Brian Pavlovitz said:
Well, I'm sure this post will leave people wanting more
so I'll stop!
By the way, how does everyone like the new SDN look?
I think it's fine. At least it isn't crashing everytime I log on now, although that will probably start happening soon. This whole "karma" thing is a bit weird, I'm not sure where that came from. I would bet that the same people who are obsessed with high post counts are the same who will be obsessed with high karma, and thus keep creating alter egos and giving themselves more. Eliminating post counts is kind of silly. I don't think it will prevent people from continuing to post boring tripe and inside jokes. The whole thing does seem a bit more streamlined and works better. I am not really a veteran of a bunch of internet forums so I don't have much to compare to.
You know what's funny? When I started college in 1995 I did not have an email address and really didn't even know what the internet was. The computer lab at my high school for my first couple of years there was filled with a bunch of the old-style macintosh computers (the vertical box-like things). My senior year, one computer showed up that had a sign next to it that said, "internet access only." The whole year, I only saw one or two kids on that computer, and they were the same two kids who were there the entire freaking year. I only knew a couple of people who had email addresses. And this was not hicksville high, it was a famous, extraordinarily wealthy New England private school (my senior year two guys gave $25 million each to the school). Then I went to college and got an email, but accessed it using a dialup telnet thing from my room. I went to the computer lab a couple of times and they had this thing called the internet, I remember trying to figure out how the heck to remember all these dots and dashes. "is it http-colon-slash or backslash?" and exchanging an email with a friend at another college and trying to figure out the email address. I actually exchanged letters (paper letters!) with people the first few months there. By the time I graduated I had ethernet in my room, knew all about the web, search engines, etc. Amazing about progress.
Not sure why I brought that up, I guess I'm just wondering what life would be like without the internet around. I'd probably spend more time reading and doing worthwhile things. I guess I was firsthand witness to a revolution. All these kids starting high school now have grown up with email and instant messages. In my day we went outside and played baseball with our friends, we didn't instant message cryptic code words like LOL ROTFL BTW. Grumble grumble grumble. So I guess I got to see a few revolutions in my life. The internet revolution, the cable TV revolution (didn't have cable in our house until I was about 16), the fall of communism in Europe in 1989, and the so-called Republican Revolution of the mid 90's. I am still hoping for the intelligence revolution in which young people decide that it is socially desirable to be intelligent and spend time learning about science, history, literature, whatever, and want to better themselves instead of spending all their time at the mall and scraping by with doing the minimum in life, but I guess I'll continue to wait for that one!
