Websites people say have changed their lives

For me it was a band fan club website. It was built on top of a highly customized version of phpbb. There were quirks so that people could change the color of text and embed pictures etc even though that wasn't allowed. That was what sent me down the rabbit hole: how did they change the color of the text??

Unfortunately, eventually it led me far enough that I found an xss vuln and upon reporting it they shut down the ability to comment/post/pm at all. So now it just sits there frozen in time.

I eventually scraped the site (some 2GB of posts) and rebuilt the site from scratch with pyramid/sqlalchemy/postgres. I offered it up for use, but didn't get much traction. Still, that was a very fun project. Interesting how the site was still sending me down the rabbit hole all those years later.

stackoverflow

alternate cache http://archive.is/WZQ9p

I love such summary sites, and probably will spend the next weeks reading/watching stuff from this one. However, I have to note a mistake I often make that other people may make as well:

Often when we think "wow, that's life changing!" it's actually a strong emotional response of surprise. It is really helpful when it happens because the content provided demands it. It helps us to learn faster and stay motivated to the end of the content. But sometimes it's not the content itself, but the presentation. And just like Coka Cola may taste exciting when you haven't been drinking any sugary drink for years, the presentation itself may be the only thing exciting about it. It creates the emotional response by artificially triggering our buttons, but not because it really has some valuable lesson.

I really need to remind myself of that before I start to dive in. Hope it helps some others to filter the real content from the sugar water as well.

The issues that seems to trouble the majority of users on Reddit, or at least the more vocal users, seems pretty fare removed from the average persons life. You sort of end up with the impression that the average users for the "mainstream" subreddits are pot smoking, male-to-female transgendered, bacon-eating vegans, 14 year old hippies with college degrees.

If anything I believe that Reddit have shown me that people across the world are much more diverse than I would have imagined. Similar in many many ways, but with vastly different priorities and problems. In the more niche subreddits people communicate extremely well, despite their differences, simply because they share a common interest.