The good old says were when there were about 60 million people on the internet and it was new and unknown.

I think it wasn't social media that changed it for the worse, at least not perse, it was the internet-connected phone.

(I've been around since 1999 too). You missed Natalie Portman, BTW

Speaking as an old graybeard UI guy.... we have just come up with more and more complex solutions to the same old internet "one weird trick" of putting your information on someone else's computer.

Yeah, I remember "Server Side Rendering"... we called Java Servlets or JSPs or PHP or ASP. There were clear divisions of labors and boundaries were respected.

Even when we had to go to make everything feel like an app, at least RESTful stuff still had those boundaries.

Now that everyone needs the same code running front and back, and JS (I'm not a hater of JS by any means but still) stuff like this is bound to have happened.

10-15 years ago there was such a split for web engineering. They wanted to make everything on the web look like an app, and a lot of backend guys hate anything looking like UI, so lets have an amicable divorce and do everything through these god awful endpoints, so the backend folks don't have to touch UI and the frontend folks can think they're "more real" engineers by making stuff that looks like it's a black box app vs enjoying the natural versatility and iterability of the old web.

I'm sure I'll never get hired for it, but good ol PHP (hell for most things I skip the MySQL; poor mans no-SQL w/ JSON files on the file system works and scales well for so many things)... vanilla Javascript can even be beautifully declerative when you want it to, with string templates building up whatever new DOM you didn't get from the server. I have these sites that last for decades, and when it comes time to add something, they're easy to figure out and adapt and there's no library hell (browsers have gotten so GOOD yet still so backwards compatibile over the years)

So I look for like minded souls using terms like "buildless" and "evergreen". But it's like an underground movement...

Garbage In, Gospel Out

I'm more interested in Skype vs Zoom...

I'm 50, in UI, and feeling similar.
I don't mind agile per se (but it's difficult to come in on a very established project - so many decisions were made, and you don't even have the full context to judge them properly. It's like learning a new language, basic fluency is hard won)

What I do mind is how much flavor of the month there has been - a lot of complexity and difficulty in following code path for very theoretical gains . Any redux project smells so much like 2019, it's sad.

So like 20+ years ago, Wired declared "free wins".
I think people - after being nickel and literally dimed by 10-cents-per-SMS - were rightfully shy of "pay per transaction", because thy weren't sure what their usage would look like and that shit adds up.

So two decades later we have this sad fork in the road, two main paths:
* "free", but shitty with ads or other ways they figured out how to commoditize your attention
* subscription, where they can keep collecting rent no matter how little you use it.
( with "pay per usage" the third way less traveled)

Cow Clicker did it first. Or at least, earlier.

Probably right that it's just catnip for people hunting Chevos or whatever the kids are calling them now.

After they finish the BSOD screen, the systemd team's next project is to add Clippy to the boot sequence.

In the 1950's COBOL was supposed to let bosses write their own programs. In the 1990s, Visual Basic was supposed to do the same. I guess this meme repeats on a 30-40 year cycle.

I had a Kaypro II. I did the Micro Cornucopia magazine II to IV upgrade and ended up with two 2/3 height DSQD floppies.

The Kaypro company was owned by the Kay family. I heard a description of Kaypro's demise as being caused by "Too many Kays, not enough pros".

I'll believe it when I (don't) see it.

As you're already aware, making a new platform is an extremely dicey proposition. The "fax machine" effect is huge. Do you really think Truth will give Trump the attention he needs and he'd actually resist the siren call of his old soapbox?

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCy... points out -- rather selfish mentality. If you get the virus some other way, you are jus a walking virus fan.

Whatever it is, we have been dealing with this and a host of other issues from them for years.

Absolutely love the boards, and some of the staff is really cool, but the company really is abusive when it comes to this sort of stuff.