"The whole reason he's a public figure is from his blog posts that include a bunch of deliberately placed attitude and bombast of the sort that turns a lot of people away but is selected for anyway because it gets just as many (or more) followers, and attention is only additive."
This is not a defensible statement *based on my writing*. Give it a shot, if you think you can pull it off. I'd like to see some real citations here rather than broad, unsupported generalizations.
Now try *that same statement against DHH's writing* -- what you said is exactly correct.
> This is not a defensible statement based on my writing.
The writing is all there is; the entire basis for the remarks is the obnoxiously cocky posts confidently published to the Coding Horror blog. (Or, I dunno, maybe things changed and that's no longer the case; I started ignoring everything published there 10+ years ago.)
> Now try that same statement against DHH's writing
Try as you might, you're not going to convince me to give enough of a shit about going off and familiarizing myself with whatever you're referring to all for the sole purpose of being able to figure out who is the biggest blowhard.
Thank you for the kind words! A project should never be about me, personally, anyhow -- it's always joint decisions between the team and the communities actually using the software. Please email me at jatwood@codinghorror.com if you'd like to review a draft of an upcoming blog post I'm planning to make that relates to Discourse, but is far wider in scope.
"hired" is a bit of a stretch! Joel had some design input, and the original "let's replace this terrible thing with something better" idea for sure, and Expert-sex-change was the mimeograph, but it was me, Jarrod Dixon and Geoff Dalgas and then Kevin Dente in the earliest days.
It's not though; all topics are permanent and searchable. So it's the best of both worlds. Have you ever tried searching chatrooms and 100+ channels? Excruciating.
I have used search in slack/discord/telegram and found it's super fast and fairly reliable. I can often see references to the same error messages or bring up the topic I'm interested in.
Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about.
IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer.
While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.
Oh, I'm well aware of this workaround. The problem is that Ctrl+F is muscle memory by now, so I usually hit it and immediately start typing... then notice that it's the wrong search, swear, hit it again, and type again.
Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum.
But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.
People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
It seems like a giant confidence game to this day. 80% of adults in the US don’t use Twitter, and of those that do, only a much smaller number are regular users, and an even smaller percentage care to follow brands, which most people rightly see as opt-in advertising. The timeline algorithm makes it even less likely that the pointless post from @reebok is going to reach many people, probably nothing close to the amount of free irl advertising that they gave to Twitter and Facebook.
Yes I’ve poked at twitter a few times but never saw the point. Have been drowned by news of them for almost a decade, right? Self promoters and journalists just desperate for “engagement” to their own detriment.
I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness.
I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
