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I have described this world to a few people in my life recently, and look back on it very fondly. Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it

by Duhck 4y ago

I have described this world to a few people in my life recently, and look back on it very fondly. Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more. I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old. I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more. My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send photoshop instead of /server send 26-40 It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the web across users of the app, and connected to IRC. It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
Is there something equivalent to it nowadays?
- stnmtn 4y ago
  Discord bots, while wayyy more of a walled garden, brought me a lot of joy from the combination of short feedback loop (very easy to make bots do relatively complex things) and large userbase of more-tech-savyy-than-average users I hooked up OpenAI into my bot to allow GPT-3 like prompting in the servers I'm in; created a way to search for youtube videos and play them in a voice channel, and other dumb, fun things. Making it scale seems like it would be doable, but for now I'm keeping it to the servers I'm active in
- Duhck 4y ago
  Yea as ahmadss describe above, web3 and discord is as close as you can get to this experience. A good friend had a really cool way of describing the evolution from web1(aol / dialup era) -> web3 Web 1 was unmitigated chaos, lots of creativity, lots of experimentation, lots of illegal activity, not a lot of money being made Web 2 was ordered chaos, lots of money being made everywhere, not a ton of creativity but lots of business value creation Web 3 is the best of both worlds (and some of the worsts). Lots of creativity, boundless energy, lots of value but also lots of fraud.
  - JoeJonathan 4y ago
    Is it the best of both worlds only because there is money being made?
ahmadss 4y ago
this describes the web3 + discord scene accurately today, but instead of Visual Basic, kids today are using Replit.

by Duhck 4y ago

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

Is there something equivalent to it nowadays?

stnmtn 4y ago
Discord bots, while wayyy more of a walled garden, brought me a lot of joy from the combination of short feedback loop (very easy to make bots do relatively complex things) and large userbase of more-tech-savyy-than-average users I hooked up OpenAI into my bot to allow GPT-3 like prompting in the servers I'm in; created a way to search for youtube videos and play them in a voice channel, and other dumb, fun things. Making it scale seems like it would be doable, but for now I'm keeping it to the servers I'm active in
Duhck 4y ago
Yea as ahmadss describe above, web3 and discord is as close as you can get to this experience. A good friend had a really cool way of describing the evolution from web1(aol / dialup era) -> web3 Web 1 was unmitigated chaos, lots of creativity, lots of experimentation, lots of illegal activity, not a lot of money being made Web 2 was ordered chaos, lots of money being made everywhere, not a ton of creativity but lots of business value creation Web 3 is the best of both worlds (and some of the worsts). Lots of creativity, boundless energy, lots of value but also lots of fraud.
- JoeJonathan 4y ago
  Is it the best of both worlds only because there is money being made?

ahmadss 4y ago

this describes the web3 + discord scene accurately today, but instead of Visual Basic, kids today are using Replit.