Kottke.org is 25 years old today | Hacker News Reader

Kottke.org is 25 years old today

kottke.org

464 pointstambourine_man89 comments

> P.P.P.P.S. Ha, I’ve thought of one more thing: I’ve turned comments on for this post! kottke.org used to allow comments on every post, but it’s been almost 8 years since the last time they were on.

The most telling point of the post was at the very end. Gosh we were so young and naive. Just setup a website to accept comments from all over the world. How exciting! Who knows who might visit! And we'll learn about how people live in other parts of the world and all get together and sing kumbaya. Today, user generated content is a the golden goose that also shits everywhere and honks at everyone that comes through the door unless you police it tirelessly.

viagra ads, I remember

LOL! I think I bought my car (used), and (I at-least want to believe) the Nikon D40x with TexasHoldem Ads. ;-)

huh how?

I'm guessing by hosting ads.

Once upon a time, when there was no social media, but there were (blog)webrolls, Digg, Slashdot, etc. And there were quite a few personal websites. I had one and was happily showing off to my small group of friends while sipping “cutting-chai” in the suburbs of Bombay, strolling with a Girlfriend and taking Macromedia Flash exams on the spot to impress her. There was a Startup, Macromedia, that saw that I was pretty active writing ActionScript (ASFunctions mostly) to make Flash sing to my tunes. Bam, Macromedia sent tickets to fly to San Francisco, while another group invited me to speak at Detroit (it was then a nice city) I even got to meet the “father of ActionScript”, and that geeky guy that sometimes did the Apple Watch demos.

Early to mid 2000s, my website was blowing up and so came advertisers, and Google Adsense. I think, having a Google Pagerank of 7-8 helped a lot. Besides the typical, one of the best month I remember was when a company bought a bunch of Adobe’ Creative Suite licenses after clicking my affiliate link. Btw, I did away with any form of ads by around 2017/2018. I never wanted my website to be commercially earning money but in those days, the money on the side helped me bootstrap my Startups and pay my rent.

Dug up some pictures for you

Earlier pampering by Macromedia https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/720575940835...

And some of these other pictures should give you a rough idea that my site was good enough to earn not-so-bad money early on. Also look at the sidebar in the website, that is how we added the ads - just plain text with hyperlinks.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0pat7u9csqj8n15/brajeshwar.com-200...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u0vdmv81gq8v3bi/google-adsense-che...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdml3x3q68nq5ru/brajeshwar.com-inc...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7cshznldpaphivq/brajeshwar.com-ado...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5yxcy4iun17ipng/brajeshwar.com-com...

Well, now, those images bring back a lot of memories.

I was in a similar boat. My early blog made money for me through affiliate sales for books about Flash, which eventually led to me writing books on Generator / Flash, which led to a job at Macromedia, which led to me reaching out and recognizing people in the community!

Miss blogs and the culture around them so much.

Here are some more images of some of that Macromedia swag: https://flickr.com/photos/mikechambers/albums/72157594191144...

Dude, you are Mike Chambers. You are one of the person who made one of the biggest impact in my life and career. Your email that fateful day inviting me to be a "Macromedia Champion" (or something like that in 2002-ish) and the eventual "Lego" invite changed my life and career. It was the time I was in between jobs and was helping out everyone everywhere with Flash problems.

Man, you are making me cry. You made me sit and talk with the authors whose books I read to get a job, you made me have dinner with the people who made the software that I worked with.

I regret never getting a picture with you, and sorry for sleeping out on the Halo Game night at "W" that night. First jet-lag experience in my life and learning to adjust.

Edit: I think I'm mixing up the timelines but the gist of story remains. I do not have the email archives prior to 2006, and I lost all emails from brajeshwar.com, and the photos metadata are scrambled after a crash-recovery around 2006-2007.

FYI for people who haven’t pieced it together, the letter in the photos from BRajeshwar was sent by Mesh.

This is a very nice moment. Meeting each other on the internet after all those years. Nice.

It really cool to hear from you. Was excited when I saw your post. Such amazing times!

The Macromedia suite was so cool at the time, remember be awed by what it could do.

Wow, both you guys were (a couple of) my heroes back in the Actionscript days. Thanks for all you did back then, because it gave my coding skills a heck of a boost in my early career.

Awesome. Thank you for your kind words. I'm flattered and you made me smile.

Mid-2000s were a great time. AdSense and Yahoo! Ads were new. You had 18 year olds making $100,000/month practically overnight by throwing up a MySpace layout website (e.g., myspacesupport.com.)

I attended school with my main job being running Google Ads. $900 check every month. And then there was the money I made off supporting the open source app (which I wrote in Perl) that the website running the Google Ads was for. The site couldn't have been more than a few dozen pages.

Good times.

I recommend reading these comments! they are so heartwarming

> Gosh we were so young and naive.

Yes, but coming from a world where a long-distance call cost you a fortune, where the only way to talk to strangers from far away was ham radio (or physical travel), where a message took days, sometimes weeks to reach the recipient, it was somewhat inevitable.

My dad and his buddies maintained their own CB Towers in our rural southern back yards to get around expensive land line bills. Added benefit of it freeing up the phone lines access to the BBS we hosted for the computer savvy among the farmers.

> Today, user generated content is a the golden goose that also shits everywhere and honks at everyone that comes through the door unless you police it tirelessly

Meh, some sort of good spam filter + good moderation (not of dissident opinion but of pure trash, oneliners and other boring stuff) and you'll resolve most issues, at least when it comes to blog comments.

"good moderation" is hard and exhausting. it may be possible for your small blog with little traffic, but for something like kottke.org?

I've personally been a moderator for communities with up to ~2 million users, where the main point of the biggest community was discussions around subjects that are generally taboo in society, so it attracts a lot of low-effort posts for sure. On average, the community had at least ~50K members online at any given time, if there is some big news that number increased a lot.

And we managed to moderate it well. Granted, the community has ~100 moderators who are all doing it in their free-time, but with the right tooling and the right guidelines/rules, moderation is not impossible. It's just really hard to get right.

Moderation is real continued work, not something you can do once and solve. Putting up an real life event at any size requires moderation or guiding the visitors. I don't know why people in tech continue to be surprised about having to take care of their audience.

There's taking care of your audience, and then there's discovering that not only are there some salespeople in your audience, trying to move v1xagra and c1alis, no that basically benign. It's that theres a mentally disturbed person going around, shitting on your digital walls and yelling at your other users. There's a digital gunman in your audience trying take your users hostage with ransomware. Which, I mean, after Columbine, the foiled shooting at De Anza College, Sandy Hook, the Mandalay Bay shooting, among far too many others; after those events IRL maybe I shouldn't be surprised when my site gets probed yet again for WordPress vulnerabilities, but (and my naivety is showing once again) in looking back from 2023, and comparing it to 1998 pre-Columbine kotte.org through my rose colored glasses, it's hard not to feel that something's wrong. I don't have to police the people I let into my house for them shitting on the walls, why is it so normal digitally and just accepted as the cost of doing business?

Most recently, the author of the basement community site documented their dealings with some when their site got popular, which included someone(s) of an anti-social bent. The cynic in me saw that coming from miles away so it's no longer a surprise, but in reflecting about 25 years of Kottke.org, actually, yeah it is.

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/things-i-learned/

(posted here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35132223)

>it may be possible for your small blog with little traffic...

Indeed, it is possible. My blog (pretty much unchanged in format since 2004) gets around 500 page views/day and averages ±10 comments/week. Just right, small enough that I can respond personally to comments.

I think part of the decision was that a busy comment section at the time was maybe… a dozen posts.

There weren’t upvotes, retweets, etc to encourage less desirable content, etc. The text stood on its own.

We knew there could be bad things but we could handle it, if only because volume.

I'm not even done with it but I can't recommend enough Kottke getting interviewed by John Gruber on The Talk Show this week. It's a fun trip down memory lane hearing them talk about the beginning of the web as we know it. No one knew what a blog was yet and they were there figuring out what the web was for in the time before mega corps moved in. Kicked up a lot of nostalgia in me. I still read Kottke.org pretty much every day, I like his taste in internet.

https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/03/11/ep-370

That episode really drilled home how old the web is. Even in the early days of building it, I was thinking “there’s going to be a generation that never knew a time before the web,” and I was ready to deal with children from that mindset, but at year 25 we’ve got adults actually working now. Just amazing.

"I like your taste in internet" – Thanks, I will add this expression to my repertoire.

Hey, this is so nice. I used to be a regular on your website. I fondly remember a time when you included my website in one of your article (blog post) and I had that traffic spike. I mean, my simple personal website being linked from the likes of Kottke, 9rules, Adobe, etc were a big-big thing for me. :-)

Thank you for keeping the site alive.

Nice 9rules shoutout there. :)

His font 'Silkscreen' was a hit. It was clean, tiny, and free and found all over the web in the early 2000's. I see it from time to time in various places.

https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/

+1 thanks for this.

I was obsessed with pixel fonts for most of the early 2000s, and I found Jason's website because of Silkscreen.

This really takes me back: https://web.archive.org/web/20010603232545/https://kottke.or...

Wow it’s been a long time. This post inspired me to pull my trusty rss reader out of the dustbin and add a couple of feeds. I used to have lots of feeds and it was the main source of web content but somehow that all fell away over the years.

The problem is that there is a deluge of content out there and I have less time to consume it than I did back when kottke and others started. I’ll subscribe to something and never have time to get back to it. It’s like buying books and never being able to read them (another “hobby” of mine). Maybe one day “when I retire” (if I’m lucky enough). Maybe if I had only one interest it would work but I’ve always been interested in so many things—there’s so much out there that’s fascinating! It’s a dilemma I don’t know my way out of.

I never understood what the big deal is about Kottke.org and I’ve been on the intraweb since early 90s.

Not being a hater. Just never understood the passion.

Maybe the appeal is he was one of the first to monetize being a blogger.

Yeah same here but it's fun to see all the nostalgia nonetheless :D Some names I haven't heard in ages in these threads.

It's remarkable how influential Kottke still is. I've seen a whole lot of stories start as a Kottke post, then get picked up by an online journalist and either just run as-is or even better, investigated and turn into a detailed article on the subject.

Absolutely adore Kottke.org.

It's also crazy how you can increase the usefulness/nice-ness of most things just by doing them for a long time.

i really should reboot memepool

Wow, that's a good memory! Memepool was one of my favorite web destinations for many years, so for that, thank you.

YES! I'll contribute again if possible.

Please do. I do miss the times when the internet was mainly "weird", obscure and different things (compared to what was mainstream at the time), and disagreeing with others was a fun pastime, not something people became angry about.

Oh, please do this. Memepool was the greatest thing on the web for a long time, and I was very happy to be an occasional contributor of links ..

Would LOVE to see memepool resurrected!

Thank you for memepool.

Also a very nice shout out to my favourite show in the article : Halt and Catch Fire.

One of only a few shows that actually presented tech as it really was in the early days. I was depressed when the show was finished.

I was very sad too when it finished. But I think it had one of the best runs and ending possible. I wouldnt have wanted it any other way.

One thing I loved about that era of computing is that it was possible to know the whole computer from the bottom up. I dont think it will now ever be possible.

I realize that you might not see my reply, as it's been over a week, but I agree with you. Approaching my mid-40s, I learned about computers through Atari 8-bit systems. Even just working with Atari BASIC back then, there was so much you could do compared to high-level languages now. We may be in trouble eventually when the hackers of old have passed on, and we're left with the need to move away from current computer architectures due to limitations, and the number of people able to invent and work with low-level tech are few and far between.

Oh wow, I'd completely forgotten this site existed.

I remember first stumbling across it way back in 2002, when I'd received a rather unusual spam email and was trying to find out more about its origins - turned out Kottke had blogged about it: https://kottke.org/02/07/an-email-from-ryan-and-jacob

Quite surprised and fascinated to see it still up and running. Time to have a browse and see what I've missed!

Ah yes, the age of blogs. Seems like yesterday you'd stumble on interesting blogs by people, and they would link to 20 or so more interesting blogs... And you could subscribe to all of them using RSS. And there were easy tools to subscribe to RSS feeds, and also publish your blog as an RSS feed.

It ain't so easy these days.

Shameless plug: There are still lots of personal blogs out there and an easy way to stumble on them is https://indieblog.page/

I loved this one. I opened two articles and both were interesting. Thank you for sharing!

> It ain't so easy these days.

Technically nothing have changed. Plenty of RSS readers much more than ~20 years ago. People changed or rather the internet; they realized they can reach more people than writing to a wall. Most want an audience and you find them on Twitter, Youtube etc. not on your secluded site.

> Ah yes, the age of blogs.

> could subscribe to all of them using RSS

Maybe bit nitpicky but kottke.org predates blogs, and predates RSS. It's "pre age of blogs".

Today, March 15, is the 23rd anniversary of the release of RSS 0.90:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

There are more blogs today than ever! And, RSS is alive and well. Come back!

I love the quote he referenced from Halt and Catch Fire…

> Amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending.” Halt and Catch Fire, season3, episode 10, ~34:00 Joe MacMillian (played by Lee Pace) (talking about a childhood trip to New York City, also related to the internet in 1990)

I love when things I noticed are noticed by others as well. It’s interesting and a glimpse into the unmeasured, uncommunicated worlds that I think people have but don’t really have a reason to talk about, so they don’t. But it still exists.

Filed under secret history, dark wealth, etc.

how come i've never heard of this site? I feel out of the loop

Are you under 30?

Funny you say that, because the author of kottke isn't.

What does that have to do with not knowing about this site?

First, I was pointing out the shortsightedness of the comment to which I had replied. However, your question is answered in the article.

The author's age is related to how long Kokkte has existed as a blog, which is longer than those who are 30 today have been browsing the web. From the actual article, "I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years". This means that people who are over 30 today were the initial boosters for kottke. Kokkte is a person's blogsite, not something targeted to people under 30.

As the article says, kokkte.org is older than google. The author didn't start blogging when he was 5.

There is also a pertinent point on wikipedia about Jason Kokkte. "In 2005 Kottke was able to quit his day job to focus on blogging full-time." [1] He wasn't supported by people who were at most 12 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Kottke

That is the moment you realize the internet is huge. That someone could make a living out of a weblog yelling at clouds and you never heard about it despite being online almost every day during the same period.

It's one of the early waves of blogs, popular on the early internet. I don't think it was really "relevant"/popular in the last 5-10 years, but I might be wrong.

> popular on the early internet

Popular on the early(ish) web. The equivalent for the internet would be .plan files, perhaps?

I should have said “web” and not “internet”, yeah.

I had to tune out in recent years. He seemed too convinced we were all going to die from COVID.

Same although I’m only a few months older than the blog.

I don’t want to take away from a really good article, but I want to comment on:

> it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity

I get it, I feel similarly, but maybe like life we need to decide what we consume and somehow find a way to consume a more personal web?

Find those corners / collection of sites we feel are good, and share?

These blogs (kottke.org , memex 1.1) offer daily-ish roundups of links and articles they find interesting, with a short (50-100 words) intro as to why the reader may also be interested. I don't like using email newsletters (my inbox is flooded enough), and long lists of urls is off-putting. Are there any other blogs that do something similar?

http://astralcodexten.substack.com does links posts like this once a month. Here's this month's: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march-2023

/r/all sorted by top, limit to x duration ;)

All the alternatives the siblings to you have posted are also somewhat echo-chambers, but this is probably the worse of the worst when it comes to echo-chambers.

metafilter.com

aldaily.com

marginalrevolution.com

mjtsai.com/blog

boingboing.net/blog

Nakedcapitalism is the one of my choice

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/

Michael Tsai is something of a curator of links in the Apple techie world https://mjtsai.com/blog/

I have a link blog in my sidebar, updated every day or two: https://simonwillison.net

I just remembered one in Spanish: Oink! (https://oink.es/), established in 2001.

https://3quarksdaily.com/ is another one from way back that is still going strong

It's not exactly daily, but Leah Neukirchen's Trivium (the successor to the original "tumblelog", anarchaia) is a fantastic link-only blog: https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/

I'm trying to solve the following part with https://newsletterify.com. Let me know if you wanna beta test it for free!

> I don't like using email newsletters (my inbox is flooded enough)

https://www.bookofjoe.com/

happy birthday Kottke.org - such a fun little website + amazing editor!

I remember subscribing to kottke.org with Bloglines :P

Kottke's about page is the perfect description of the "www dream". The web of human possibilities.

How

Never heard of it.

I've been using the Internet since the mid-90s and have never heard of this blog. All I see in the blog is regime propaganda and nothing of interest. Are there older blog posts that were groundbreaking for their time that I'm missing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com