I hopped onto reddit after digg rotted out and slashdot had turned into a corporate owned hot mess.

It was fun for quite a few years, then once they got a taste of serious money and fame, it all started going to hell.

That's just the way it goes. Like back in 88-92 Rush Limbaugh was mostly fun to listen to, bullshit, but entertaining bullshit. Then he started to take himself seriously, cranking out books, doing shameless political shilling, etc. From there it went from suck to blow pretty quickly and was unlistenable.

But, I was busy with the whole college thing back then, so I didn't worry about it too much. While learning how to twiddle electrons at a university off the Dead Cedar, a writer of subversive books for loompanics and technical manuals for Mitsubishi introduced me to the whole libertarian party thing. But it turns out he wasn't the only libertarian or anarchist in my circle of friends.

So down the rabbit hole of fringe politics I went, as well as real world politics when I got my first technical job. My boss had been one of the key campaign people for a certain infamous Michigan senator in her younger days. Her daughter was pretty hardcore libertarian, my co-workers, sorta right leaning, anarchist, one I think was a religious nihilist, so political discussions were fairly amusing around there.

Of course the USENET early IRC, you could chat with every fringe religion, fringe political beliefs, every flavor of outcast and weirdo, they were all finding each other around the world.

Then USENET got choked to death with spam, and various internet connected BBSs started to pop up. Then at some point you didn't need to telnet into a BBS. You could hook up via a web forum, and it was off to the races. Slashdot, Digg, Fark, TOTSE, all sorts of fun stuff. The golden age of libertarian code geeks pioneering a new world.

And then the AOL crowd discovered it, and ran it into the fucking ground. :D Well, not really. There was every kind of dot.bomb, crazy assed blue sky projects pissing away investment cash at crazy burn rates, it was fun, but if you liked a site, it was probably doomed in 3-4 years when the money ran out and the ad spam started choking everything to death.

Late 2001 came, and over the cliff all of it went. Sort of. Lots of people twiddling on lots of forums, lots of crazy games, myspace was heating up, and "free internet" services were popping up, choking with ad spam, and then dying.

Then came the golden age of DISHNET emulation hacks. Helping mobs of Canadians horn in on our sweet sweet USian satellite TV services. Mostly though, it was something to do for all the people twiddling because the economy crashed and burned. Engineers and coders need something to do to keep amused. And it's not like cracking C band KU band, and older satellite services was much of a challenge. Or much reward if it was only so many channels on one bird. But 250 channels per bird, more if they were primestar crap resolution. What's on all those hidden channels?

The horror! The Horror! thousands of rebroadcast TV stations from all across the US. Inaccessible due to stalled legislation, etc, etc. Unless you had the master keys to the whole works. :D Was it worth the hours of effort put in? Meh, probably not. Still, I was not aware of all the boring clone TV stations across the US. thousands of channels, all spewing the same TV news programs, the same ads with different localizations. But it was a foreshadowing of things to come on the interwebs.

Tens of thousands of BBSs, local internet groups, all were merging onto bigger and bigger platforms on the world wide web. Which meant, the various political pressure groups started pushing harder and hard to horn in on these things.

Can't have all that unchecked libertarianism, anarchism, what have you going on out there. Especially not after all the free staters actually started making their moves to new hampshire. And then the fringe groups who had various western states enclaves going.

Then came, the golden age of podcasting. Pretty much anything goes. Until it didn't. First the pirate sites got knocked out, and some of the more out there racial politics groups got bumped from one place to the next. Then the porn sites. More and more forums for "thoughtcrimes" and perversions went unindexed, then encrypted.

But not to worry, there was now webcasting! 240p and millions and millions of people to try and influence. I think this gets us close enough to current day for people to see the trend lines. ;)