"’00: There also must be some really good music discussion forums."
[pained face] The Internet is complicated and didn't go as planned. Paul Ford converses with his past self about where we are in 2020.
Update: Paul added a new version of this conversation that is less jokey and more earnest. For example, he elaborates on the discussion forum pain I quoted above:
"’20: Independent forums are mostly dead, swallowed up by Reddit, social media, and the like. I cannot overemphasize how much the lesson of the web is that people, given the choice between the freedom of operating and managing their own platform, and running a centralized platform that they do not control, will choose the centralized platform."
Medium
Update: Paul added a new version of this conversation that is less jokey and more earnest. For example, he elaborates on the discussion forum pain I quoted above: Sometimes it's worth explaining the joke!