Bit quiet in here . any reason?

[Mark_A]

I am just back after a spell away, it seems pretty quiet, webmasterworld always used to be busy. I wondered if the action has moved into the supporters forums? or if people just went elsewhere? I am interested to know what people think?

[engine]

Holiday season makes it a bit quieter than normal.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

No, it's been quiet for at least the last couple of years. Just look at the last post date on each of the forums and you will see this.

[engine]

Also, some people don't post as frequently, but they do read.

[NickMNS]

Keyplyr has taken a break. He was/is a frequent contributor. His lack of contribution is felt.

[robzilla]

Lost some pillars over the years, as well. Tedster, Incredibill, Marcia, Fathom...

Things have certainly changed, but there's plenty to stick around for!

[justpassing]

> or if people just went elsewhere?

This, yes.

ps: hope Keyplyr will feel better soon.

[tangor]

for some, like myself, there aren't as many interesting topics as there used to be. Too many chasing after one thing/company and that gets a little old. But every once in a while something tasty does appear!

[Lexur]

Add that now there is more people doing some specific work about Internet things in some department in a million companies (with its own learning path) and less web masters.

[Mark_A]

Well I think it is a bit quiet in here which is a concern, it might tempt people (me included) to look elsewhere for information, perhaps using WebmasterWorld and other places rather than just WebmasterWorld. But if we find other places solve our needs WebmasterWorld will decline.

[Elsmarc]

I used to visit quite a few forums and websites (my bookmarks "collection" is huge). I have watched the internet evolve and discussion forums have been in decline for a number of years now. At the same time, sites like Stack Exchange and Reddit have thrived, not to mention what I consider garbage like facebook and twitter.

I used to make low 6 figures from 2004 through about 2014 (from 1996 to 2004 I had sites up but no advertising - It was just a hobby of sorts), these days lucky to bring in 2K a month and it's still dropping. Ads are cheap and adsense sucks these days. I plan to close my last forum in a few months. I retired around 2003ish and I'm too old to care about the internet much these days.

The internet has been pretty much corporatized. The wild west days, the days when it was fun and interesting, are long gone.

Even here - I used to stop by a couple times a day. These days maybe a couple of times a week. Not to mention the UI here is ancient.

So it goes. Nothing lives forever.

[brotherhood of LAN]

From a programming perspective, stackoverflow and its sister sites had a nice way of answering all manner of questions in a conveyor belt manner.

I've tried asking a few questions there over the past few years and get some militant answers about how my question "isn't right" and folks getting blinkered into raising their reputation, bit surreal TBH.

Some sites have split the diversified webmaster role/topics pretty well, but hopefully there's always room for an independent forum for like-mined people to share ideas, news or ask questions.

[tangor]

Dying breed (forums such as WW) as the "give me an answer NOW in 30 seconds folks have no concept, OR DESIRE to learn the trade. It's all cut and paste and give it to me NOW you inconsiderate ... hey, I'm entitled! Give it to me now! One reason why I pick and chose how to participate at WW these days. Pretty sure the old timers at WW are doing the same thing. Particularly those who have avoided posting burnout just to advance metrics.

[Marshall]

With all the "point and click, build your own website" services today, not to mention the free business pages on social media sites, I think a lot of people here are a dying breed. Back when I joined WebmasterWorld, everything (basically) had to be built from scratch, you coded by hand and your concerns were making things compatible with IE and Navigator, and except for a few books, there really was not a lot of reference material on the subjects of web design, web development, or the web in general. Now, for a lot of things, it is simply point and click or copy and paste. You can get scripts from here, and fonts from there, and there is a virtual buffet of software you can purchase or download for free to nearly everything you had to do by hand. Remember when something like FrontPage was cutting edge? It is like many old skills: wood working for example, that have been taken over by automation and a lack of patience.

[Mark_A]

I can understand some thinking, why should I share my hard won knowledge, why shouldn't poster xyz have to learn it from first principles as I had to.

But that said, a forum like WebmasterWorld needs lively discussion to thrive.

[justpassing]

I can understand some thinking, why should I share...

You can also add, why would I waste my time helping, sharing my knowledges and 25 years of experience, with guys who believe to be God because they can press button and use drop down lists to install Wordpress and its plugins, and who claim to know better than anyone else about SEO and how search engine 's algorithms are working; but who, in spite of their infinite superiority still, come and cry that they do no understand why their traffic is collapsing. And of course, when you try to explain things for the purpose of helping them, they explain to "you" that you are wrong and stupid, and that what you are saying is BS. So fine, I keep my BS and use it to feed my business which continues to be prosperous "magically"...

I miss the state of mind of the webmasters of 90's...

[NickMNS]

@justpassing nice attitude...

25 years of experience,

This means squat in web. Name me a single web technology that is still used today in the same fashion as it was 25 years ago? If anything flaunting your experience is holding you back more than anything.

One of the most critical success factors in this industries is one willingness and ability to change, adapt, and learn.

[lucy24]

in the same fashion

Oh, come on. Name ANYTHING that is identical to what it was 25 years ago.

HTML has been around since 1992. You can write a page in HTML 1.0 and it will still display on all browsers. It will look pretty ghastly, sure, but it still works.

CSS hasn't quite been around for 25 years, but it's getting close. Continue as above.

php was created in 1994.

javascript was introduced in 1995.

Apache server software was introduced in 1996.

Et cetera. Each of these has been largely cumulative: new developments add to, rather than replacing, earlier forms.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Agree with Lucy with respect to the same technologies/requirements but evolving over time.

One thing I remember this place being prominent for, a lot was bleeding edge. I remember papabaer schooling a lot of us into using CSS and moving away from inline styling, just as an example. Definitely more 'wild west' for sure... Brettt's keyword pyramid also. Fundamental introductions to new ideas.

The conversation is also spilled over into social media. I suppose part of the problems with sharing ideas and information, you come across a big topic and within days its replicated and talked about in a 1000 different places. The location/source doesn't travel as far as the idea perhaps

I've joined a few FB 'SEO' groups and it's slightly amusing seeing the same fundamental ideas repackaged by gurus, but then in today's web most stuff is forgotten about in a week anyways.

[graeme_p]

HTTP has been around for as long as HTML.

TCP and UDP are even older, as is IP 4. TIP is in the process of replacement, there is a proposal to replace TCP for HTTP, but its still unchallenged for other uses. I have not heard of plans to replace UDP at all.

A lot of the programming languages we use are a lot older than PHP: C, Lisp etc. Even a relatively new language like Python is more than 25 years old.

The principals of programming are even older. I am sure the same applies to a lot of other webmaster skills (like design).

[Shepherd]

Well, I am still as amazing today as I was 25 years ago... Admittedly though, what I used to be able to do all day now takes me all day to do.

One thing I have noticed here over the last year or so that is different from the past is the anger where there used to be heated, productive discussion. Things used to get hashed out, discussed, debated, studied... and most knew each other IRL, shared a beverage at Pubcon. Now it just all seems like anonymous shouting.

[NickMNS]

HTML has been around since 1992. You can write a page in HTML

I can still communicate by fax too. That doesn't mean that I choose too.

Oh, come on. Name ANYTHING that is identical to what it was 25 years ago.

There a plenty of things that change very slowly. Take nuts and bolts, the threads standard. Unified nation thread standard was adopted in 1948. British Standard Whitworth thread standard 1841. This is an example of many standards and practice that are used in other industries that are still in place and not likely to change anytime soon. If you take a mechanical engineer with 50 years experience this person has seen very little change over the course of their career, save for maybe the last 15 to 20 years. Those changes have mostly come as result of software innovations. CAD being the most notable. And even then, most "old-stock" engineers could not operate a CAD system, but it didn't matter because the output the drawing produced remained the same, the need for an individual to innovate did not exist. That is not to say that some or likely many did and do, but it was not essential.

I'm sorry if anyone is offended, but this doesn't hold in the web industry. 5 years ago, machine learning and neural networks were pipe-dream reserved for academics. It now drives Google search Algorithms. 25 five years ago you could make text the same color as the background of your website and rank for those keywords. Now the concept of keyword is nearly obsolete. Look at Iamlost's last posts [webmasterworld.com...] [webmasterworld.com...] This is an industry where things evolve at lightning speed, comparatively to other industries.

My point was not to say that having 25 years of experience is not valuable, my point was that having 25 years of experience does not raise you above others that don't the same experience and that somehow ones success is attributable to ones experience. Mark Zuckerberg had no experience when he founded Facebook. I am willing to bet that if he were to try and found another Facebook with all his experience he would be able to succeed.

Conclusion: in this industry experience is neither necessary nor sufficient but it does hold value.

@Graeme_p Python 3 was released in 2008, Python 2 only exists for those people that can't or are unwilling to change and there are only few more month (Jan 1, 2020) left before its end.

[iamlost]

There is an interesting human behaviour recurrence as endeavours move from small to larger communities (studies tend to agree that (1) individuals firm connections are typically bounded at one or two hundred and (2) as communities exceed about three thousand they begin to break into distinct neighbourhoods).

There is a corollary to the above that human endeavour can frequently be split into 20%, 80%, 20% regarding support/belief/capability/etc. With webdevs this might be (to use stereotypes) 20% consciously white hat, 20% consciously black hat, 80% consciously or unconsciously or simply ignorantly grey hat.

More relevant to this discussion 20% are actively staying abreast of new developments, constantly learning, staying ahead of the curve; 20% are willfully ignorant and functionally incompetent; 80% are doing the best they can possibly feeling overwhelmed by change.

Prior to ~2005 the web was new and required a certain level of technical competence so the community was small and self selected to the 20% ahead of the curve; between then and 2011 the arrival and uptake of CMS's encouraged a rapid increase in site developers as the minimal tech threshold dropped; in the time since the 20/80/20 split has become increasingly apparent.

Unfortunately, the 'new' majority are pretty much only interested in hanging on to what they had/have while the 'old' now minority suffers attrition by death, retirement, etc.

It doesn't help that there are so many changes in so many web areas. One might say that the web climate is undergoing critical change. I do know that areas I find of interest and value: personalisation/privacy, contextual delivery, bot/security in depth, marketing (other than the usual), direct ad sales and delivery, direct affiliate relationships, etc. are out of step with most of WebmasterWorld and other webdev fora.

The cutting and bleeding edge webdev communities are small and elsewhere. And sadly fragmented/specialised. Sort of like 20 years ago except that then noobies were received with joy and now most often with reservations regarding interest and competence.

As a general interest web mastering forum WebmasterWorld reflects its membership most of whom typify the 80%, hanging in, fixated on Google and AdSense minutiae, with little time or interest in what else is happening. The audience makeup has changed and appears unlikely to change back. What this may mean for WebmasterWorld going forward is an intriguing speculation.

[justpassing]

25 years of experience,

This means squat in web. Name me a single web technology that is still used today in the same fashion as it was 25 years ago? If anything flaunting your experience is holding you back more than anything.

C/C++ programming. I do program my own PHP extensions for speed, security and efficiency. But you certainly do not understand half of the words of this sentence.

So for you 25 years of experience, means I learned something 25 years ago and sticked to it? May be this is how you work , but I am not as lazy as you; you confirm my feeling about those who believe to be god just because they are smarter than their own ass.

I was silly to come back, farewell for good.

[Marshall]

@NickMNS

25 years of experience,

This means squat in web. Name me a single web technology that is still used today in the same fashion as it was 25 years ago? If anything flaunting your experience is holding you back more than anything.

One of the most critical success factors in this industries is one willingness and ability to change, adapt, and learn.

Apparently you think "25 years of experience" equates to 25 year old knowledge. You have got a lot to learn.

[Samizdata]

Name me a single web technology that is still used today in the same fashion as it was 25 years ago?

Have webservers changed radically?

...

[lucy24]

20%, 80%, 20%

No wonder I feel so tired all the time. I’m expected to give 120%.

[NickMNS]

Have webservers changed radically?
Yes radically. eg: Nginx.

You have got a lot to learn.

Yes I have got a lot to learn, I plan to never stop learning.

Apparently you think "25 years of experience" equates to 25 year old knowledge.

This is not what I wrote or what was intended. I clearly stated my position experience is neither necessary nor sufficient but it does have value.

There is no need to have expert knowledge in HTML1 to become an expert in HTML5. Most likely, mastery of HTML1 would allow a person reach a level of mastery of the newer technology quicker but the technologies are such that one does not need to know the prior version in order to learn the newer one. So yes experience has value.

I started to swim competitively in my late twenties. I could swim since I was a child, but I had never learned to swim correctly. Swimming is a highly technical sport, due to the fact that you are propelling yourself in water instead of air (higher density thus more drag) makes any technical mistake extremely costly in terms of speed and efficiency. At that time in my life I was at the peak of my physical ability. But when I would enter the pool, I would swim with people that were no where close to my physical fitness level, but these people had been swimming competitively since they were children, they could beat no problem. It took years of practice and coaching to reach a level that was somewhat close to them. The point is that there are some activities or professions where experience carries greater importance, where experience is necessary. Web development is not one of them, I'm not saying it has no value, but I would certainly say that willingness and ability to change and learn new technologies is a more important factor.

The biggest tech companies that exist today were all founded by people that had little to no experience. Let me be the first to say, it shows in some very important aspect of the business. But these aspects are not related to tech but more related to managing large businesses, and other social issues.

The overall point is that there is reluctance to embrace new technologies and concept with many in this community and there are other area on the web that are thriving as they are focused on discovering and discussing the newest technologies. Here there are long drawn out discussions about keyword tools or how Google is out to get the small guy that span many pages whereas threads discussing concept such "semantic search" or "entity recognition" are left with few comments.

I hangout here because it is a laid back vibe, one can ask open unstructured questions and still get a good response. And one can still get a pretty good overview what is happening in Search and AdSense. But I spend my time elsewhere looking for new ideas, new technologies, and to find out what's hot and what's not.

[tangor]

But I spend my time elsewhere looking for new ideas, new technologies, and to find out what's hot and what's not.

Might be one reason why it is quiet about here ... invested elsewhere?

Note: Nothing that is new "in the wild" is not addressed here. Smart set of coders, entrepenuers, and generally handy folks ... most of whom are STILL of the mindset of providing direction withOUT giving cut and paste solutions.

WW folks are generally invested in education, sharing with makes sense, and preserving their own secrets to the cut and paste kiddies.

And experience (25yrs plus) simply means that critter has already made the mistakes, figured it out, and is STILL in the game. Noobies have to learn that all by themselves.

Aside: we are all born stupid: ie. nothing known, blank, open mesh to absorb with is to be experienced. After ABCs and how to dress oneself and tie shoe laces, the rest is simply accumulated experience.

If one can find others willing to share a bit of what THEY have learned since birth a joy of gratitude would seem reasonable.

Aside 2: It is increasingly obvious that those who have managed to navigate the bs of g and continue to be successful have absolutely no desire to share those strategies to the "Quick, make me famous and RICH" crowd. No brainer. But the Old Pharts still make the effort, just more qualified these days.

And that's why the quiet on what is important as the noise regarding "why has g forsaken me" becomes an incresasingly desperate torrent.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

"I was silly to come back, farewell for good."

Missing you already.