Posting this a day early - tomorrow marks two years since this forum went live.
In 2023, on the 11th of October (on a Wednesday
), I launched this forum.
The irony is that, over a decade ago, when I started BikeGremlin websites, I had considered starting a forum and decided to not start a forum because many decent forums had already existed and I could contribute and direct website readers there.
That time was a lot better for making a forum that is "big & popular." In 2023, just as today, starting a forum is a lost cause to a great degree. Big corporations are monopolizing and privatizing Internet. Briefly:
Goole answers searches with stolen regurgitated text from sites like BikeGremlin in the form of "AI answers", while mostly promoting corporate owned platforms (like Reddit they made a multi-billion dollar deal with) in search results below. Likewise, platforms like Reddit, Quora, even StackExchange either directly censor or "strongly discourage" linking to any websites - so the essence of Internet, hyperlinks, is being destroyed (a great example of the early onset of this "logic" in 2018 can be seen in this Stack-exchange discussion - and in this one too ).
Having said that, the main idea of this forum was not to "become huge," but to help connect people, and serve as a good Q&A platform for any questions related to BikeGremlin articles or YouTube videos.
Forums (and Usenet newsgroups before, and BBS even more before) used to serve that purpose, before they were commercialized (and then started getting killed by the large corporate-owned "social" networks.
As far as I'm concerned, that's been a success and in hindsight, I think it was a good call.
In 2023, on the 11th of October (on a Wednesday
), I launched this forum.
The irony is that, over a decade ago, when I started BikeGremlin websites, I had considered starting a forum and decided to not start a forum because many decent forums had already existed and I could contribute and direct website readers there.
That time was a lot better for making a forum that is "big & popular." In 2023, just as today, starting a forum is a lost cause to a great degree. Big corporations are monopolizing and privatizing Internet. Briefly:
Goole answers searches with stolen regurgitated text from sites like BikeGremlin in the form of "AI answers", while mostly promoting corporate owned platforms (like Reddit they made a multi-billion dollar deal with) in search results below. Likewise, platforms like Reddit, Quora, even StackExchange either directly censor or "strongly discourage" linking to any websites - so the essence of Internet, hyperlinks, is being destroyed (a great example of the early onset of this "logic" in 2018 can be seen in this Stack-exchange discussion - and in this one too
).
Having said that, the main idea of this forum was not to "become huge," but to help connect people, and serve as a good Q&A platform for any questions related to BikeGremlin articles or YouTube videos.
Forums (and Usenet newsgroups before, and BBS even more before) used to serve that purpose, before they were commercialized (and then started getting killed by the large corporate-owned "social" networks.
As far as I'm concerned, that's been a success and in hindsight, I think it was a good call.
