ahh the good ol flamewar days of IRC
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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I miss Yahoo Answers
In that case I can recommend "turning Yahoo Answers into beautiful music": https://m.youtube.com/shorts/NDvaRF4HQHQ
First we created communities that we used to share information and ideas. This allowed people to grow in their skills and in turn teach others what they learnt. This cycle kept the communities going, providing an important service for everyone involved.
Then capitalism turned those communities into walled gardens, often using predatory patterns to increase engagement to the detriment of the quality. Being walled off made it harder to share the knowledge, leaving people with only a few larger holdouts of what once had been.
Then we created machines to do the learning for us, finally killing off the concept of information sharing communities. These machines learnt from every knowledge sharing community that existed previously and became the place to access that knowledge. Without people coming into the communities, even the last holdouts could no longer sustain themselves. The ability to share and gain new knowledge was removed, causing stagnation for everyone involved. The ability to actually learn anything was also greatly reduced, having the machines apply the knowledge directly. The new machines can't learn, can't think, can't reason or be creative, all they can do is remix already existing information and regress to the mean while doing so.
But for a while there, a lot of value was created for the shareholders.
This has got vaguely Douglas Adams vibes.
I am saving this.
I've had this in my head for a bit, but you expressed it much more eloquently then I ever could have, going to save this for later!
This text is great, you have amazing writing :)
Thank you so much!
LLM are useless for niche stuff. They are ok-ish, if you do something another 100s of people already did (like, overengineering a webpage). Which is contra the idea of open source, btw.
Jokes on them, I have a shame kink.
It's called humiliation kink, you stupid stupid boy.
The other option was that nobody ever replied...
And then it turns out that it was himself last month.
Then we learned that if you wanted to get the right answer from people ... all you had to do was confidently post an answer, any answer, especially if it was wrong ... and so many people would jump on you so fast to tell you how stupid you were and give you the right answer.
.... and you also had to tie an onion on your belt which was the style of the time.
I'm studying right now and I'm the lead for a group project. I've been having a hard time getting the team to actually talk with each other and come up with ideas. Someone told me the other week "pitch bad ideas badly". So I tried that with the title of our project I put down a shit awful name, told everyone about it, and within 5 minutes the team came back to me with an actual title
A Project Manager just earned their wings.
Phishing legitimate answers out of people by exploiting their ego is still one of the most impressive things I haven't thought of.
Will try to keep in mind
It's called Godwin's law
So that's how I can get away with it! You just eradicated every last hints of remorse that I had in me.
“style at the time”
The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones
I learned to let you all squabble amongst yourselves and get the answer. Since every question is a duplicate, it stands to reason the question I have has already been answered.
all you had to do was confidently post an answer, any answer, especially if it was wrong
so called murphy's law...
I love how you keep making this joke mr. cunningham.
Now we go to a text transformer that poops spaghetti code by the bucket.
At least it tells me I'm right all the time. 🤗
"And you stopped because now you ask AI instead?"
"No! Because the special website adopted AI!"
What was the website? I just had books in '95 and later, Geocities wasn't great for chat, IRC and network news groups were the best places to get help
The web was pretty small in the '90s
I spent my time in newsgroups in role playing game flame wars
StackOverflow
It was Experts Exchange. Then they paywalled everything like greedy idiots - hiding decades of useful community knowledge.
Then everyone moved rapidly to StackExchange, which had coexisted but been quite small until EE did their thing.
Ah, software developing nerds and expertsexchange. A story as old as time.
It starts with innocent questions, then thigh highs during long coding sessions and... you know the rest. It's all in the name! 😅
Go to any linux forum or help site today and you can experience it right now.
"Oh, someone had the same problem" as I see forum thread in search results, followed by finding out that thread turned into a gaslighting session on why OP's problem wasn't actually a problem, and no solution was provided as result. 🌝
Why would you want to X? Dont X. Problem solved 😊
$currentYear was meant to be year of the Linux desktop! Why isn't it?? 😡 Those oafs should be on here by now
Edit: it really highlights the two kinds of patriots. "My country is the best country, anyone criticising can get away from us" and "I am proud of what my country has and has achieved and I want it to be even better; here's how we can make it better because we lack X,y and z"
Windows is popular
According to many Linux users, Windows isn't Linux (Which just means they don't want to fix X cause it's not a problem for them)
Therefore, Linux isn't popular.
I've unironically seen people in forums say that Linux doesn't need to grow, that it already acvomplishes its purpose which I guess is serving a bunch of specialized geeks. They don't think mass adoption will bring anything good, as if FOSS could be enshittified instead of getting more support from those interested in contributing to something that works.
To me it feels like the ultimate "fuck you I got mine". It would be different if they said something like "we would like to do this, but we lack the resources". That would be understandable, but they appear to be straigth up hostile to adding stuff that would get more people to use Linux. It feels like classic gatekeeping (which is dumb cause Linux can't enshsittify).
There's always someone willing to tinker, if these people grow up with Windows, I think the tinkering "window" might be lost or wasted on a restrictive OS. But who would want to tinker in order to get working something that should work already? Tinkering should be fun and optional, not a task scheduled at every tuesday.
You're right. I updated my post just before your reply.
I spent some time in the mid 00s installing various modification programs on windowd to modify it with stupid shit I found on deviantart. It would have been better if I got to do it on Linux.
Although some enshittification is happening for certain viewpoints on Linux, with some propriety things being allowed and the systemd DOB debacle, and AI on fedora.
That smiley at the end. I laughed. 😂
As a masochist, I enjoy the freebsd forum
*freebdsm
It was right there.
honestly it was okay until linux came along, linus torvalds was truly the jerry springer of abusive online communities