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Comment by zamnos | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

I recommend reading these comments! they are so heartwarming

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.

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.

> 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.

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