Absolutely adore Kottke.org.
It's also crazy how you can increase the usefulness/nice-ness of most things just by doing them for a long time.
Kottke.org is 25 years old today
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Today, user generated content is a the golden goose that also shits everywhere and honks at everyone that comes through the door unless you police it tirelessly Meh, some sort of good spam filter + good moderation (not of dissident opinion but of pure trash , oneliners and other boring stuff) and you'll resolve most issues, at least when it comes to blog comments.
"good moderation" is hard and exhausting. it may be possible for your small blog with little traffic, but for something like kottke.org?
I've personally been a moderator for communities with up to ~2 million users, where the main point of the biggest community was discussions around subjects that are generally taboo in society, so it attracts a lot of low-effort posts for sure. On average, the community had at least ~50K members online at any given time, if there is some big news that number increased a lot.
And we managed to moderate it well. Granted, the community has ~100 moderators who are all doing it in their free-time, but with the right tooling and the right guidelines/rules, moderation is not impossible. It's just really hard to get right.
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#53how come i've never heard of this site? I feel out of the loop
It's one of the early waves of blogs, popular on the early internet. I don't think it was really "relevant"/popular in the last 5-10 years, but I might be wrong.
> popular on the early internet
Popular on the early(ish) web. The equivalent for the internet would be .plan files, perhaps?
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, you are Mike Chambers. You are one of the person who made one of the biggest impact in my life and career. Your email that fateful day inviting me to be a "Macromedia Champion" (or something like that in 2002-ish) and the eventual "Lego" invite changed my life and career. It was the time I was in between jobs and was helping out everyone everywhere with Flash problems. Man, you are making me cry. You made me si…
FYI for people who haven’t pieced it together, the letter in the photos from BRajeshwar was sent by Mesh.
This is a very nice moment. Meeting each other on the internet after all those years. Nice.
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#55Ah yes, the age of blogs. Seems like yesterday you'd stumble on interesting blogs by people, and they would link to 20 or so more interesting blogs... And you could subscribe to all of them using RSS. And there were easy tools to subscribe to RSS feeds, and also publish your blog as an RSS feed. It ain't so easy these days.
Shameless plug: There are still lots of personal blogs out there and an easy way to stumble on them is https://indieblog.page/
I loved this one. I opened two articles and both were interesting. Thank you for sharing!
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#56Also a very nice shout out to my favourite show in the article : Halt and Catch Fire.
One of only a few shows that actually presented tech as it really was in the early days. I was depressed when the show was finished.
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#57i really should reboot memepool
Oh, please do this. Memepool was the greatest thing on the web for a long time, and I was very happy to be an occasional contributor of links ..
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#58Wow it’s been a long time. This post inspired me to pull my trusty rss reader out of the dustbin and add a couple of feeds. I used to have lots of feeds and it was the main source of web content but somehow that all fell away over the years.
The problem is that there is a deluge of content out there and I have less time to consume it than I did back when kottke and others started. I’ll subscribe to something and never have time to get back to it. It’s like buying books and never being able to read them (another “hobby” of mine). Maybe one day “when I retire” (if I’m lucky enough). Maybe if I had only one interest it would work but I’ve always been interested in so many things—there’s so much out there that’s fascinating! It’s a dilemma I don’t know my way out of.
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#59I don’t want to take away from a really good article, but I want to comment on:
> it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity
I get it, I feel similarly, but maybe like life we need to decide what we consume and somehow find a way to consume a more personal web?
Find those corners / collection of sites we feel are good, and share?
Re: Kottke.org is 25 years old today
#60> P.P.P.P.S. Ha, I’ve thought of one more thing: I’ve turned comments on for this post! kottke.org used to allow comments on every post, but it’s been almost 8 years since the last time they were on. The most telling point of the post was at the very end. Gosh we were so young and naive. Just setup a website to accept comments from all over the world. How exciting! Who knows who might visit! And we'll learn about how…
I think part of the decision was that a busy comment section at the time was maybe… a dozen posts.
There weren’t upvotes, retweets, etc to encourage less desirable content, etc. The text stood on its own.
We knew there could be bad things but we could handle it, if only because volume.