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@jbiloh I genuinely admire your restraint when it comes to the accusations you endure from some of the members of your forum. A lesser man would have kill -9'd those people by now.
I also have to give him credit for not locking this thread, and for seemingly not editing peoples posts as well. It does mean something to me. I think @jbiloh is trying in his own way, I think given the circumstances there isn’t any winning,
LET has always been fairly vocal, a touch of entitlement and cheap with slightly anonymizied accounts… so rolling out a host tax and not doing the best job of rolling it out is going to generate a lot of negative discussions. Combined with a lot of distrust, suspicion, and bad decisions in the past, it becomes a bit of a powder keg for users.
Objectively, I think lots of us moving on isn’t a bad thing for LET and for us. We all need less negativity in our lives and I don’t remember the last time I bought servers from a LET provider. LES, today. WHT last week. Reddit last week. LET I think BF? It’s just not where I go anymore anyway.
Well he isn't doing it anymore because the most vocal opponents have largely moved on to other topics or from this forum entirely.
Patience and prudence right? I appreciate and respect everyone's opinions.
Certainly trying. Lot's of effort going into this. I truly believe through persistence this is going to work out well. Just need folks to give it a chance.
That's what makes LET, well, LET. Wouldn't want to change it.
Yup, no doubt it could have been better. /headslam
I am fine with the new pricing and with my new host rep tag.
to the discussion on something that I’ve learned over the years, and it has always held true, and is also probably partially related to the changes here. It may also help providers who will soon face the need to rise prices due to the ongoing price hikes of everything across the EU, from power to the god damned cooking oil.
Want to add my 2 Bulgarian lev
just inflation
I know this topic is dead and there's no changing hearts or minds, but this comment made me curious:
Of course I cannot see the same metrics, but one that I can see that I was interested in was number of comments LEB posts were getting. A quick spot check between the front page and page 100 showed many more comments for past articles. Fast forward a bit and here's some data I gathered.
Disclaimer: This was just to indulge my own curiosity. It was a quick script, and InfluxDB's new flux query language is rough, so there is the possibility that I've made mistakes. Please point out if I've done anything dumb or anything seems amiss.
All-time posts by comment count: Explore yourself
By my interpretation, I think this highlights the difference between the forum regulars and Jon. The non-provider community members values engagement, and not clicks/purchases. More posts and fewer comments doesn't seem good from the perspective of an engaged regular.
If you're considering the mean is lower due to more posts check out the below data. There are less total comments per month as well.
Mean Comments per Post by Month: Explore yourself
Graph Image
Total Comments per Month: Explore yourself
Graph Image
Total Posts per Month: Explore yourself
Graph Image
These days many comments on the non-RN giveaway articles are (GPT-3 generated?) spam or comments from Jon/raindog themselves patting themselves on the quality of the article in question.
awesome work. when looking at the very first image, the immediate question that arises is, what happened early 2019?
An ad from AlphaRacks on 01 February 2019 generated 88 comments, which was well above the average:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/alpharacks-ssd-kvm-vps-starting-at-22-year-in-los-angeles-ca-and-more/
Go figure.
(It's still amazing how many providers who advertised on LEB in 2019 have simply disappeared: HostBRZ, LQHosting, HostedSimply, YourLastHost, Hosting73, BigFootServers, SupremeVPS, etc. -- one couldn't make this stuff up.)
so you are suggesting the change in LEB authors and therefore maybe the engagement with comments and such is what happened? could this also mean 'paid comments'?
why did the authors change? does this imply a change in whoever lead and 'owned' LEB back then was involved and prepared the alpharacks scam back then already?
interestingly enough, that visible pattern in commenting behaviour did not change after Jon bought/took over in 2020 - go figure.
@Falzo , I was simply trying to identify the cause of the rise in the curve (you asked "what happened early 2019?")
My parenthetical comment ("It's still amazing [...]") was more just a by-the-way remark of the kind: "look again at how many LEB providers from that time have disappeared!"
Naturally, I have no idea whether there were "paid comments", etc.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/157968/transparency-report-leb-offers-and-colocrossing-locations/p1
tl;dr 79 of 80 offers in the first half of 2019 on LEB had services with colocrossing
That was a golden year
Some reading from the golden years: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:vpsboard.com lowendbox colocrossing&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m
Some very good reading and gives context to the folks who haven't been around for long (this includes me) as to the history of jbiloh and CC. I know of their mismanagement and maliciousness, just not that it extended this far.
I only have to assume that the thread https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/173931/webhostingtalk-censors-let-admin#latest was only created in order to judge if the current set of regulars remembered these historical events. With the consensus being firmly "no" and that "LET is the best place to be", jbiloh proceeded with the provider fee and continued his favoritism for RN.
And then there was this:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-leb-hosts-deadpooling-arkahosting-supremevps-umaxhosting-hosting73-hostbrz-ku/p1
CC really pulled a number on LEB
which seems to fit timewise to the change in that 'spread' in the above the image...
again I think it is very interesting that this is not the known point in time @jbiloh supposedly took over the whole thing.
highly interesting as well that the pattern/density of posts and comments seems to not have changed afterwards though despite the whole thing being taken over (again) later...
PS: what I want to say is, if this somehow paints an image of how LEB is driven by someone and might depend on the persons of author and boss, then the points of change are obviously the interesting ones. with Jon stepping in 2020 it seems nothing changed, why?
interesting metrics there.
I am not sure exactly when colocrossing took over, but I think it was much earlier than 2019. It's just that at some point, they seemed to preferentially feature colocrossing posts on LEB. I don't even know what really happened there, colocrossing had phases where they tried to encourage people to do "startups" by renting from them. So the drastic change in 2019 is not really because of a change of owners but a change of policies?
In 2020-present day the comment count is still low but the total posts per month has clearly gone up a lot since jon stepped in.
For what it's worth, even @cociu couldn't be bothered to try to get featured on LEB. He said he tried to get featured but was ignored when he tried to. Was this due to the policy of preferentially accepting colocrossing hosts, due to cociu's poor english, or due to red flags with hostsolutions? We will never know.
LEB still sucks though, right?
probably. maybe you can be brave enough for both of us and go have a look? ;-)
In my opinion, yeah, it does.
I first heard of this forum through hearing about LEB, but that was back in the day when it actually had interesting deals posted on it (Even if 99% of those ended up deadpooling months later). I don't believe its got any better, the content there makes me cringe, I would rather something more chaotic and user-generated like LET.
I did. What struck me was that despite all the grand plans, it still looks like a basic Wordpress blog from the early part of the 2010’s.
I think that’s the route for a lot of the earlier members. It was killed off in the days of the CC-centric offers for most people because they never expected to find anything interesting, and it hasn’t really recovered.
Going more chaotic and offering something really different to a lot of technology blogs would actually be an interesting way to take things, being notorious can be just as profitable as being famous.
This thing is really hot here, I visited a while back and since then there a have been lots of comments. As someone new here, this thread gives me impression that there are lots of passionate members here. Even though they are angry from management of this forum but they can't ignore this place.
My view is that owner is only trying to make sure that even if forum is dead (may be because of members leaving for reasons) , he has something still working which is Lowendbox.com by grace of organic traffic, so his current goal is to get more and more articles there. Even if it is by making members of forum furious by charging for some extra privileges in form of some tag.
Why does it make you cringe?
A redesign is actively underway.
Who’s doing it? Have you engaged a pro to do something with it, or utilising the talents of existing LEB staff members?
A pro, who comes recommended, is doing the design, he has not done work before for LEB/LET.
I’m sure the results will be very interesting. Can you share a rough ETA?