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Is it just me or have things changed around here?
AnthonySmith
Member, Patron Provider
Good Prevening all,
To start with this is not meant as a foot stamping or a whine nor am I looking to get in a big drawn out argument with amazing gifs flying about, it just feels like this place has changed a fair bit recently, after talking to a few people on irc about it I thought I would risk my neck and start a thread.
I remember when I first stumbled on LEB in the early days and I thought it was pretty amazing as a concept, obviously others did too which is why it grew so much that the original owner chose to sell it on due to time constraints.
Rather than write war and peace I will just point out a few things in a simple enough format.
The old days:
Fairly free flowing, community driven and well lead by the owners
A lot of buzz about what you could make a tiny VPS do
A good healthy community not without its degree of controversy but it was usually justified.
Although the adverts started creeping in it was minimal and fair
There was a good low end spirit about the place
Good offers were posted as well as bad
Now:
Seems a lot more moderated but with a lack of top level involvement.
Feeling more commercialised every day now with about 40 advert spots which are 3 x the price they used to be (avg $100)
The rules are creeping in
It seems more about how much people can (over)sell for $7 rather than what people can achieve with a low end box
Offers seem heavily vetted and there is a check list as long as your arm for posting an offer.
I suppose what I am getting at is that the feeling I personally get is that the whole place has gone very commercial / market place driven and while I don't mind that as a host as it is a good market place I feel like that's what drives things now and as a result its harder to take part in the real community of it all due to being a host.
I keep throwing the name WebHostingLowendTalk/box around in my head as the phase it seems like things are at now and with LET and LEB being so heavily entangled now as the same common market place it feels like something is missing.
I hope no one takes that as a rant (I know I am good at rants) more of an observation and a wonder if I am the only one?
Possible suggestion: make another tier, no adverts, community only, no marketing, just talk/help/scripts/look what I did with 96mb of ram.
Thoughts?
Comments
How will money be made with this model? The amount of time and effort required to manage this warrants the need for money I suppose.
yes
There were a lot fewer people in the old days, and those fewer people seemed to be more 'in-tune' with the original focus. Since a couple of years ago, the number of visitors has skyrocketed, and so the focus has become a bit more fuzzy.
Considering this point:
Any time I try to have an offer posted, I'm told that there's a many-week wait. I think @kujoe and @mitgib both had offers that waited 3+ weeks. I don't know why this is, unless it's just a lack of interest on the part of the admins to post offers.
The focus is for it to be 'community moderated', so it's good that the actual mods generally stay out. I do wish they would post most as community members though.
Ostensibly, all of the points you mentioned could be chalked up to natural precession of growing. In a choice between it being the same and stagnating, and growing and needing to be different, i'd rather choose growth.
It has changed, says this old school lurker who signed up later. As far as rules go, they're really the natural progression of any community. Put a bunch of cavemen together that can only grunt at each other and by the end of the month they'll have learned to communicate to each other a few basic expectations for their interactions together. It is my opinion that every online community starts out great and eventually degenerates into pure chaos. Rules, if well made and enforced, can sometimes prevent this.
There's no way around the biggest reality that changed things. This place is a marketing gold gold mine. Nothing changes a website faster. It has to.
Just my thoughts.
Strict rule if someone making fun of others (getting common now) without any reason just jealousy or even without any reason.
No, you are not. I also often dream about the old LEB times, often thought about how we can bring the old LEB back, but not having a solution
since invite-only systems are bad, also similar stuff would be even more moderated then here or WHT.
Looks as I was not online at that time, are you maybe having a log?
haha ok I am happy to accept that if that is the general opinion
Well I mean as an additional thing, completely community ran, and I would think the revenue for T * B are more than enough to cover a forum.
@Damian
Your point about fewer people in-tune is a very good one and perhaps that is what has changed.
Dont get me wrong, I am not saying its bad, just very different and now missing a certain element it used to have.
I think that's the wrong question to ask in the first place. The question should be "how can this be kept running?", not "how can money be made off this".
EDIT: In fact, I believe this approach of "how can money be made off this" is one of the primary reasons LET has ended up as it is now.
It has been over a period of time and in PM's mostly but grep your logs for me today about 4 hours ago
I believe its a natural evolution
I agree, it really was always going to happen once it reached a critical mass, it was go completely commercial or die I guess and the commercial conversion is rolling in fast.
I do think though taking the 'evolution' stand point that it would be a shame to loose a part of what the place was built on (an organ, limb etc)
Not sure if @96mb still hangs out here but I think more than anyone he will get what I mean by all of this, he still has the leb spirit
Has always been, making fun of fail providers and just failures in general (like Randy and Dewlance)
Speaking of commercial and @96mb, I might have Rick rolled his ad block as well. I've had too much free time recently...
That did make me laugh
I get what you are saying. I was here a long time ago as well. I left for many reasons and just came back recently. This is not the place it once was. I was just setting here thinking the same thing. It is not only the commercialism though it is the people as well. I am not trying to start a fight but it is the truth. Some of the people that used to be here no longer are and that to a point hurts a community.
I understand any site has to make something or be something. More power to you if you do this. I am not one to usually gripe either but this place used to have a more comforting feeling to it. You did not get jumped for posting an idea like you do now. You did not get slammed for posting your thoughts on a subject. When you tried to help someone they said thank you and then if they could help someone they did so. Now I see basically the same people posting all the time.
This is all my opinion and if I get jumped on or slammed for it oh well at least I have finally said it.
I second this.
It's the people, there's a lot of new faces that don't really contribute anything worthwhile to the community...
@bamn indeed I have to admit I have been close to starting this thread about 10 times now and stopped myself for fear of a gif bashing, but it seems to have been taken in the right way
Considering I have 32 drafts, that's how much things have changed around here.
But is change always a bad thing?
No, not always, but sometimes, it is.
Well around here people seem to hate change. I kinda welcome it. Plus what would you guys have to bitch about if things didn't change.
@24khost Hopenchange? Sorry I had to :P
Not always, but as LET has changed, I feel it has been for the worse. I do not see myself as active, and just pick and choose when/where I participate, sometimes I will find myself raging in a response and then go delete the draft, as it would have added nothing.
I don't know if it how Chrome handles translations, but I see much more of the short worthless comments here as I do on hostloc. And the majority of topics here have little to interest me as they once did.
I feel so unloved now ;(
I don't think this place is too moderated. Yes, someone gets banned here and there, something gets deleted, but since we have a lot more users than before and a lot more posts, threads etc, that has to happen. In the old days when Vanilla first started, I never had to go to page 2 to see what's going on, today if I miss a day we have several pages of new stuff.
Quality hasn't improved, that's for sure, most if it is not worth reading, but what should we do about it? Ban/delete more?
This happens to me increasingly as well.
I also find it interesting how several of the reasons LET has changed (for the worse) are being exhibited in this very thread.
+1
I am sorry @joepie91 hopefully it is not something I said. In the last couple of weeks I have tried to tone it down. Take a more laid back approach here as the people that I really respect have gotten quite irritable. People like you, Tim, Anthony are part of the reason I came here. I know enough to get by but there are things that need learning and things that I can help with.
I will admit, I haven't helped with the calling-out. In terms of Tim and joepie91 (and a decent amount of you here), I haven't been here long enough but I do remember when I first joined LET it was a great place with a wealth of knowledge and awesome topics.
Although now it just seems like the same topics comes around again, more complaining and arguing (most of the time for no real reason), people demanding free/cheaper items for the cost that would actually provide a net-loss.
Personally, one of the most fun in a thread was when @Damian first released IPXCore's 32mb VPSes, and MrLadoodle got a minecraft server working off of it. Now its just complaining about lowering the prices ("I could get this there for half the price you're looking for!") or ask something that could be answered with a single search (Hey guys what do you use for your VPSes?).
We still do have interesting discussions and basically community challenges (someone just released a stock of this! Lets see if we can run this on it! Lets try something new!), but it doesn't happen as frequently as it used to.
But of course, I've only been here for about 6/7 months now.
No. I feel exactly the same. It used to be about making best use of scarce resources, Now it's all about, "how much can I get for $7?"
Time to change the name, 'cause it isn't about lowend anymore, it's just about "cheap".