Microblog Posts

We've come full circle. Paying for things used to be normal. People used to pay to host their own personal websites. In a world where it was normal to pay for things, it was also normal to pay someone to host your personal website.

There were BBS systems, IRC servers, etc. that used to be paid for by somebody, but the users didn't need to pay. Some geek just had enough cash to spare and liked hosting an IRC server, so she did. Or a school was knowingly (or unknowingly) hosting services that were used by a lot of non-students. The school admins didn't know, the computer admins liked using the services so they didn't mind keeping them running. In the early days, long before the dot-com boom ads were rare. That meant it stayed OK with the schools and stuff. Nobody tried to run an ad-supported IRC server, AFAIK. It just wasn't a thing.

Then "Free (with ads)" became an option, and people started migrating to "Free (with ads)" because, why wouldn't you? The earliest ads weren't all that obnoxious, and once they started getting obnoxious it was easy for the tech-savvy to just block those ads. Now we've started to see the error of our ways. So yeah, please host your own stuff, or if you're using something hosted by someone else, help out however you can.