No worries. We’re pretty relaxed around here. I try to keep my inner taxonomist suppressed. He’s so controversial.
It’s a decent chat app. I was mostly alluding to the part where they tried to shoehorn a forum interface into it, and it does absolutely nothing for me. It’s also a centrally managed platform that will ultimately fail it’s users like so many others.
Please vote if you haven’t already:
It’s not the most important ballot anyone’s going to be involved with in the next week, but it’s probably the one you’ll have the most direct impact in.
I suspect it won’t be once they switch to ready-only. That’s intended for certain maintenance tasks. I’ve used it before when I needed to make a backup to restore to a new instance. Since anonymizing posts requires rewriting the DB, I don’t know how that could work when the DB is read-only. I’ve never tested it, though.
yeah, that part… and I think that we should not dismiss what could become a new reality Tuesday. if anything can be tracked back to us in a worst case scenario and be used to identify us for thoughtcrimes against dear leader or whatever, then we should do what we can to protect ourselves in that case. I hate to be so paranoid, but there it is…
Yeah, I believe in my heart that Ken cares about the community, and the blowback has to be hard to deal with. He’s in a crappy position. I can believe that he would hope for the BBS to return.
Yeah, good point. I don’t feel like he’s trying to bullshit me. I’m with you - I feel like he doesn’t fully believe what he’s saying. I like the phrasing of “desperately hopeful”.
Same. I think he believes in the ideals of BB, and he very much wants it to survive and prosper. I don’t think he’s being deiberately disingenuous with us.
Honestly, the timing of this is what makes me angry as opposed to just sad and/or disappointed. It forces many into having to make this decision at a time when it could be so consequential just when we don’t need the extra stress and turmoil. The most charitable interpretation is that TPTB at TOP were profoundly thoughtless with regard to the feelings and needs of the community.
Did he also point out that if the substack move failed, and they decided to reactivate the BB BBS again, people who anonymize are fucked? He did with me.
But I sort of feel like that’s probably not going to play out that way, and anyway, I don’t know if I want to participate in trying to resurrect something that they’ve so casually killed even if they do eventually go that route.
(I guess I should have kept reading before replying.)
By the way, with the move to Substack, is Ken out of a job?
Posted very shortly after I anonymized. Oh, so now they’re having second thoughts? Kind of late for that. I’m not actually upset about it though, as I think the damage has already been done and even if they brought back the BBS, too many people have already jumped ship for it to ever be the same again. I made my decision based on their seemingly very clear “if you don’t like it, too bad, it’s happening” attitude (Frauenfelder more than orenwolf, who I’m more sympathetic towards), so to see them suddenly go “oh, but maaaybe we might change our mind” at the last second is kind of annoying.
This was foremost on my mind in getting anonymized before the deadline. I hate it too, but it’s warranted.
Interestingly enough - Ken/Orenwolf is a user on this site (yeah I did some peeking).
He’s probably reading all this stuff right now (and if so let it be said I always thought he was a great dude even when he blocked my less empathetic posts).
Just based on the absolute lack of communication (beyond Ken doing a heroic effort) i honestly don’t care if things were reverted. The decision has already broken up and disrupted the community, going back would not erase the shitty decisions and i don’t know what it would take for me to invest my time and effort into the site.
I’ve mentioned it in a separate comment but i’m not big on social media platforms because drama and bullshit is just not something i have emotional capacity and energy for. It took years for me to feel comfortable being part of the BBS, and even many more years to be actively engaged, and just as i’m feeling like i can be part of things this stuff with Substack happens. I was really hoping to see something positive from the controlling interests in BB but i’ve quickly changed my mind.
