The Tilde Club
Servers may now be cheap but people are the same. Some sent me emails like “username zergblaster” and nothing else, because they have been taught that the web is a robot that dispenses things for their pleasure. These people are kind of useless, but it’s okay, maybe we’ll help them learn HTML. Many, many more people wrote me about how much they missed the old web, that sense of quiet and intimacy and patient thought—writing, coding, and learning as they went.
This made sense to me, because I miss it too. The modern social web is a miracle of progress but also a status-driven guilt-spewing shit volcano. (Then again, without Twitter no one would know about tilde.club.) Back in the 1990s—this will sound insane—some of us paid a lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or $40 a month or sometimes much more. We paid to reach strangers with our weird ideas. Whereas now, as everyone understands, brands pay to know users.
Via I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds. Hat tip: Zeldman.