I miss the era of Internet forums. They didn’t need to be federated, just simple deployments of MyBB, vBulletin, PHP, Xenforo and so on.

I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought people together.

And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today.

Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss, then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access. Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.