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webmasterworld.com...]
Note that despite predictions to the contrary, I really did stay away, though as one poster in that thread noted, one can always use a different nic for different purposes, which I did for a bit after that one, but then haven't logged in again to webmasterworld for over a decade I think, at lest, maybe more.
And I did meander along the GNU/Linux path, and still do, which is where almost all my online efforts have been directed. That's an interesting game, albeit difficult and time consuming, but easier to make a global impact of sorts should one so chose.
I want first and foremost to congratulate the site owner, whose name I forgot, sorry, for not falling into any of the modern horrible fads for layout and presentation, and, even better, for retaining old accounts and not pruning them, which is more than I can say for all the old emails I used to use with various large and small email providers, all dead now. This era of actually making usable non bs content and layout seems largely dead in the water in the rest of the internet, though we've kept our commercial stuff as clean and simple as possible while still being user friendly, but my eyes sparkled when I hit WebmasterWorld again today for the first time in a long time, not broken, not stupid, no idiotic presentation fads, astounding really. But probably translates to kids going elsewhere I'd fear, and of course the pervasive stackexchange/overflow stuff, which I assume has eaten a huge chunk of the WebmasterWorld core userbase.
Maybe it started coming back to me when I refactored one of my oldest flat file home grown CMS sites recently, an idea I got at least in part from how WebmasterWorld was constructed.
But talking to a client, made me wonder if it wasn't time to check into WebmasterWorld again, mainly to follow the godawful mess that modern machine learning is demonstrating, particularly re google, and anyone else who is trying to implement an absurdly flawed model of cognition by tossing billions of dollars of hardware/devs to generate enough computer to enable... pattern matching...
Our interests were stirred a bit a few months back when we realized that google serps were turning into total gibberish, something my non techie firends concurred with, though in our case, it resulted in google returning us to our old pre monetizing serp position of #1 by accident, where we now sit peacefully, though I'm sure google will realize their error at some point and get rid of such accurate results that reflect what users actually want and are looking for.
I'm curious if any of the 2005 era gang are still around, and note, posting in foo to maintain my 1300 final post average, and don't really have anything I want to learn re seo or tech in this area so probably won't be posting much, unless there's something interesting, but maybe I'll use an alternate account for that, I don't know.
I'l also curious if there has been any good critical discussion here of AI (sic, machine learning really, and even the learning part deserves its own (sic) since the only honest part of that statement appears to be the code and data runs on machines), not as in, actually believing the AI BS hype, but critically appraising it when it comes to how the big firms are applying it, like MS OpenAI GPT, Google's silly failures with waymo, search, auto identifying spam and obvious seo abuse, etc.
You may remember, like those big google update threads, where it was picked apart, back in matt cutts era?
I've noted to a guy I work for that I've been thinking of checking back into WebmasterWorld just to see where it's at, so that's what I'm doing. Plus to see if anyone is still around from the old days. I know that's pushing it after so many years.
