Transcript

[Banjo music]

MANTRA: Just Build Websites!

Dave Rupert: Hey there, Shop-o-maniacs. You're listening to another episode of the ShopTalk Show. Hee-haw. [crackling] It's a... [crackling] logging onto BBS. I'm Dave Rupert and with me is Chris Coyier. Hey, Chris. How are you today?

Chris Coyier: Oh, good. The bandwidth is surprisingly good for a 14-4.

Dave: We've got 14... yeah. I'm running 28-8, so it's pretty much. Yeah.

Chris C: Oh, you must have rich parents then. That's good for you.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris C: We have a special guest on today.

Dave: Mom, don't pick up the phone.

[Laughter]

Chris C: We're going to end up being nostalgic, but not nostalgic at the same time. It's Mr. Chris Person. How ya doin', Chris?

Chris P: Hey! How's everyone doing today?

Chris C: Fantastic.

Dave: Good.

Chris C: Killer radio voice on Chris. We're jealous.

Chris P: Thank you. Thank you.

Chris C: We talked about it.

Chris P: I do that on purpose sometimes because I have a show called Highlight Reel in addition to what we'll about with Aftermath.

Chris C: Uh-huh.

Chris P: And so, I kind of intentionally do that affect sometimes. It's the reason I have my setup the way that I do.

Chris C: Yeah. Well, it's fricken' working. [Laughter]

It's a little bit random for us because this show is generally about Web technology, and we don't shy away from getting into the nitty-gritty details of coding and all that stuff. But we're probably not going to do that here because it just was a post that was going around. I was seeing it shared. The post is on a site called Aftermath, aftermath.site, and the post is Forums are Still Active, Alive, and a Treasure Trove of Information. It was just a well-researched, nice post linking up a bunch of currently active forums, which triggered some kind of nostalgia alarm in my head, like, "Oh, forums. Those were cool. Remember those?" But that was kind of not your point.

The point was, like, "They're not gone. They're still here, and they're still killing it."

Chris P: Yeah.

Chris C: Yeah.

00:02:10

Chris P: Yeah, people still are on those things. You know what I mean? And those are the people who... I don't know.

When you talk about information and we talk about sort of like getting things done - You know what I mean? - a lot of times you'll go to a YouTube video, and the YouTube video will be downwind of some person on a forum did and sorted these out.

TikTok being kind of a summary of a YouTube, being a summary of a forum, thing. It's like forums are still here. Forums are still where you find answers. There's Discord, too. I think Discord does have its own place. I think that Discord has become a forum, but even the things that are replacing forums are forum-shaped. Reddit is still a forum thing--

Chris C: Right.

Chris P: --even though I don't think it fully coheres the same way and it's, I think, actually much more fragile than a lot of these forums are (in certain ways). And yeah, the same with Discord. Discord is a chat, but they introduce threads. Now if you go into certain technical ones (like I'm in an espresso hacking one for hacking espresso machines) that thread will do individual machine threads. It's forums. They've recreated forums from first principle.

Chris C: They have, indeed. I think a lot of people think of Discord as just - I don't know - this new format that we're all used to. You type at the bottom, and there are other people in there. It's basically a chatroom. There are channels, and the channels have different topics (loosely). But Discord goes even a step further and makes it quite literally like a forum. I forget exactly what they call them, but you can start a thread. Then it's just a stack of threads on top of each other.

Chris P: Yeah.

Chris C: Quite literally forums. Yeah.

Chris P: Yeah. I mean I think that Discord, to its credit, sort of realized there was a desire for chat again. People missed the AIM IRC days, and they had a place for that. But forums, you need to be able to search "How do I fix this problem?" and then, when you get there, you end up in a community. That's how it works. You know what I mean?

Chris C: Yes, it does. I guess that would be the strike on Discord is that they might be a little bit searchable within Discord, but not so searchable outside of it, and that's kind of a bummer.

Chris P: You can find a link, but it is a closed ecosystem.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: You know what I mean?

Chris C: Right, right.

Chris P: That is ultimately, I think, its biggest problem. And I think sort of like kind of what Reddit was going towards. I don't think they are as much now, but a lot of these people becoming walled gardens, I think, is a problem.

Chris C: Right.

Chris P: Although, there are a lot of forums I'm on that are part of private forums, and those are where I learned about video encoding, for example. You know what I mean? Anything downwind of tracker stuff.

Tracker forums are really good at telling you, "Okay, this is how you rip a CD correctly," and that information isn't as well collated in a public way. You know what I mean?

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris C: Yeah.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

00:05:32

Chris C: The downwind thing is fascinating to me. It reminds me of how -- I don't know -- there's TV news, and TV news is fine. They do a little bit of their own journalism but it's just known to be that, for the most part, it's a little bit like the YouTube thing that you mentioned where they sourced all their information from forums and now they're doing the YouTube video. TV news is, for the most part, just regurgitating what newspaper journalists have already done. It's downwind of newspaper journalism.

Chris P: Yeah. It's like the New York Times is reporting that so-and-so... Yeah, they have actual beat reporters that do that and then it gets sucked into the ecosystem. They knowledge ecosystem is always directly downwind and only as healthy as the source.

Chris C: Only has healthy as the source - there you go.

Dave: Even Malcolm Gladwell's entire career is built on this, reading sociology papers and then trying to stitch together a narrative. It's kind of this.

Then I like this idea. [Laughter] In the same way that Malcolm Gladwell stitches together a book out of some research, a lot of times people will make YouTube videos or TikToks based on one person's pure obsession that was on some forum 70 threads deep. They'll turn it into this, "Did you know you can make a pocketknife out of a toaster?" or whatever, and it came from some genius.

Chris P: In an ideal world, it's like the content creator is the person who is on the forums. You know what I mean? I think that's part of the reason I love networking and hardware forums because a lot of times it's like serve the home or any of these ones that are level one techs.

They have a forum. The forum is a bunch of guys doing work. Then the YouTuber is a guy who was on the forum.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: You can smell when a person has forum on them.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Chris P: You know what I mean? You can smell... Say what you will about Linus. Linus is a forum guy at the end of the day. Even though he's created a media empire around that, he's still a forum guy. Jeff Geerling is a forum guy. Those are guys who fucking know forum shit.

Dave: Birkenstocks and socks are a dead giveaway.

[Laughter]

00:07:57

Chris P: Yeah, obviously. But you know. I think that we're going to eventually reach a point where fewer people have that. I think that's a generational thing. You know what I mean?

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris P: But I also think that there is a capacity for younger people to be involved in similar things. I see a lot of kids who are into retro tech, and those kids are all anima avatars, and those are the kids who are in the VHS decode Discord.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: The Domesday 86 Discord.

Chris C: Okay. Are they not in forums?

Chris P: I don't know. It's just a different way of being. I just think the impulse is similar.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: But I do think that also Google changed it's algorithm very slightly to favor forums (six months to a year ago).

Chris C: Oh...

Chris P: I'm seeing them more. I saw that anecdotally, so I can't know that for sure. But I think people are getting redirected to forums in ways that they haven't been before, and I can't tell if that's real of if it's just them hoovering up shit for LLMs.

[Laughter]

Chris P: Like they need to. They're like, "We need real information."

Chris C: Yeah, and this is where--

Dave: "Reddit is charging money now, so we have to do this." Yeah.

Chris P: We need you to stop recommending. Actually, the forum tab on Google kind of works. If you search something, you click "Forums," you do get stuff.

Chris C: That's a real thing? Oh, my God.

Chris P: Yeah, people don't know that. It's right up there.

Chris C: I don't know that. Oh, there is! Literally! For me, it's the fifth one in.

Chris P: Yeah. People don't think you could do that. It's surprisingly useful.

Chris C: Holy cow. Yeah, I'm noticing that what it considers a forum is Reddit, Korra, and Stack Overflow - and all that. But that's fine. Those are, I guess... That's okay. They're forums.

It's text-based information is the thing, right? Surely, Google still likes that and it's a good format for all kinds of stuff. If you're explaining something even vaguely technical, text is the right format.

Chris P: Yeah.

Dave: Well, and it's inherently threaded, right? That's always... "I'm going to talk about this," and then you just dogpile comments and take it as far as you can go on one topic at a time versus a blog, which is like, "Here's 1,000 things I'm thinking about," or "1,000 posts a day," or whatever.

00:10:14

Chris P: It's also community. You get to know these people. They end up having eccentricities that are easy to deal with interpersonally. You see drama happen in those spaces in ways that I think don't really work when you have something like Reddit or larger.

The problem with moderation is community size as much as it is content.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris P: Obviously, like on Twitter, you'll have your nazis and stuff like that. You'll have people... But also, 4chan, for example, knows how to moderate within the context of 4chan.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: If you put 4chan in the same place as guys who like speakers and anime nerds, it's going to create something weird. And so, all of the problems of Facebook, all the problems of Twitter, and all the problems of any of these platforms is scaling up and moderation.

Moderation becomes harder the larger the community you make and the more they can talk to each other.

Chris C: Absolutely.

Chris P: And so, that isn't to say that moderating for content is agnostic. It isn't. You know what I mean? There is a very specific way to do it. It just becomes almost like exponentially more difficult and none of these tech companies ever want to do that.

Chris C: Yeah. And tricky and nuanced because it's not just spam. It's not just nazis. That's a thing. But it's not as common as... A micro-story is I had my own forums. I had a blog at CSS-Tricks for a long time. You can still go to that site and go to /forums and they're there. There's 37,000 threads. It's a very medium to small sized one over only--

Chris P: Yeah.

Chris C: It wasn't multiple decades. But the problem was not nazis or spam or anything. It was people that were just rude, kind of.

Chris P: Yeah.

Chris C: And they tended to be the ones that were there the longest, which was hard because you don't want to... I felt... I didn't want to scold them too badly. I wasn't trying to be like, "You're a dick." I wouldn't ban them, but they would be the person that somebody would post a new thread about, "How do I do X, Y, or Z?" and they'd be like, "Ugh! Ugh!" You know? "This has been covered eight times, idiot. Here are the links." You know?

To me, it felt like a problem because it was not the vibe I was going for. And I'm technically at the top of this chain. They're my forums, dammit. And I couldn't figure it out. I never did.

Eventually, I did just close the forum not only for that reason but it was in there. I couldn't figure out how to scale it. Anyway, done with story.

Dave: It's work. I mean I think I had to kick my uncle off a forum once.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Dave: He came in, and just was fucking flaming people. And I had to kick him off because... I think it was him. I have no idea.

Chris C: Yeah.

Dave: But it sounded a lot like him. [Laughter]

00:13:11

[Banjo music starts]

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[Banjo music stops]

00:14:10

Chris C: Your post lists all... Part of the post was to point not only to say that forums are still there but to point people at lots of really active forums, still. It was amazing to me to see it because I know a handful of them but mostly not. You have your finger on the pulse.

There were so many sections just for audio stuff. So much audio. What is it about audio?

Chris P: I mean there's confirmation bias with that, too. You know what I mean? I have a bias as somebody who has done a lot of audio.

Well, I think it's confirmation bias with the Internet. A lot of forums, audio guys love forums.

Chris C: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: Then I'm a person who loves audio forums. Ipso facto, there's going to be a lot of audio forums for multiple reasons.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: But it was also where I was starting. Then counter wise, I couldn't find that many sports forums. But also, a lot of sports moved to Discord, and so it's this complicated thing of, like, my bias as a writer. I'm trying to acknowledge that.

I actually kept asking people, "Please send me forums. Please send me forums. Please send me forums," specifically so that I would get out of my bubble. That was part of the reason the list is this good is that just people that sent me stuff. I just spent a better part of two weeks being like, "Please send me more forums. I need to know."

Then I would have to vet them a little bit because I don't want to send somebody to a forum. Part of it is me being like, "Look, man. This is a forum. You don't know what you're going to get into."

Chris C: Uh-huh.

Chris P: "You don't know what this community is, but here's a good idea." For example, people had a real problem with... There's one of the beer making forums that I used to go to that apparently is really aggressive.

Chris C: Ooh, I could see that being a big one. Yeah.

Chris P: Really aggressively took over the other forums around it.

Dave: Hmm...

Chris P: Then I found this other drama where one of the forums, like bushcraft forums, like the American bushcraft forum copyrighted the term "bushcraft."

Dave: Oh, wow.

Chris C: I don't even know what that is. What is bushcraft?

Chris P: It's doing survival stuff.

Chris C: Oh, I see. I see. Yeah.

Chris P: Yeah, so it's like I have a knife, and then you go into X, Y, Z. And so, there are other bushcraft forums. There was an Australian one, which you think they should own that concept, but that under. But there's an archive of it on archive.org.

Yeah, you just end up seeing a lot of drama. But then you get to see a lot of old stuff, like Anthony Bourdain used to post on this one cooking forum. It's really good. His posts are incredible. Somebody was going through it, and you could see when he did the Beirut episode and was like, "Israel has just bombed the airport," and you're like, "Damn! He was there at that time in history," and you can see the moment in time when he's doing his show, and him going on a forum and being like, "Hey, guys. Just letting you know." And you're like, "Damn, that still exists somewhere in space."

Chris C: Yep. Yep.

Chris P: It's like a slice in time. But that forum sucks now is my understanding. It's not a good forum anymore. It kind of fell off.

Everyone is like, "Okay, it fell off but look at Bourdain's old posts on here." There's a lot of important information that was here.

Chris C: Yep. Yep.

00:17:34

Chris P: Also, there's just some weird forums. When you get into a specific thing, like the secret society of lathe trolls is one of my favorite because it's people who make their own vinyl records.

Dave: Whoa!

Chris C: Oh, no kidding. What?!

Chris P: Yeah. They do. They do lathing, like record lathing.

Chris C: Yeah, right. So, the needle comes down and carves into the vinyl to make the music.

Chris P: Yeah.

Chris C: Wow. Yeah, and it doesn't feel right. If that thing was just a Discord, I don't know, just the vibes are off. You know? I can't see them making the hop. It has to be some old-school forum technology.

Chris P: It has to be robust. I also think that... Oh, the other one is the DIY electric car forum.

Chris C: [Laughter] Okay.

Dave: Oh.

Chris C: Wow!

Dave: Awesome.

Chris C: You're like, "I'm not going to buy a Tesla. I'm going to do this myself."

Chris P: No, actually they do. Yeah, the DIY electric car forum is something I found a year and a half ago, and those guys are so cool because you know those wonky '70s electric cars that look like a triangle or like a trapezoid or something like that?

Chris C: Yeah, yeah.

Chris P: There was one guy on there who was like, "All right. I'm going to get this thing to run on lithium ion," and he went into KI CAD and made a PCB, like you do, and here's the custom PCB. It's on GitHub for converting this as a controller to run on lithium ion. That's the shit I love. I love that stuff so much. It's so good.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: So good!

Dave: Yeah.

Chris C: And the fact that it happened on a forum means there's a URL that points to it.

Chris P: Yeah.

Chris C: Which I think is tremendous. It's there forever. Some of these are quite old, so it's nice that somebody continues to renew the domain name and pay for the hosting, whatever that costs.

Chris P: I got so mad because bodybuilding.com went down. The forums for bodybuilding.com went down a few weeks before I did this.

Chris C: Oh...

Chris P: And that's like... Those are really important forums to me even as just a guy who has lifted at some point in my life.

Chris C: Right.

Chris P: But just for a culture reason, and it's all because of the company that bought it up and doesn't have a use for it. Then those people have... Basically, they moved their non-weightlifting community to a new forum, which I went into.

Dave: Hmm...

Chris P: But also, there's... You'd be surprised what things are interdisciplinary I guess is the thing I learned the most from forums. I don't have a gun. I don't need a gun. I have ended up on the ar15.com forum for looking up how to do something involving metal lubrication.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris C: Uh... [Laughter]

Chris P: You just end up on these forums that are just way in the wild, way in the weeds, because you're like, "Uh... How the fuck do I do this?" And it's like, "Well, okay, so here's how you do it." It's like, "Oh, okay. I'm glad that person is there (at least in this weird part of this forum I would never go on)."

00:20:31

Dave: Yeah, do you think that's an art or a skill (finding the forum that matches your niche concern)? Everyone, I think, has something like that, a hobby or something they're trying to do, whether it's--

I'll give an example. I want to put new storage in my garage. I'm sure I could find a garage forum and post a picture of my garage and 100 people would tell me what I need to do.

Chris C: Please do that.

Chris P: Can I suggest one?

Dave: Sure. Yeah.

Chris P: r/legostorage.

Dave: r/legostorage, awesome.

Chris P: Or something along those lines. I forget what it is, but it's the one of guys who store Legos, and that's where I learned about these really specific shelves that you need that they use that are... There are two kinds they use. There's one. One are these pull out ones and then there's the good version of the pull out ones.

Chris C: Oh, my gosh.

Chris P: And they're the ones you're going to get. They're the ones your going to get at, like, Granger.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: You know Granger will sell these things. I forget the name off the top of my head, but they're big, bright color ones, and Lego guys love them.

Chris C: God, that's amazing.

Dave: The first photo I'm seeing is the tubs. Yeah, I'm seeing. [Laughter]

Chris P: Yeah. You just end up on a weird traunch of information.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: I am actually doing a piece eventually on modular storage, so you'll--

Dave: Oh, cool. Yeah.

Chris P: I hope you enjoy that.

Dave: Oh, that's... We've nerd sniped ourselves in our Discord about Gridfinity and all that stuff. There's 3D printing worlds that you can go down and all that.

Chris P: I have a love of Systainers. Do you like Systainers?

Dave: I don't know Systainers.

Chris P: Systainers are... not to get too into the weeds, but they are a German modular storage solution.

Dave: Oh...

Chris P: That are very expensive but that you can usually get secondhand. They're the go-to for guys that love... like woodworkers love these things because they lock together like it's death stranding.

Dave: Oh, wow. Okay.

Chris C: This is the best...

Dave: So, you could stack 40 tall? Beautiful.

Chris P: Yeah, you can. Absolutely.

Dave: Oh, my gosh.

Chris P: Yeah, that's what they're meant to do. You're meant to be able to put them into a big van and stuff, together, and bring them to your loadout and then unlock them. I have a bunch. I have a couple of them as side tables because Tanos makes mono-color ones that are sort of like the Joe Columbo side table. But the worse case scenario is I'm going to get better side tables because I have a girlfriend now. But they do have that kind of '70s injected plastic, industrial look that was really popular with Kartell and other sort of... There was that time when plastic was seen as a very mod '70s thing to do.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris P: And yeah, particularly with Kartell, particularly with Italian modern.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: It has the mono-colored ones that are all solid color blue are really nice because they don't look like they should be in your garage.

Dave: Oh, man.

Chris C: Some solid gear talk. I really like it.

Dave: I love this. I love this.

Chris C: Where did this information come from? Of course, we extracted it from forums.

Chris P: And Google searching just generally. You've got to know. You're like, "I need a box that locks together," and then you just end up registering for somebody's community.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Dave: Beautiful.

00:23:58

Chris P: I don't know. I mean I love forums. I love the really weird ones, too. It was also an excuse for people to vent me all of the forum dramas that they had been privy to over the years.

Dave: Part of the years, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris C: Oh...

Chris P: You know. There's one forum that's based on the guy who founded Vanguard.

Chris C: The investment group?

Chris P: Yeah, the Vanguard Investment Group. For people who don't know Vanguard, the whole deal was they realized, "Oh, wait a minute. If you just put your thing in an index fund it's probably going to do as well as if you get a guy on cocaine to put your money in things," and so they basically created an entire company that was, I believe, investor owned around that concept. It was just one guy who was an economist who was like, "Yeah, let's do that."

And so, there is one forum devoted to that. And then somebody linked me to a very... Yeah, it's called Boglehead. It's based on this guy, Jack Bogle. And there's a 2007 thread in which an econ student applies a semi risky strategy in a very risky way, and I link to it. And it's very, very fun. I will not spoil what goes down there.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Dave: All right.

Chris C: All right.

Dave: Oh, that's great. I love this, like, forums are this media that exists. Right? You go to them now and it's almost like they're untouched, un-updated. Some of them kind of have a new coat of paint, but it's kind of this really old, archaic thing. But then you have this other whole--

Chris C: Yeah, why do they look so old? What the hell?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris C: You'd think it would be--

Chris P: Don't need to update them, man.

Chris C: There's no incentive to do it?

Chris P: It works.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: You want to make it run like shit? No.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Dave: [Laughter]

00:25:40

Chris P: Actually, some of them, some of the problem is that they haven't been updated. Romhacking.net is a good example of that. Romhacking.net was the go-to forum for a lot of--

Dave: Nintendo.

Chris P: --old--

Dave: ROM hacker, yeah.

Chris P: Yeah, if you wanted to do a fan translation of an SNES game - or something like that - that never came over. ROM Hacking was your place to go. Part of the problem was the guy who was in charge of it didn't want to update it. It was just basic creaky old stuff that would have taken no time to fix. The people had reached out to him to fix, and he just wouldn't let go of control of the site.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: And so, the whole thing kind of collapsed on itself. There was also other... I mean if you really want to get into it, it's a really tragic story, but look up the rom hacker, Near.

Chris C: Okay.

Chris P: That's a big part of the romhacking.net. They were... It's a very tragic story, but they were driven to self-harm.

Dave: Oh, gees.

Chris P: By some of the less savory places on the Internet that technically count as forums. But yeah, it's all sort of adjacent and mixed up into that. But a big part of it was the guy just didn't want to give people the keys to the shop, but he also didn't want to run it. So, now it doesn't exist in the same way.

Chris C: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris C: I bet there's a little bit of that, a piece of that story in every one of these forums just because - I don't know - maybe some of them are hot and fresh and people extract loads of life enjoyment and fulfillment out of them. And some of them are 15, 20 years old. And they're like, "Well, I'm not going to turn it off, but meh." You know?

00:27:27

Chris P: Yeah, because a lot of it is a labor of love. A lot of it is a labor of ego. And a lot of it is these people's only source of income. And you see that manifest in a bunch of ways, like in the case of the number one forum for metal finishing predates forums. It started off as--

Chris C: That's hilarious.

Chris P: It started off as a magazine. No, it started off as like a print column in some magazine and then switched to forums in, like, the early '90s. It's called finishing.com. It's proudly maintained by one retiree in New Jersey.

Dave: Hmm...

Chris P: You look at it, and it looks like that. It's a QA style forum, so you just look up any question you have about how to finish metal.

Chris C: Uh-huh.

Chris P: And someone answered that shit in, like, 2008. You know what I mean? It's like a guy in Mumbai being like, "Hi, I need to anodize silver. Has anyone done that?" And then somebody being like, "Totally!" And it's some guy from Wisconsin being like, "Oh, yeah. Here's what you've got to do. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah."

They have solved issues none of us would have dreamed to ask (over a period of decades), and it's all just one guy who is like, "Yeah, I'm retired. I made my money. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah."

Then you have somebody like Lowtax who was evil and now is dead.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: And now the forum is in a better place.

Chris C: Wow!

Chris P: Something Awful is in a better place than it was initially because Lowtax died (because he was an evil man).

Chris C: Jeepers.

Chris P: And I know that's a grim thing to say, but I think everybody on the forum agrees. They're like, "He wasn't a good guy. He was an egotistical weirdo. He'd spiraled, and now it's in the hands of people who actually like the forum." And it took a turn. It's a better forum now.

Chris C: Wow.

Dave: Oh, man.

Chris C: Yeah, okay. That's the Something Awful dude.

Dave: Well, and that's kind of my coming of age on the Internet was Something Awful. You could go to this website, and it literally had all the unspeakable things you couldn't say in real life or see or whatever. I'm talking mostly like photos of dead people or something like that.

It was shocking, I guess, back then. There was kind of a no rules attitude, but it was also a pretty heinous place to hang around.

Chris P: And also, it looks kind of quaint in retrospect after 4chan.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: Now it's sad that the needle has moved so bad that even 4chan looks kind of--

Dave: Isn't extreme enough. [Laughter]

Chris P: No, it's not even that it's not extreme. I think it's just that I think the people who came of age on 4chan ended up mellowing.

Dave: Okay.

Chris P: I think that happened with Something Awful, too, to some extent. Either the people who were too extreme ended up leaving the community or moderation got better. I don't know. Something--

4chan is better moderated than Twitter at this point, man. It's fucked up to say.

Dave: Wow.

[Laughter]

Chris P: I regularly see worse shit than I would on 4chan on X the everything app.

Dave: Yeah.

[Laughter]

00:30:49

Dave: Well, it's funny how... Yeah. I'm not going to - whatever - defend 4chan or any of its....

Chris P: No, you shouldn't. That's not a praise of 4chan.

Dave: No, no, but it had... The one rule was everyone is kind of anonymous. I guess you could, in theory, not anonymize yourself.

Chris P: Yeah, you could register an account if you wanted to, but just nobody did because it was against....

Dave: That would be suicide, basically.

Chris P: Suicide, yeah.

Dave: But you would basically... Everyone is anonymous, so that's kind of the table stakes. But in that, they figured out how to police their culture, as bad as it was. As horrific as it was at times, they policed the culture in a way that was somewhat effective, which is, I guess, not effective enough maybe. But they--

Chris P: No, it was not. But I will say there was always a difference between /b/ and /mu/.

Dave: Those are the subchannels of it, yeah.

Chris P: Yeah, there were a lot of people who realized they were gay or trans (on 4chan).

Dave: Yeah.

Chris P: And you know that's... It's something I don't like dismissing because it was a part of that culture. 4chan was a very gay culture despite being reactionary. Or maybe it's just--

It's like any forum. There are different parts of it, and they were all bad on some level. They were all what happens when you anonymize people.

[Laughter]

Chris P: But they had different tenure. The movie one, the music one, those were different parts of it, and they all developed different, like, kind of pretentious tastes sometimes.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, right.

Chris P: You'd see these people just get really annoying taste in music sometimes. It was fun. I don't know. But I was never really into it as much. I would occasionally drive by it and just check in to see what the case was. But I know enough people who are younger than me who are now normal.

Dave: Sure, sure. Yeah. Kind of post rot, in their post-rot era.

Chris P: Yeah, or they're just rotting and they have a house.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris P: Nobody has a house, actually. It's fine.

00:33:16

Dave: Yeah. What do you think about Reddit in this place? It's kind of like the commodification of forums in a way. Has it changed the scene? Has it made it better, made it worse? I feel like one thing I'd be curious of your perspective, I feel like it has turned every hobby into a game like, "We're going to do this. Okay, how do we min-max it all the way to the end?" What's your take on Reddit?

Chris P: I think I'm more charitable to Reddit now than I was ages ago. I think it's interesting because everyone talks about how it sucked up forums. I think it's intentional or its intent early on was close to something like Dig in many ways because people forgot about Dig and how it was this news aggregator that would just be a traffic firehose. But initially, I think that's what it felt like a little bit closer, a little bit closer to that. And I think that gets lost a little bit in sort of the history of what Reddit was.

I think it's choices on a corporate level with its moderation teams has caused it to be more profitable in certain ways but also backfired immensely on the community sense. Everything involving that idiot who runs it has really hollowed out a lot of those communities, which is again just a bit forum fight. That's just a big... Like the guy who runs the company, who runs the forum, decides to make a chance. Then everyone gets mad and leaves. That's the oldest tale in history. Except now it involves an IPO.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Chris P: I don't know. I think I used to be more like, "Oh, this replaces something, and that thing would still be healthy were it not for Reddit." Now I think I'm a littler closer to, "I think Reddit is not doing very well from a community perspective."

It's like the communities that are doing well are doing really well, and the communities that are doing bad are just dead forums. And I think a lot of that has to do with institutional knowledge being lost because of these corporate choices and because of these basically tool choices.

But I don't know. I'm kind of neutral on Reddit at this point. I think it has its uses that structurally are in a similar place. I think the culture that was annoying about Reddit kind of no longer is exclusive to Reddit. And I think that people who use Reddit are a lot more pragmatic and self-conscious about what being "Reddit" feels like these days. But maybe I'm just on the wrong subs. Maybe I'm being simple here, but I think a lot of this has to do with Musk, his star falling and that epic science guy persona not being as forgivable in public anymore where it's like - I don't know.

I think a lot of people either moved to forums or Discord a lot more, and the people that remain are doing fine.

Chris C: Is that what happened? Because the exodus of Reddis - I don't know - maybe it didn't matter. I just am thinking of whatever it was a couple of months ago when people were seriously pissed, right? They messed up API access.

Chris P: They deleted their comment history, too.

Chris C: Which is a little destructive, but you've got to do what you've got to do, I guess.

Chris P: Yeah, I mean it's their comments. It's their content. Yeah, I'm kind of all over the place with it at this point. You know what I mean?

Chris C: Hmm... Yeah, I mean I did. I was not important to it. I was largely a lurker, but it was annoying enough for me that whatever.

At least it's still on the open Internet. That's what I applaud them for and I hope that never changes is that all of that crap just has URLs and you can link to it logged in or logged out. That open Web spirit is like, "Oh, thank God," because they could have easily gone a different way.

00:37:14

Chris P: Something that actually happened a lot more is I've been looking for videos and finding them more on Facebook via Google, which is weird.

Chris C: [Laughter] That is weird.

Chris P: I think they realized now. They're like, "Hey, maybe if we put some of these, people will want to go back on the website." And so, now you just have links on the public Internet to videos on Facebook, which is really weird.

Chris C: It is. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Do they--? It makes me think of - I don't know - TikTok feels like they begrudgingly have a website. They don't want to have a website. They know most of the world doesn't actually use it that way. They just do it because they get URLs. Then URLs means they're shareable and maybe they get random SEO value from it.

Chris P: They are not paranoid about it the way that Facebook and other closed ecosystems are.

Dave: Instagram. Yeah, yeah.

Chris P: They realize it doesn't hurt their bottom line, and so they're fine with it. You know what I mean? It increases discoverability on the app and, in so doing, helps their bottom line. You know what I mean? They don't care. You know what I mean?

It's the same thing about the big thing was being able to download videos. That is the big revelation is that people are going to download these things either way. Just make it easier and watermark it.

Chris C: Yeah. Here you go. [Laughter] Yeah. Maybe it was. That does sound... So, being more open was good for them. Golf clap. Nice.

00:38:44

Chris C: Do we--? I don't know. I have a note here that I wanted to think about. There's this guy named Jeff Atwood, you know one of the early Stack Overflow guys, which... was Stack Overflow a forum? I would say yes. It's pretty maybe squarely a forum. It just feels different because it was so big on reputation and voting and crap that it just felt a little different.

Chris P: Yeah. It's like, is Hacker News sort of a forum? I don't think so.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: I kind of put it in the same place in my head. It's like this weird kind of other thing.

People are asking is Arrowwood a forum. It's like not really. Sort of. I don't consider it a forum. I consider it something else. But that's a real borderline thing.

Chris C: Yeah, it's tricky.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris C: It's like even a blog isn't that far away. Somebody starts a thread, which is you the blogger, and then there are comments below it. Fundamentally, or taxonomally, it's not that different. It just feels different. It just is different.

Dave: It's kind of like there's a social gaming mechanic in it (right), social reward. Reddit Gold is probably similar, too. I don't know. Karma. It's this, like... Ah! That's tough because that exists in other forum software. But it's just this kind of like you earn points by being on the site more and replying to people. It kind of games you into using it.

Chris C: My point was that Jeff, from his Stack Overflow experience, was like, "Well, what was so fundamental about that? Why did that hit so hard?" He was always very clear in public about the idea that it's the idea of typing paragraphs to each other. That is what will never change on the Internet. So, goes off to create basically forum software called Discourse. Not Discord.

Then I don't know what the success of that thing was. It seems like a medium level of success - or something. But I did. I liked his point. He's like, "Yes, people are going to fricken' type paragraphs to each other, so maybe we should help them do that." Kind of cool.

Hopefully, they keep doing that. [Laughter] Please keep doing that, people. Yeah.

00:40:54

Chris P: I hope so. This is only tangentially related to uHex, I guess. I was going to say a community think I want to bring up that's sort of related to something I'm writing now. Do you know Proxmox helper scripts?

Chris C: I have not heard of it. Dave?

Dave: No, no, I don't know. No.

Chris P: Do you guys know Proxmox?

Chris C: No.

Dave: No.

Chris C: [Laughter] I know what a helper script is, though.

Chris P: Proxmox is a virtual environment. It's a VM. You use it to... You install virtual machines.

Chris C: Okay.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris C: A virtual box.

Chris P: So, I have, for example, a little... Yeah, I have a little computer, a little box, a little router box in my house. It runs OPsense, which is routing and firewall software. Then these little mini PCs, which I only know because of forums and because of YouTube -- STH loves these things -- they're... What do you call it? You can run these VMs in here and there is a community or there's one guy, one person, rather, who runs this GitHub repo that's just the most useful helper script because it just takes the process of running these services locally and then just instantly makes them easier. That person was just diagnosed with cancer, pancreatic cancer. I believe it's pancreatic cancer. I've got to look it up.

But they're Ttech, and they just said, like, "Hey, you guys have got to take this over. You guys have got to do this." And so, now those have moved over to... What do you call it? I think it's community-scripts.github.io/proxmox. You can also see a link to sort of the Ko-fi of this person.

But I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is because in the issues part of their repo they're like, "I only have a couple of weeks left to live. That's how bad this is. And I need you to take this over." The process of handing these things over, these things that are really, really useful and becoming a community-based thing, it mirrors a lot of what happens with forums, which is that what is good about forums and what is good about the Internet is sharing information. That information is kept by individuals often taking care of this stuff that is loadbearing, even as they die.

It really got to me. It really messed me up. I'm glad that it is now actually debatable in a better place because there are a lot more people. They've sort of open-sourced it out.

Chris C: It can be the things that ... to do it?

Chris P: They made it a community thing instead of a single person. I'm glad it was able to have that continuity because a lot of forums don't get that. A lot of forums just die. And a lot of... Even though this is a GitHub repo, it has a lot of the same dynamics of information on the open Internet.

Chris C: Right.

00:43:57

Chris P: And it's funny because as I was doing... I'm doing a piece right now on making your own router. As I was doing that, I got to this point. And I was like, "Wow! This reminds me a lot of a lot of these things that happen in forums." How do you correctly make a forum alive? You get to that inflection point where it's like, "Is this going to die or is it going to be better than it used to be? How do we properly remember the people who have contributed to this?"

I'm sorry that's a dire thing to say, but it's a really--

Chris C: No, it's a huge question.

Chris P: --fundamental part of an open Internet is acknowledging each other's contributions and acknowledging how... There is just an entire class of people who the Internet doesn't run with, doesn't run without.

Chris C: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris P: Even just the people who develop FFmpeg.

[Laughter]

Chris P: The Internet just straight up doesn't run without FFmpeg. In a sane world, that would be funded by NATO or something. You know? [Laughter] They would just have--

Chris C: Dude, there are a lot of stories like that. Even the whole DNS system, which the Internet quite literally can't run without, is smaller than you'd like to think about team of people that know how to run. Oh... yeah. Anyway, good points. That's... Sorry about Ttech. I see he had a commit as of a couple of days ago, so perhaps the last few days. Sorry, brother.

Chris P: I think he just made it public archive.

Chris C: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: And I hope that any of that money is going to care for them.

Chris C: Yeah.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: I actually don't know if it's a man or a woman, so I don't want to assume.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: But yeah, I hope they are doing well. Their contributions are... I'm literally using those scripts now. It's like, "Oh, damn. I can just put CADEE or Traefik on this thing, and it's just one click. That rocks. Thank you."

00:45:56

Chris C: Yeah. Man. Great story. We didn't talk about Aftermath much at all, but that seems like a big part of your life and is a part of what seems to be people are pointing to sites like Aftermath as being this new era or new wave of worker-owned independent journalism website stuff. Do you mind that distinction or like it?

Chris P: No, I mean we invite it. I, for background, used to be a Kotaku video editor.

Chris C: Okay.

Chris P: And writer. And I was part of Gawker. And a lot of... You know, so I went through the Hogan Trial.

Dave: Ooh!

Chris C: Oh!

Chris P: Which was fun to be a part.

Dave: Whoa!

Chris C: Wow!

Chris P: No, I wasn't a part of the Hogan Trial. I was just at the offices while all that stuff was happening and where we all learned about Peter Thiel.

Chris C: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Chris P: For the first time, we all learned about Peter Thiel. No, I mean what happened is private equity ruined a functioning network. Say what you will about the content, if you agree with it or not. Those websites made money.

Chris C: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: You know what I mean? Those websites were functional. They made money. And the big one was Deadspin.

Chris C: And then they didn't.

Chris P: Well, the big one was Deadspin. Then everybody said--

Chris C: Is that the car one?

Chris P: No, Deadspin was the sports one.

Chris C: Sports one. Okay.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris P: It was one of the most popular one, and they kept saying, "Hey, stick to sports."

Chris C: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: "Hey, just get in there and tell me what the score is." That's not what the mandate of any of those sites wanted to be. And then everybody on the website quit at the same time, which is one of the coolest things you can do.

[Laughter]

Chris C: Collective action, baby. You heard it here.

Chris P: Well, we were unionized at that point.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: We were... Unionization, I learned helping bargain contracts. I learned a lot about... That radicalizes you. That does make you be like, "Oh, damn! You guys have all this money?"

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris P: You had this money this whole time? You could have paid me? You just chose not to? That's wild.

It makes you touch the process a little bit more directly that makes you go, "Hey, wait a minute." And in the case of Deadspin, they all left and they formed a cooperative, and that's now Defector, and Defector is probably the biggest success story. They have plenty of employees. They have a community that loves them.

And now people follow their model, and we were trying to do that but with people who used to be at Kotaku. I get to write about my stuff that I... I briefly wrote a stint for three months at The Verge, and I do freelance for them occasionally.

Chris C: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: And so, I was able to take those things that I'm interested in, which is basically like, "Hey, check out this weird freak GitHub alternative to the thing that costs $500 that Sony sells you."

Chris C: Right.

Chris P: Or "Check out this weird thing I found on AliExpress that actually kind of rules."

[Laughter]

Chris P: I get to write about that stuff.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: Or repairing CRTs. I did a whole piece where I just found a CRT that had a vertical fold-over issue and was like, "I'm going to learn how to recap a CRT."

Chris C: [Laughter]

Chris P: I get to write those things.

Chris C: That's real journalism right there, everybody.

Chris P: No, it is.

Chris C: Hell yeah, it is.

Chris P: How scary is it to discharge a CRT? The answer is very until it's not.

Chris C: Yeah, well, it can explode, right?

Chris P: Uh... It can really hurt you.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: This is the reason why you're supposed to put one hand behind your back when you're discharging it so it doesn't arch through your heart if you touch it the wrong way.

Chris C: Wow!

Chris P: But no, literally you connect a screwdriver to grown and just giggle around in there. Then you hear a pop.

But no, I get to write my weird stuff. I get to write about what I want. We're a coop. We have to have quorum. It's just like it's so... It can be... I mean it doesn't solve all your problems. It solves a lot of problems, though. You'd be surprised.

When you don't have a boss telling you what to do and it's literally just like, "Hey, man. Could you pull your weight right now?" You're like, "Yeah, okay." It immediately solves half of your issues.

What's cool is that people who start coops love getting more coops off the ground. We want other coops to be successful, so you have 404, which is a great success story.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: We're still trying. We're doing okay. We could be doing better. 404 is doing a great job. Hell Gate is doing a great job. You have all of these. Defector doing probably the best job. But you have all of these, and Wanita started one with me that's based on music journalism. Yeah.

Chris C: Those are the ones that are like a website, right? You could even lump in the ones that are more newsletter or whatever. Or do you think of those differently?

Chris P: Yeah, you absolutely could.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: Yeah. I'm a fan of websites, personally, because I'm a millennial, I guess, and thus old.

Chris C: URLs! URLs! Anyway--

Chris P: I love going to a place and being like, "Thank you," and then going into the comments and being like, "By the way--" and you have to pay if you want to comment on our site. It rocks. It's the old--

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: It's the old low-tech special. You want to be on the forum? There's the account. Give me $5."

00:51:06

Chris C: By problems, before, too, you were saying problems meaning - I don't know - you have a boss and you're told what to write about. Is it that kind of stuff? Then if you start your own site, then all the money comes to you. Anyway, your problems become, "We should have more subscribers," less so I can't have Friday off.

Chris P: Hierarchy. It's hierarchy.

Chris C: Okay.

Chris P: I think my relationship with my editor is better now that he's my equal rather than--

Chris C: Oh...

Dave: Peer rather than dictator.

Chris C: Yeah. Right on.

Chris P: Yes. I think there's... Editors end up being elevated for good reason. It's a good skill to have. But you have this problem in journalism where people are elevated based on seniority and sometimes into managerial positions that they aren't good at. That creates a disfunction where managers (who shouldn't be managing are managing) and where writers who should be in a higher position.

But then it's like, well, okay. This person is a bad manager but they're a good editor and X, Y, or Z. It lets people play to their strengths. It also is like sometimes you just get an editor who is like, "I haven't had this position," but it's just like that guy cut out a bunch of shit you did not want. Sometimes that's a good idea and you don't know better, but it becomes more conversational, in my opinion, and I think that's healthier ultimately. It's a healthier position to be like, "Hey, man. As a reader, I don't think this works." You know what I mean?

Also - I don't know - there's... When you even things out, it helps with biases around just basic structural things that end up feeling really bad, like just feeling nasty and feeling weird and, again, doesn't solve all of them but it becomes a conversation that you're having with people who are your equals instead of a topic you don't want to broach because you're afraid of getting fired.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris C: Yeah. Right, right.

Chris P: You know what I mean? If there is a dysfunction, it becomes everyone's issue and you have to hash it out as opposed to if I talk to this, do I have health insurance?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris C: Yeah, which is a bigger deal.

Dave: It's the ability to say no, right? If it's a very hierarchical thing and your boss's boss says, "Do this," your ability to say no is diminished because you're like, "Well, I've got to eat this month." But if you're all peer level, it's like, "Well, I want to help my peer," or maybe there's a compromise that can get this done.

00:53:50

Chris P: And there this is element of, like, okay, well... Because the rejoinder to that is like, okay, but if people... It's the whole janitor thing where it's like, "Oh, well, who is going to do the shit that sucks to do?"

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: The answer is somebody has to or nothing gets done, and that is itself a dynamic that's difficult to get across. But the diffusion of responsibility becomes flatter - hopefully.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: Ideally.

Chris C: Right.

Chris P: Not always the case. It's not always the case, but it makes it so that you have... When it's your business, you have more equity in it, and that's the part where I do sort of kind of empathize with small business owners. You know what I mean?

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: Sometimes they get a little too reactionary where, like, "This is my baby," and stuff like that. But when it's everybody's baby, everybody has to care a little bit more.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: And that lights a fire under your ass to do stuff that would normally suck to do because you're like, "Okay, we have to figure out accounting. Who is going to do that?"

[Laughter]

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: Granted, you have to do a fucking committee or something like that. But then that... You're like, "Yeah, but this is my business. I have to figure this out." And it feels better. It just does.

Chris C: Could it be? I could imagine. Not to dwell on the hard parts, but I would think the hard part becomes then let's say there are ten of you - or whatever. There's a pretty decent chance, I think, that animosity builds somehow. That somebody is like, "I'm going to Hawaii for three weeks," or whatever, and you're like, "Good. You should." Then they do it again, and you're like, "Are you, though? Because I'm over here writing." It gets this, like, "I know we're equal, but it don't feel equal."

Chris P: That can definitely happen. But also, you're more likely to address it happening early.

Chris C: Sure.

Chris P: If everybody is like, "Hey, man. Could you just not."

Chris C: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Chris P: Hey, you know, because it's like, "Hey, man. We really do need somebody on-hand. Is anybody here?" And also, it's who you picked sometimes, too.

Chris C: Sure.

00:55:44

Chris P: Which I know is not ideal, but you know you want to.

The biggest thing I have, I think, that has been addressed is, okay, so I think a lot of these cooperatives can only exist in part because of the work from home movement and the idea of, like, "Hey, we didn't need to spend any of that money on real estate."

A midtown Manhattan office that mainly houses people that don't want to be here anymore, you guys could have just done that shit from home. I don't always think that's the case. Some people, like I function better in an office environment sometimes. But I didn't need to go to Time Square all the time. That sucks. That place sucks.

You have 404, for example, in their roundup was talking about how the overhead of Vice, this notoriously bloated organization.

Chris C: Uh-huh.

Chris P: And how much real, real hard reporting on the tech industry they do with not a lot of people and how much of that is just self-hosting platforms. They use Ghost, which they really like. Ghost is fascinating unto itself as an open-source and nonprofit organization doing hosting.

Chris C: Yeah, I saw they just published recently. Yeah, I can't remember the details, but there's nobody at the top that's reaping loads of money. They're structured as a nonprofit.

Chris P: It's an interesting company. We use Lead. We're enjoying using Lead currently, but Ghost is also very interesting. And I think that they're worth looking into in terms of the future of publishing.

But that overhead, all the stuff that costs money at organizations goes down. You know what I mean? But the only reason why we (or Defector or 404) can exist is because of a kind of mentorship because we are all really efficient at our jobs. We all really know how to fucking blog.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Chris P: And what replaces that? What replaces a large institution? Taking people who want to write for a living and showing them how to do it correctly.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: And I don't know if we've scaled up to this point where we can take that load on.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

00:58:01

Chris P: I think it's also sort of unfair to ask an emerging industry to have all the answers.

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: But it is a question that you have to think of moving forward. How do you get new talent? How do you get young talent? How do you teach talent what to do and where to work? A lot of that is with freelancers.

There is no shortage of people writing. But how do you teach them to be journalists? It's hard.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris C: Yeah. Maybe you're like, "Well, not here." Maybe we pick up--

Chris P: But then where--

Chris C: Yeah.

Chris P: --I guess, is the criticism I've seen of this structure. And we don't have the answers to that. But I do think it's an important thing to have to answer for yourself. It's like, where do... What niche does our class of website replace? Is it enough? And can that be applied to a larger institution?

Dave: Right. Does it work for more than ten years - or something?

00:59:06

Chris P: Yeah. There's that. But also, I am of the belief that most companies should be cooperatively owned just on principle.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: It works for King Arthur Flour and Bob's Red Mill.

Chris C: Both the flour companies are run this way? That's--

Chris P: I think there is another one that is too.

Chris C: Oh, my God. That's amazing. [Laughter]

Chris P: Weirdly, Bob's Red Mill is a fascinating story. I won't go off on it too much, but the guy basically just hit like 85 years old or something like that, and was like, "I think I'm going to give my company to my employees." And he's the only cool CEO--

Dave: Yeah.

Chris P: --in history is the guy who is like, "Eh, I think I'm going to give this one to you guys. Have fun."

Chris C: Oh, that's great.

Chris P: There's a really good cable company. What do you call it? If you need to buy CAT-5 cables, there is a cooperatively owned place to buy, like, CAT-5 cables and XLR cables (out of California).

Chris C: That's great.

Dave: We'd be remiss not to mention Igalia who does a lot of browser programming. They kind of do a lot of contracting with Google and Apple to add features to your browser. They are also cooperatively owned.

Chris P: How do you spell that?

Dave: I-g-a-l-i-a.

Chris P: Oh, nice! Good for them.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, it's a cool, like... You wouldn't... You know. I mean you wouldn't guess it from a tech company, but it is. Yeah.

Chris P: That's nice. I mean that was always the... I don't know. You see it. You see things go south where it's like a company has slow profit strategies where it's like, "We're about stability," and then they just shed it down their leg like Band Camp.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris C: [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah. Well, yeah. A lot happened there, kind of. Tough. Tough to watch that.

Chris C: My grocery store, growing up, Woodman's in Wisconsin, all employee-owned. They had, like it wasn't just one store. They had like 15, too, so they were scaling while being employee-owned. Pretty rad.

Chris P: Dude. The Midwest [laughter] is the fucking Yugoslavia of America.

[Laughter]

Chris P: It's just like it's all credit unions.

Chris C: Yeah, totally. I was absolutely a credit union member as well. Life in the Midwest!

Well, thanks, Chris. This was an amazing conversation about all kinds of stuff.

Dave: Yeah.

Dave: We're going to love all the--

Dave: Thank you so much. What's your--? I guess, for people who aren't following you and giving you money, how can they do that?

Chris P: Aftermath.site, it supports us directly. It gives us the ability to keep doing what we're doing. I hopefully keep putting out articles I like. I just did one on extremely specific cleaning products I like.

Dave: Oh, God. That's up my alley. Perfect. [Laughter]

Chris P: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Chris P: Oh, yeah. I'll link you to that one. It's real fun. I got into... Part of this came up because my friend got into using enzymatic cleaners that are used in labs.

Dave: Ooh... Yeah. Yeah.

Chris P: There's one called Tergazyme that's used in basically every lab, and it's what you'd use to clean biological material like blood and smoke.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris P: Out of glass and plastic.

Dave: I want it. Yep.

Chris P: It comes in a four pound carton.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris P: For $40. You use 10 grams of it per liter. It will last you a lifetime.

Chris C: Amazing.

Chris P: It does have phosphate, so if you have a septic tank.

Dave: Somebody has already sent me this article. I have read this article already.

[Laughter]

Chris P: Well, anyway, that's my website.

Dave: I already star, hearted it up. So, yeah, this goes on into my off-brand deodorant, so this is great. Perfect. Thank you. [Laughter]

Chris P: Yeah. Yeah. Trader Joe's, dude. Trader Joe has got that shit on lockdown.

[Laughter]

Dave: It's all--

Chris P: And I get into the very specific kind of zinc that I found via a cosmetic formulator forum, like people who are chemists in the cosmetic industry.

Dave: This is great.

Chris P: That's how I found out about that.

Dave: Oh, beautiful.

Chris P: This is my brain.

Chris C: Terrific.

Dave: This is brilliant. Thank you.

Chris P: Anyway, aftermath.site. On Blusky and Twitter or X (the everything app).

Dave: Ooh, yes.

Chris P: I am @Papapishu or Chris Person. It is a Curse of Monkey Island reference: I refuse to change.

And yeah, I don't know. I'll be around. If you ever have any questions, let me know. I love answering strangers' questions, surprisingly.

[Laughter]

Chris P: I'm like the one guy on Twitter who is like, "Oh, yeah. You don't need to do that." I love a challenge.

Dave: Perhaps opened door you cannot close, but we'll find out. [Laughter] Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your kind of deep well of knowledge about old forums. This has been cool.

I'll say thank you, dear listener, for downloading this into your podcatcher of choice. Be sure to shart it up. That's how people find out about the show.

Join us in our D-d-d-d-discord, patreon.com/shoptalkshow. Chris, do you got anything else you'd like to say?

Chris P: Which Chris?

[Laughter]

Dave: Yeah, do you have anything you'd like to say?

Chris P: I have a piece about routers, making your own router coming out. Look out for that.

Chris C: Fantastic. We will.

Dave: Excellent. All right. Thank you. Bye-ee.

Chris P: Bye-ee.

Chris C: ShopTalkShow.com.