Tashlan

I’m not online so I can stare at websites, and any website will do. I want discussions, people and content. A platform with five users, as you say, has relatively little value to me unless they’re like my best friends.

Most recently Spez said the IPO is further away now than it was last year lmao

This tends to assume that each individual is a sincere member of a conversation, but real parties also don’t have swarms of robots and clones wearing disguises coming in to try to destroy your house. User reducing visibility is a strong first-line defense against bad actors that doesn’t require 24/7 moderators. If you poke through big, popular Facebook pages, like the NYT, and look through their comment sections, you’ll often find a ton of copy-pasted spam, scams, etc. (“this psychic saved my marriage! this accountant made me a bitcoin millionaire!”) I don’t believe the up/down system can be the only way to preserve the ability for people to have conversations, but we shouldn’t forget what problems these systems were created to solve.

Is this like when they let AOL onto Usenet

I don’t think there’s an age cut off, I just think you got into the hobby when it was niche and your peers didn’t. I’m an NES-generation video game player and I don’t really know anyone my age who doesn’t at least have a gamer in their household. On the other end, I don’t know a single person who has a cable subscription.