Of course, nobody with two brain cells to rub together who reads that answer is sitting there thinking to themselves, “Huh… I guess I’ve had it wrong all this time, focusing so much on money.” Rather, they’re instinctively blurting out, “Yeah right – I call bull!”

But I’ll give them partial credit; frequently it’s about money. Sometimes, it’s just about a work environment that used to be great going to crap. And sometimes, it’s about the employee coming to an epiphany, and realizing that their work environment was actually crap all along.

That said, it may be true that not every job that I’ve ditched was entirely because of money… but it should go without saying that it’s always a factor in where I went for the next job. Also, it’s never the only factor – but it’s certainly one of the more significant ones.

I hear you… but imho, you can usually only go back so far before you lose your audience. ;-)

I think my first modem was either a 1200 or a 2400 baud as well, and if we’re going to back that far… I can remember logging into BBSes that turned out to be outside of my “billing exchange” or something. That meant that they weren’t technically long distance calls – so you didn’t have to add 1 and the area code when dialing – but they were nonetheless an extra charge. My dad was very annoyed with me when he got those bills. He finally made me dig into the phone book to find out which exchanges were an extra charge for our area, and I printed a list of those exchanges and posted it on the frame of my monitor. Henceforth, I was no longer allowed to call any of those exchanges. (There were still dozens of BBSes that I could call within my area.)

And of course, at some point after that, Dad went ahead and subscribed to a second phone line to the house, so that I no longer monopolized the main house line.

And yeah… Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves… I had almost forgotten how many search engines we had, back then. Your mentioning that reminds me of one of my first experiments in writing my own html files: I created a miniature bar that had a select box listing a bunch of different search engines. I could select one, type in my search term next to it and hit the Search button to immediately be redirected in the frame below the bar to that engine’s results.

Good times.

Discovering the internet in the '90s was… different. Let me see if I can paint a picture for you.

Initially, many people used dial-up BBSes to get their fix of “Usenet” groups… which I think may be the best analog to the “federated” communities on Lemmy/kbin and such. If you looked hard enough, you could find groups for just about anything surprisingly easily… and I do mean anything. ISPs like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL, along with some of the more sophisticated BBSes, would all connect to each other periodically – in some cases, not necessarily by way of live continuous connections – and the groups that the service provider had chosen to subscribe to would be mirrored to their server.

Those dial-up modems eventually topped out at 56Kbps – long before blazing fast 384Kbps DSL became a thing – and you had to disconnect if Mom or Dad needed to make a phone call. Worse, if they were expecting a phone call, you just had to stay off until they gave you leave to get back on… but really, the “addiction” phase of the internet hadn’t even kicked in yet, so that just meant you went and did something non-internet related, like ride a bike or watch a VHS video tape – or just whatever happened to be on TV. (Uh-huh… I can already feel you shuddering at the very thought of actually disconnecting for a while…)

The entire concept of a “web browser” was brand spanking new; my first exposure to a web browser was the AOL browser. It… wasn’t great. Discovering Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Firefox) was a night-and-day difference… way better at pretty much everything. Geocities, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo… all the things were at your fingertips, at that point.

But really, once TCP/IP and “web browsing” became a thing, the nature of the internet has remained relatively static in some very significant ways, since. The speeds cranked up periodically, and the websites have changed from time to time, JavaScript and stylesheets were added to the mix, and the most popular web browser has changed several times… but the fundamentals are still much the same. If you dropped late-'90s-me in front of any web browser today, I’d have to learn which websites have replaced the ones I used to know… but that would essentially be the full extent of the browser learning curve. I suppose it might also take me a moment to grok that all of my favorite newsgroups have been entirely replaced by web-browser-accessible systems at this point… but in the end, I’m pretty sure that I’d quickly get how that makes far more sense from an end-user usability standpoint.

So yes… many things have changed. And a few things haven’t.

I’ve noticed some of this in non-reddit forums, where we’ve discussed the situation at some length. I agree; it’s quite disconcerting.

Some people have even made it clear that they’re incensed at Christian Selig, like the situation is somehow his fault, and they consider him to be a gold digger who is just profiting off of the platform that Reddit generously provided, and they even go so far as to suggest that Selig needs to “pay his dues!!!11!!1” Even a well-reasoned argument (including a full explanation of the actual math) was ineffective at convincing them that maybe they don’t quite grok the situation… one person actually stated bluntly that he doesn’t even care; he basically just wants his subreddits back.

The mindset behind these kinds of comments just utterly baffles me. (shrug)