks for making this topic by the way — really seems to have generated a lot of interesting posts, and has been a great read!)
/r/Games is a very appropriate example to choose. I actually started that subreddit out of frustration with the low quality of /r/gaming, and if you read some of the old meta posts in it, you'll see a lot of similarities to approaches here on Tildes. I've made a comparison a few times along the lines of "as /r/Games was to /r/gaming, Tildes is to reddit as a whole".
I remember reading this when I was initially considering Tildes, and it along with AutoModerator were among the many things that cemented the idea to me that you would be a great admin! I was already convinced that Tildes sounded good, but seeing how much prior experience you had made everything magnitudes better.
I really do want to thank you for creating and maintaining this website. Coming here has been one of the rare unambiguously good things that's happened in my life, and I don't say that lightly. It's been wonderful to be here, and I really appreciate your efforts!
I found tildes literally by doing a google search for "good reddit alternatives". I saw a thread on reddit where someone was being lambasted for asking a perfectly innocuous question (the hivemind was REALLY laying into them), so I decided then to leave the site permanently and started seeking some place better. Ironically it was a thread on /r/RedditAlternatives that was discussing Tildes that brought my attention to it.
A short email to Deimos later, who was kind enough to send me an invite to join, and voila!
Also, welcome to Tildes! We're glad to have you!
I'm in a very similar boat. I was tired of all the negativity, and just overall bad behavior on reddit. I wanted to go some place where I could expect civil and thoughtful discussion, instead of having to keep track of which subreddits were still worth participating in.
I still have a few holdout subreddits I'm a part of on reddit, so I haven't gone as far as deleting my account. But every time I catch myself mindlessly scrolling through reddit, the more I think about it.
Oh man, that's another thing. The mindless scrolling. I gave up reddit and facebook at approximately the same time, so I suddenly found myself with a WEALTH of time I didn't previously "have". That's why I started focusing so heavily on my writing; I figured I may as well be productive, because goodness knows I'll never be good enough at Overwatch to go pro, lol
Thanks. Always nice to receive a warm welcome instead of a complaint about another "New youtube viewing Redditor" joining or something like that.
Goodness forbid someone watch youtube AND want polite, mature discourse, right?
Well, polite anyway. Pretty sure I alone bring the maturity of the site down by at least, like...40 BMUs.
It's not about maturity. Immaturity can be fun and innocent enough. It's toxicity. I swear everybody in Reddit is always trying to make a snappy quip lol.
I literally googled "reddit alternative" after I felt it was the last straw over there. It is so big now that it runs itself. The same jokes over and over. The same content over and over. The reddit circle jerk jokes are now a circle jerk of their own. It's' just too average
But the real problem is how that concept stifles anything like discussion, conversation, nuance, etc. We joke how it's a hive mind but fuck it, it quite clearly is. I'm not about that shit.
The only subreddit I frequent is action sports stuff because it is small and doesn't have a "culture" around it, and MMA so that I can be updated with news as well as watch old fight clips.
All the other large generic subs are 420% dogshit it's insane.
Also rampant moderator abuse nobody will ever talk about because the fact is if you operate within the hive mind you will never have an issue. Think or say anything differently however and they may whip out ban hammers for really bent, exaggerated reasons.
Saw it in a comment on HN, asked for an invite from Deimos and he was kind enough to send one pretty quickly. I don't really know why I signed up, but I'm really happy that I did.
What I really like about Tildes is the fact that it is still small, and at the risk of sounding elitist, the community seems to be comprised of more educated and mature people compared to many other popular "forums." I haven't yet seen anyone bash anyone in the comments for the sake of it. Most people try to be nice, which I can't really say for Reddit or HN.
Pretty much same as everyone else, reddit blah blah blah, but in particular -- I was disillusioned with how truereddit devolved from actual, content-rich articles (which is originally what most of reddit was but whatever) to a thirty-word HuffPo essay on "Orange man bad" re: circlejerk.
I maintain enough of a presence to check on my sports teams and leagues and check modqueue while browsing /new of a fairly large sub that I moderate, but other than that, nothing's really keeping me around there anymore.
I think I found a link on Hacker News. Same thing as others, emailed Deimos and got a signup link. While I'm not an especially prolific user, I enjoy dipping in and out much like I am on HN. It's certainly refreshing here - I feel I'm too old for the meme-culture that is Reddit and while I love an in-joke (and have plenty of them with mates), I find the in-jokes on Reddit just a bit old now.
Ie.
"Should I get the black hat or the brown hat?"
"Yes."
Yeah, was funny first (few) time(s) but Reddit knows far too well how to kill a joke.
I saw a post on HN a while back and got an invite from Deimos. Unlike most people it seems, I wasn't specifically running from Reddit; I have never seriously used Reddit for discussions, only memes and pop news. I enjoy Hacker News, but it is still uncommon for me to engage the forum side.
The main reason I joined Tildes was my growing ethical concerns with the advertising-first business model that nearly every forum / social media website use. I had recently finished "The Conquest of Bread" by Piotor Kroptkin, which didn't completely convert me to Anarchism, but did plant a question. What if we didn't waste time and energy on total losses to humanity, like advertising, SEO, market research, lobbying, etc? No starving child in Yemen has gotten a loaf of bread becuase Tim in marketing made a killer campaign. We fund empty jobs because we are to afraid to accept that we have already passed the point where everyone needs to work. I also have serious problems with the way ads have become an enormous tax on our collective attention.
I know that me not using these services won't matter, but I have to start somewhere.
You not using these services does matter because you can still benefit from not using them, as well as encourage others to join you.
A mention on HN, which unfortunately like reddit seems to be going downhill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023209
I've been growing more disillusioned with HN as well. It seems like the groupthink has grown stronger than before. I feel much more frustrated when browsing the comments than I did in the past.
I only got into internet forums almost a year and a half ago, the first one I was on was Reddit. It was really cool at first, but I soon noticed it's degrading quality. During my browsing, I saw a post about an alternative—Tildes. I joined and posted/commented a bit, but for some reason didn't come back to it (was also on Reddit less) until recently because Reddit is getting really bad. Now I am on Tildes every day and love it.
I saw it on either HN or Reddit. I'd been using automod for years and years and will basically do anything Deimos says.
For me, reddit is basically moderating a few smaller communities and answering spreadsheet questions. Tildes popping up was perfect timing, as I was looking for another haunt.
Tildes is the perfect balance between the best of reddit and the quality of HN.
The Reddit Alternatives subreddit sent me here one on of my many searches for something to replace Reddit for me. And honestly, I feel like this will just be a temporary stop on my search. Nothing really against the place, it's just my dream site has a larger freedom of speech element that Tildes wasn't really built to provide. It will become similar to HackerNews for me, a place I can get a decent viewpoint on various subjects.
Well that and I hope that more decentralized services gain more ground in the future and that it can be a good place for discussion. Sites that can't be bought or censored by governments or corporations no matter their viewpoint.
Yep, there are lots of other people trying to be the "free speech alternative". It's a rough road though (and not one I have any interest in), because the main people you attract initially are the ones who feel like they're unable to say the things they want to on existing platforms, and that... tends to be the type of thing that gets you banned from those.
https://notabug.io/ might be one for you to check out, it's both decentralized and definitely freedom-of-speech-oriented.
Keep an eye on Prismo. It's attempting to be a federated reddit, which will allow it to resist centralization and censorship. It's not yet ready for prime-time, but it has a lot of potential.
I've seen a couple others with the same answer as mine, which is that I came from the RedditAlternatives subreddit, namely when I was browsing their mega thread of alternatives and was checking out each one individually.
What made me want to stick with tildes above all the others were two things. One of them was the UI and the UX, I really like the look of Tildes and how well it performs compared to so many other "reddit alternatives" (and I now know this is not by chance but rather a core design principle when it comes to choosing the technologies to run the site) and the second was the fact that Tildes actually attempts to have some kind of moral compass guiding it, rather than going for the usual "everything goes" approach that many other alternatives boast about, which I really wanted.
Of course what keeps me coming back everyday is the community more than anything else. I enjoy reading people's comments and learning about new points of view, something I find myself not doing as much as I used to on Reddit, and I hope it stays that way for years to come.
I browse /r/random semi-often and just ended up on a thread about all the nefarious censorship going on, and someone mentioned tildes as an alternative, saying they had a few invites they could give out. Figured I'd give it a swatch. I've still got no idea who it was (on here) that invited me.
In the interest of transparency, and to make sure you know what you're getting into, I feel obliged to point out that Tildes is not a bastion of free speech. Quite the opposite, in fact:
We've had a few pro-free speech and anti-censorship people encounter unexpected problems because they thought Tildes was something other than it is. I just want to make sure you're clear on what Tildes is and is not.
Yeah, I've read it before; that "nefarious" was meant with tongue firmly in cheek. I personally was/am not as up in arms about the recently popular complaints about Reddit, probably because I wasn't there for the really early years and I didn't frequent the default subs past my first month. Reddit's issues, or at least some of the bigger ones with the community, were pretty plain to see, even to a newcomer like me five years ago. The main reason I'm on Tildes is for quality of discussion, which I can still find on Reddit in pockets but is not as segregated over here.
16 years of Reddit likely going down the drain in a month. Hopefully it's for a better place.
Saw it on HN, read and liked the ideas, read good things about Deimos, so I thought I'd give it a go. It was not publicly viewable back then, so it would've been hit or miss, but it definitely was a hit, I loved it here and decided to stay.
Welcome!
It's a bit fuzzy now, but if I remember correctly it was the redesign that initially brought me here. The redesign had a lot of wasted screen space, it removed sub styling, and the part that really irritated me was that it wanted me to change how I interacted with content. Looking around at the time, many seemed to think the same way. Overall it was part of a trend that made it clear to me that Reddit cared more about advertisers than users.
Somewhere in the midst of that Tildes was mentioned. I saw who was behind it, and what the plans for it were. Things like Tildes not storing email addresses really sold it for me; it was just a level of care that I hadn't seen before.
On Reddit I was never a part of smaller or more quality subreddits. Before that I was never a part of any forums. The community here was a real change of pace for me. If nothing else Tildes has me actually leaving replies instead of purely being a lurker.
Wanted to move away from the toxic atmosphere and issues with moderation on most of Reddit, looked for Reddit alternatives, didn't want to go to Voat because who in their right mind would ever go on Voat, came here.
Hacker News, reddit getting overpopulated, Drakula theme.
For anything, I like to know what the alternatives to that thing are. Back in 2k-something this meant trying out MenuetOS, today it means faffing around with troff and occasionally browsing /r/redditalternatives - I even made a Voat account, back when it was just created/announced, and I had an Imzy account when it shut down - but most of the projects on there seem aimed at the "free speech"/"censorship is bad"/"we don't want no moderation" crowd, and that's something that I do not appreciate.
I can see the shit that people manage to pull, even on moderated subs, and even if I can fight fire with fire - even if I enjoy it - that's not something that makes me feel good about myself.
Tildes did not promise "no censorship" or "unlimited free speech". I also saw it being mentioned elsewhere, outside of Reddit (on a Telegram chat, I believe), so I decided to check it out, and - here I am.
Another reddit refugee. Toxicity on my city's main sub, and mod inability/disinterest in addressing it.
I listened from reddit about here and I asked a mod to let me in... as you see, he did!
As a fresh reddit transferee, this is my first post, replying to a topic that's over 3 years old. I'm posting to add meaningful content to the discussion but also as an initial experience to see what will happen once I hit the "Post comment" button.
I came here because of Reddit is not a fun place to be. It's run rampant with a small minority of voices coloring the entire discussion for everyone.
So far, Tilde seems to be a throwback to what I remember from the glory days of Web 1.5... when setting up an Apache server and learning what PERL/CGI meant opened up a wealth of curiosities to be explored and How-Tos to be read. The days of Slashdot.org and when Craigslist was THE thing.
Being here just makes me feel stupidly nostalgic.
Got tired of the toxicity, bot spam, astroturf spam, marketing spam, low effort shallow content
... and wouldn't you know it. I brought this topic back to FP of FP.
It's phpBB / forum-esque in that any old thread will be brought back to life simply by virtue of responding to it...
Indeed it is. :)
And welcome to Tildes. :)
Hey we’re at least Vbulletin level quality over here
Speaking of ye olde timey days, someone in the introduction topic the other day mentioned BBS' being their first "online" experience... which brought back some ancient memories of my own. Do you remember The Lionsheart Cartel? Were you ever on that? It was KMak's cousin's BBS that he ran out of their basement. I seem to recall you being there for some of the LAN parties at his cousin's house, but I can't remember if you were on the BBS as well.
Does the Venn diagram of LAN party and BBSes have an overlap...?? I guess in the > 9600 baud days... must've been, what, 10baseT?
9600 baud? Holy hell, are you from the future!? Surely modems will never get that fast! ;)
I started with a 2400 baud modem, but yes it was a 10BASE-T network. I used to "borrow" the Enterprise grade routers from my father's office so we could do our LAN parties. But even then, it was often faster to just transfer files via DB25 (printer) cables, or later via ZIP Drives than have everyone doing it over the network all at the same time.
And yes, I am pretty sure the Venn diagram of BBS users and early LAN party goers is just a circle. :P
ZIP drives... Oh, Iomega, whatever happened to you.
My first modem was a Hayes 1200 with a CGA / amber monochrome monitor... I remember my friend had a 2400 (which introduced compression) with EGA. ANSI art was never so beautiful. I remember when the local computer shop had VGA wallpaper of the tiger... mind was blown.
RLL vs MFM vs IDE drives. SX vs DX processors. MPC 2 compatibility. VESA graphics cards. Trumpet Winsock. Kids these days don't know how good they have it.
Welp, now I feel very old. Where's ~olddudes at...
My first modem was a USRobotics 2400, and my first proper graphics card was a Diamond Monster 3D, 3DFX Voodoo 1 card. All those companies were lost to the sands of time just like Iomega was too.
And lol yeah, kids these days really do have no idea how good they have it. I remember wrestling with my autoexec.bat, config.sys, and himem.sys files for days trying to get my latest game to actually work properly… with no World Wide Web to look for help on. And don’t even get me started on networking back in the day. LAN parties often took just as long to set up as you had left to play once you finally did get everyone hooked up and able to see each other properly.
And I realllllllly don’t miss the 50lbs CRT monitors either, LOL. God, those things were a PITA to lug around and bring to LAN parties.
I definitely remember that, and another called "Ability" or "Access" - online we used to use. Waiting for a dial in slot, playing ZZT in the background, hoping somebody posted a new cracked floppy image for Populous 2 or whatever. So pure lol. The ages of antiquity indeed.
Memories. Sweet sweet memories. The warez and cracking scene was so much simpler back then too. Sigh.
I legit remember the satisfaction of watching the Razor 1911 crack scroll by as we kicked off CARMAGEDDON LAN parties haha
Speaking of… If you want a massive hit of nostalgia, might I recommend checking out scene.org and downloading a few of the old cracktros to watch/listen to. E.g. https://files.scene.org/search/?q=Razor+1911
You can also find a lot of them on YouTube too:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cracktro&sp=EgIQAw%253D%253D
They might help inspire your next DNB track. ;)
I already have a team h20 folder of cracker chip tune mods. Way ahead of you ;)
Hah. I should have known. I still regularly listen to chip tunes too. It never goes out of style. :P
I like being a part of smaller communities. They feel more personal. I'm a part of a few others, and they're absolutely wonderful. Thought I'd give this a shot too.
Civil tone, no fluff, more in-depth feel than simple aggregator sites. And approachable admin. I also like Saidit.net for similar reasons. It's more catch-all and has little editorialising, but it's still growing. I now check both in tandem. Don't like Reddit; endless arguing and pontificating.
Someone mentioned it in an askreddit thread, I decided to check it out and here we are!