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the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators;  reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

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GET BACK: PROLOGUE

masterlist

step 0: lose her

YOU HAVE ONE NEW MESSAGE

thenexttinygiant (20:31:43): im packing now, i can meet you in like 30 lore_biblio (20:34:03): okay thenexttinygiant (20:35:12): what songs should i download to listen to on the plane? lore_biblio (20:42:01): make sure tessellate by alt-j is on there

On the night that he left her, he held her in his arms and made promises.

“It’s only two years,” he had whispered in her ear, thumb drawing circles on the bare skin of her bicep. She can hear the cicadas. She can hear his heartbeat through his chest. It is steady, even, unbothered. “Two years will be over before you know it.”

They’re in the spot that’s always been theirs. A grassy knoll, secluded. One where she wiped melted ice cream off the corner of his lip. Where he braided her hair and topped it off with freshly picked flowers. Where he kissed her for the first time, and it was the first time she had ever been kissed.

The night is wet and sticky. It feels heavy, settled against her skin. Her eyes prick, and she breaths in slow and even, desperate not to cry any more than she already has.

“I’ll be waiting for you the whole time,” Shoyo says, and places a kiss on the crook of her neck, where her head meets her shoulder. “I’ll always wait for you.”

Indominable Shoyo, not fazed by anything. Not fazed by the looming two years and not fazed by being apart from her. She had begged and pleaded and cried and all she was met with was his grating, unbearable optimism. Everything will be okay. We can overcome the distance. We love each other enough to make it work.  

She doesn’t have anything to say to him. There’s nothing left for her to say. She’s voiced her concerns (calmly and collectedly), she’s begged (voice wavering and tone urgent), and nothing’s seemed to hit him. Nothing’s gotten through to him.

So she’s resigned to giving up.

She has a hard time not blaming him. Maybe a more supportive girlfriend wouldn’t. She would wave her pom poms and jump for joy at the revelation that Shoyo would be spending two entire years (twenty-four months, one-hundred and four weeks, seven-hundred and thirty days), halfway across the world. She would kiss him goodbye and promise to visit and she wouldn’t be bitter that he loves volleyball more than her.

But she’s not that girlfriend. She never was that girlfriend.

So when he rakes a hand through her hair and says, “I love you. I love you so much,” she doesn’t say anything at all.

There’s nothing left to say. Nothing left to do. Tomorrow, he will get on a plane. Tomorrow, he will leave her without looking back. Tomorrow, she won’t be his anymore.  

note: the song rec is supposed to be in the format of the old aol iming. i wish i couldve used it so bad lol. i dont care if it doesnt exist anymore. LOOK AT IT!!!

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I'm gonna admit that I got on Twitter like a big ol' dramatic dork last night and said, knowing full well that Elon Musk was doing exactly this, "If he changes the name to X, I'm out, I can't do this anymore."

Not because "X" is doofy and a terrible branding move, although it is, but because he wants to do THIS shit. Yeah, no, I am not hanging around for your global interactivity "everything app" bullshit. You want me to fucking BANK with you? YOU? You just lost about $30B running a platform into the GROUND by FIRING EVERYONE and doing whatever damn thing popped into your head between shitposts? Are you HIGH? I cannot hang around for this "tech king of the world, 420 blaze it lmao" bullshit. I could not stay at my beloved Livejournal after SUP said all the users would be subject to Russian law in 2017. I know The Moment when I see it. I can't do this.

I admit, I might go back every few months and say "Hey, I posted XYZ on any platform but this, please leave this godforsaken place," and I don't want to delete my accounts. I've been on Twitter since 2008, and I have a ton of livetweet threads (on my main and also on an alt for that purpose. Remember that time I livetweeted the Twilight gender-change book? That glorious trainwreck?). I've saved some of them via Thread Reader PDF downloads, but there are still more to get. I don't want to utterly destroy book and TV discussion we did over there.

I haven't used Twitter regularly since maybe 2016 (about the time the post-Gamergate alt-right really moved in), but the conversation and community, decentralized though it was, before that--we're going to lose the last vestiges of that, the way everyone on Reddit was upset about losing the collective knowledge over there. And I'm so fucking angry about it. I'm so angry. I immediately came back here the week he took over last year because I knew, I KNEW, somehow that Twitter would be destroyed. I just thought it would burn down in a smoking heap of rubble, not turned into a shambling tech zombie under a different name. I just. I can't do this anymore.

Also, shut the fuck up, Linda Yaccarino. Just because you can put Elon Musk's nonsense into coherent verbiage doesn't mean "a global social media/marketplace/banking system/walled garden that's basically X-Treme AOL" isn't a fucking nightmare. I hope the EU bans the fuck out of you both. See you in bankruptcy court.

[brightlotusmoon]

Xennials were the first generation to grow up with household computers and have internet access. ("You've got mail!")

Xennials are naturals at social media, though they grew up without Facebook, Twitter, or even MySpace.

Many xennials didn't get their first cellphone until they were in their 20s. Instead, they had to call their friends' homes and talk to their parents first.

By the time xennials were 20 years old, the music industry had changed completely. Instead of buying cassette tapes, you could download songs on Napster.

While xennials recall a time before the internet, they spent their formative years on AOL chatting and emailing.

[creepiegirlie]

{ ⋆₊ ♱ the rest of eric ’ s doom WADs }

Hockey.wad ( hockey.wad )

A deathmatch level for Doom II: Hell on Earth consisting of an ice hockey rink and surrounding stadium. It contains new sound effects for the pistol, shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, and plasma gun. Hockey.wad was released on June 13, 1996 and took an hour and a half to create.

KILLER ( killer.wad ) ( one of my favs !! )

A deathmatch level for Doom II: Hell on Earth consisting of a large open grass arena containing several buildings with weapons. The respawn/teleport sound was changed to Duke Nukem saying the line, "You're pissing me off". The music used in this level is taken from the Zedek's Tomb level in Hexen: Beyond Heretic. KILLER was released on July 19, 1996 and took two hours to create.

Station ( station.wad ) ( my fav !! )

xD

A techbase-themed deathmatch level for Doom II: Hell on Earth consisting of several rooms connected by a single corridor. This WAD was in the top 25 deathmatch WADs on AOL at one point according to the ENDOOM screen in uaclabs.wad. It contains a new sky texture and new sound effects for the pistol, chaingun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, and BFG 9000; the sound for the BFG 9000 was changed to Bruce Campbell saying the line, "Swallow this," from the Evil Dead 2 film. Additional credits for this WAD were given to the creator of a WAD called DeathWorld II: Fragland (made by Tom J. McClure on April 28, 1996, although his name is not mentioned and it is simply called "Fragland" in the text file for Station) for the pool idea and someone named Excaluber for additional ideas. Station was released on July 25, 1996 and took an hour and a half to create.

Outdoors ( outdoors.wad )

A deathmatch level for Doom/The Ultimate Doom. Outdoors was released on July 17, 1995. It is in the Rebdoomer directory at acolumbinesite.com.

The ENDOOM screen for uaclabs.wad mentions the following WADs, although no copies of them are known to be publicly available to download:

techout

assault

thrasher

realdeth

realdoom (a patch, most likely for his realdeth WAD, which was consistently mentioned in the text files for all of the Harris levels; Harris encouraged the reader to email him to ask about it)

coolname.zip (in the Rebdoomer directory at acolumbinesite.com, though it is not mentioned on the ENDOOM screen in uaclabs.wad)

[vicsuragi]

disco elysium characters and what browsers they would use

kim - firefox. it's the most soup up-able browser i can think of. he has added so many extensions he hasn't seen an ad in 15 years. he finds a white and blue coupris kineema theme with a tiny picture of the car in the top right corner of the screen so he can pretend his car is looking at the webpages with him.

jean - internet explorer. it's what came with his computer and he cannot imagine waiting less than 2 hours to load one ad-infested webpage. he has downloaded 80 viruses but he has become used to the nude women and flashing banner ads that pop up every time he tries to look up his recipes.

harry - aol. the dial-up tone is comforting. his computer also came with bonzi buddy already installed. he did not do that. he is convinced it is a computer-bound cryptid.

[battleangel]

The End of Weird Anime

What happens to 80s & 90s anime that arent streaming right now when VHS & DVD completely go away?

The obsession with micro everything, everythings a sound bite, everything is 5 to 7 seconds, even songs, the chorus IS the song now, noone else ever hears anything else.

Only sports, reality TV and competition games can be watched week to week in real time.

All TV series now have to be immediately binged and consumed.

Its essentially bulimia.

Binge Loki in a weekend. Binge Ahsoka in a weekend. Its already done.

Whats next.

What else can I feed the machine with.

No waiting week to week. No such thing as a cliffhanger. No anticipation. No guessing whats next. No watching together as an audience.

Everything segmented, everything bifurcated, nothing in real time, nothing communal.

No season finale, no season premiere.

Same with anime.

Its not VHS or DVD anymore.

Youre not waiting for a release.

Its crunchyroll and Netflix and Funimation and Hulu and streaming.

Its the entire season of Psycho Pass all at once whenever I want to binge and gorge myself.

No asking to be taken to the mall.

No driving to Suncoast Video.

No deciding which $30 VHS or DVD to ask to be bought.

Martian Successor Nadesico or Ayashi no Ceres?

Everything is accessible.

Its less for 3 months of streaming anime than 1 anime used to cost on VHS or DVD.

No downside, if it sucks, move on.

Its not even the old school illegal Crunchyroll which was essentially Limewire for anime where you could illegally download different series.

I didnt waste time downloading for hours on my brothers computer for a shitty anime.

I didnt risk getting a virus on my brothers computer.

I dont have to clear up space.

I dont have to waste time.

I dont have to spend money.

I dont have to risk anything.

I dont have to exert any effort.

Its just, on to the next.

What does the algorithm say a Demon Slayer fan should watch next?

What should I watch now that Attack on Titan is over per the almighty algorithm?

No Viz anime catalogue to pore through.

No RightStuf catalog to highlight and fold the corners of the pages of.

No Animerica to read through every month once it arrives in the mail.

No going through AOL message boards and anime ezboards and geocities and angelfire websites to try to determine what to watch next.

No asking to be taken to your local Blockbuster to check the newest anime rentals in the "Independent/Foreign" section.

Just scroll, select, click and move on.

No need to even download and delete.

Its all streamable, instantly consumed, immediately binged then thats it.

On to the next algorithmic recommendation.

The algorithm never ends.

It always has another suggestion for you.

No meticulously going through myanimelist.com, putting up the hundreds of anime youve watched so far then scouring everyone elses lists to get ideas for new anime to watch.

Whats next after Vision of Escaflowne?

What should I watch after Yuu Yuu Hakusho?

If I can get a ride to the flea market on 18, I wonder what else they'll have similar to Dangaioh & Orguss 02?

To Macross Plus?

I wonder if Sci-Fi Channels Anime Week Festival will show something similr to Iria Zeiram or Armitage III this year.

Ninja Scroll was amazing, I wish I could see Wicked City since its by the same director, Yoshiaki Kawajiri. But I know I wont be allowed to. I had to sneak watch Ninja Scroll at my friends house and her older brother had bought it and thats the only way I even got to see Ninja Scroll at 13.

Everyone talks about Sailor Moon but noone talks about Bubblegum Crisis 2032.

Why not? The Knight Sabers are cooler than the Sailor Scouts and Ill take a cool motorcyle riding ass kicking punk rock singer like Priscilla Asagiri over a whiny, annoying, immature Serena any day. I dont care that shes 14 like me. Shes freaking annoying and a crybaby.

I wonder what other anime are like 8 Man After. It was so hard-boiled and dystopian and futuristic.

What happens to 80s & 90s anime that arent streaming right now when VHS & DVD completely go away?

When laptops and videogame systems are discless?

Then what?

What happens when Crunchyroll, Netflix and Hulu dont want to pay to license some amazing anime that are hidden gems?

In 25 years, when very few VCRS and DVD players and video game systems and laptops that can play VHS tapes and discs are still in circulation and functioning, then what happens?

What their plan has been this whole time: we will only have access to watch what the streaming companies CHOOSE to pay the license for to stream.

We will lose everything else.

We'll lose Cybernetics Guardian, Genocyber, Twilight of the Dark Master, Robot Carnival, Vision of Escaflowne, Iria Zeiram, Armitage III, Saber Marionette J, Martian Successor Nadesico, 8 Man After, Lensman, Demon City Shinjuku, Fancy Lala, Tekknoman, Full Metal Panic...

Only the biggest hits, the most iconic series, the most controversial OVAs and movies will survive in the brand new streaming world devoid of any physical VHSs and DVDs.

Only the Akiras, Neon Genesis Evangelions, Urotsuki Dojis, Berserks, Gantzs, Sailor Moons, Dragon Ball Zs, Pokemons, Gundams, Bleaches, Narutos and Spirited Aways will survive to be streamed.

What about the Serial Experiments Lain?

What about the Nausicaa of the Valley Winds?

What about the Angel Sanctuarys?

What about the Please Save My Earths?

What about the Here is Greenwoods?

Will they be lost forever?

[retrogamechampion]

The most massive, perpetual collection of soundtracks from lost and abandoned online games

-------------

Click here to download and preserve everything that's included!

-------------

I'm a very oldschool (read: old) cat, so I was there when the very first online games / MMORPGs hit the early internet. From BBSes to games on AOL and Compuserve to Neopets to watching my oldest kiddo playing and loving "Monkey Quest..."

Technology improved over the years and the titles kept getting larger, the userbase having more ways to feel connected - Huge communities grew. Communities that had serious bonds, with the games providing them with IRL buddies, bestest of friends, and even partners. Because of the actual human connections these titles created, they became seriously important.

Now, consider all of that. Have you or anyone you know ever played one of those type of games and then suffered the heartache when a company decides to shut the service down or completely ditches the game, leaving it to fall apart? The emptiness of going to a login screen to see that the servers will never be turned on again - That's a crushing letdown, especially if you never got to properly say "Goodbye."

I mentioned Monkey Quest earlier because my kiddo adored it (and I often watched them play it). It was a really badass lil' platformer with tons of quests and surprising crossovers like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It was also my kid's first experience with a "friends list." I'll never forget how bummed out they were when they found out that Nickelodeon was shuttering it and they realized they'd never get to experience that part of their childhood again. Of course, fans tried to resurrect it years later, but those projects disappeared again due to legal threats, much like Club Penguin.

To help with the parting sadness and to preserve a serious dose of nostalgia, I've decided to start rescuing the music out of online games like this that no longer exist (or have been left to join the choir invisible) and release them as soundtracks. And, wouldn't you know? I put together one for Monkey Quest first. :)

As more games pass the 15+ year old date (what I consider "retro") or are killed off / abandoned by their companies, more soundtracks will be added with an announcement here in Tumblr.

If I've left out any online games that fit these two descriptions, please let me know and I'll consider adding them to this collection!

For now, though, here's what's included to kick off the project:

-------------

Barraki

Bin Weevils

Hello Kitty Online

Free Realms

Mata Nui: The Online Game

Mata Nui: The Online Game II - The Final Chronicle

Monkey Quest

Neopets

Qring Online

Taan Online

The Matrix Online

ToonTown Online

U.B. Funkeys

Webkinz World

[curioussubjects]

hello friends, i come again to y'all with a scavenger hunt: looking through some of these emails, i found reference to an extended cut from the kiss in home pt.1, which, if i understand correctly, was shown in promos for the episode (including AOL promo i think? although actually that might be an extended/alternate cut of the kissing in scar, which i also cant find!), and filmed from a different angle i think? i can't find it anywhere because all the videos that were embedded are gone and all the download links are dead.

SO does anyone have the video files hanging around for the alternate/extended cuts from the smooching in home pt 1 and scar? or know what i'm talking about? 😭😭

[oldasscustomcontent]

pov it's 2008,it's a warm friday night, you're listening to "when i grow up" by the pussycat dolls at 64 kps audio quality on youtube, you just wrote a really funny away message on AOL (you're sure all your friends will find it so hilarious), you just downloaded a bunch of new hot cc off modthesims, you're sipping on a limited edition black cherry vanilla coke, you boot up bodyshop... it's time to makeover everyone.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

TONIGHT (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel (13hPT) and a keynote (18hPT) at the LOCUS AWARDS.

#15yrsago Asking sf writers to imagine terrorist scenarios is stupid https://www.wired.com/2009/06/how-science-fiction-writers-can-help-or-hurt-homeland-security/

#15yrsago Lancaster, PA: the most spied-upon town in America https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jun-21-na-spycam-city21-story.html

#15yrsago US Department of Defense classes protests as “low-level terrorism” https://web.archive.org/web/20090616112119/http://open.salon.com/blog/dennis_loo/2009/06/14/dod_training_manual_protests_are_low-level_terrorism

#15yrsago Nokia and Siemens provided surveillance tools used to bust Iranian activists https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/13/europe39s-telecoms-aid-with-spy-tech/

#15yrsago AOL CDs make great shims for home carpentry projects https://web.archive.org/web/20090625023007/http://antfarmjournal.com/AF-Journal/AOLshim9-21-9/index.html

#15yrsago Some Kindle books have secret caps on the number of times you can download them https://memex.craphound.com/2009/06/22/some-kindle-books-have-secret-caps-on-the-number-of-times-you-can-download-them/

#15yrsago Germany gets its first Pirate Party lawmaker https://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090621-20093.html

#10yrsago CS Lewis explains why you should be proud to read children’s books https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9117

#10yrsago Watch a Texas lawman’s pathetic scramble for a reason not to record him https://www.techdirt.com/2014/06/20/texas-deputy-displays-ignorance-laws-hes-enforcing-while-trying-to-shut-down-citizens-recording/

#5yrsago In a bid to avoid climate vote, Oregon Republican Senators cross state lines, go into hiding, threaten to murder cops, as white nationalist paramilitaries pledge armed support https://www.vox.com/2019/6/21/18700741/oregon-republican-walkout-climate-change-bill

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!