Josh Average

I've been thinking a lot about posts on here and elsewhere about "moving to a new site" in regards to Twitter's downfall. And while that used to be a common thing in the past, to move from site to site, it's not as common anymore. And I don't think you can go back to that era of the internet unless you are willing to get a lot of people making sites that people wanna go to.

When I was between the ages of Middle School and High School (I graduated in 2012, if that helps) I was on a Whose Line message board, various gaming message boards, various podcast message boards, the Meez message boards, IRC chats on occasion, Myspace, Google+, Facebook, Reddit, and probably many more places I'm forgetting at the moment. There were websites aplenty, and they were easy to find. You had a hobby or interest you liked, you could find a board, then find more from the people who posted there, and so on and so on. Services like StumbleUpon could also get you to some new places you'd never been before, and that's one more vector of discoverability into a bunch of cool websites and places to hang.

Now, in 2024, where on the net do those places exist? I could go back to some of those old message boards, but most of them are dead if they still exist at all or I've grown out of the community¹. Some people have made throwback websites, like SpaceHey, and some people have made cool little websites in general, but it's not like people are rushing to go back to them. Where are all the users, and can you convince your friends to check in on them? Even though I follow Some Cool People on here, I still couldn't tell you of alternatives to Twitter outside of Bluesky (bleh) and Mastadon (even more bleh).

Which kinda gets me to my larger point, which is who's making sites like that anymore? Who's making message boards? Who's making other social media sites? That shit costs time and money, and while they're fun little projects a lot of the time (let me show you my list of ProBoards message boards sometimes) they will more often than not lose steam or interest rather quickly (RIP my message board I made with the help of Tumblr). It doesn't feel like new sites are really happening, and most that manage to happen feel like fly-by-night operations.

There's lots of talk about diversifying and getting setup on a bunch of different sites, but... where? What sites or platforms exist? Are we going back to forums? Which ones? Is there a different social media site that scratches the Twitter itch that you really like? Be specific, talk them up.

Like, even in the wake of Twitter's downfall, there's three "replacements" as far as I can tell: Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. Which one are you moving to? Threads at least has the support of the new @midnight reboot After Midnight, but what's Bluesky and Mastodon got going for it at this point? Bluesky's got the blocked user high score list and Mastodon seems to be built around in-fighting and declaring other instances are ontological evil so good luck picking the "right" instance. And even if we don't get into my issues with a lot of these also-rans in Twitter's wake, where exactly are we going?

And that's just thinking about Twitter! What about a Tumblr replacement (I guess I'm already here, so ignore this one), a DeviantArt replacement, a Facebook replacement, an Art Fight replacement, and on and on and on and on and on.

I'm down to sign up for new sites and give things a shot. I'd love to be fully off of twitter, I'd love to look at Discord a little less, I'd love to have a new username and password to use somewhere. But where are you going? What's the site or sites you're going to?

And, more importantly, where are we going? Who are you going to convince to follow you to the new sites, whatever they may be? I made my migration from Facebook to Google+ back in high school, but that didn't matter when none of my friends did. If you can't convince people to join you, or you don't talk up the new place, then what's the point of wondering why people don't move to new sites anymore. We know the reason at that point.

1. Talking about you, 4-day-a-week nerd podcast that definitely taught me some unhealthy and toxic nerd habits that I had to unlearn as I grew up! I checked back in on that message board and podcast recently and I'm glad I'm gone lmao.

As I continue to diversify my online presence, and see people talking about leaving other sites, I keep coming back to this.

Bringing this one back, one last time, as cohost ends.

Bluesky - implausiblyjosh.bsky.social
Twitter - implausiblyj
Tumblr - implausiblyjosh
YouTube - Implausibly Average
SpaceHey - Josh Average
Pillowfort - JoshAverage

Someone made a weird claim on twitter about the PS2 and how important DVD playback was in late 2000, claiming that DVD players were under $100 by the end of 2000. It didn't smell right, but this screenshot they kept posting didn't make sense to me. Where was it coming from, who was saying this about DVD players?

I went to try and find where this screenshot comes from, and it's the Wikipedia page for "DVD player". I went and skimmed the 5 refs included in that article, and as far as I can tell, of the 1 webpage, 1 service manual, and 3 articles, none of them say this about pricing. Here's the specific version of the article I was looking at.

The closest we get is the EETimes reference in that wikipedia article, an article from May 2002 which has "With DVD player prices on track to drop to about $70 by year's end". That's not super helpful because it doesn't tell us where the prices are in May 2002.

The remaing four sources aren't very helpful either. The service manual PDF is lots of circuit boards, no prices. The webpage and and the other two articles are talking about the first year of the DVD player & format, which is about 1997. So that doesn't help us. Where'd this number even come from?

I checked the Talk page for the article, I'm seeing someone point out in 2008 that there were 0 sources on this article, and I'm not digging in the edit logs of the article itself to see when/where the references came from. So we know sometime between 2008 and 2024 these five sources were added, but none of the sources back the claim.

Trying to find articles about pricing from the time, I google "dvd player price in 2000" and get an IGN article from August 2000 that lists prices ranging from $270 to $3,000. To confirm my knowledge of the PS2 launch (because now I'm doubting what I know lol) I find a GameSpot article from May 2000 announcing the price and launch of the PS2, which is October 26, 2000 for $299 USD.

If your entry level DVD player is $300 in August 2000, I don't know how easy it was to find players "under $100" by the end of the year, and definitely not by the PS2's launch date of late October 2000. Based on looking through some articles at the time, we're looking at something that cost the same as a budget Sony DVD player at the time, but also played video games. It's hard to say how much that drove sales, but I did a quick search for "ps2 launch sales", looking for articles before 2001. I found a CNN article from the PS2's launch day that says:

Perhaps the most important perk, the PS2 can play digital versatile disc (DVD) movies, a feature that Sony hopes will make the $299 console a standard appliance in North American homes. The game pad controls the DVD functions with a relatively rudimentary interface, allowing users to skip ahead, pause or view special features.

In Japan, the presence of the movie player has reportedly driven up sales of DVD movies.

Based on quick searches from articles at the time, T\the evidence that the DVD feature helped PS2 sales is way more evidenced than the idea of $100 DVD players by the end of 2000. Hell, trying to find something that gets me close to that pricing claim is a CNET article from 2002 which says:

The cost of DVD players fell more than $200 within two years of their introduction in 1997 for nearly $500, according to Peddie Research. And the price slide hasn't stopped. Although the Consumer Electronics Association says the average price of a DVD player was $193 last year, consumers can now find players for less than $100.

Looking at it all, it seems like the DVD functionality was a selling point according to Sony and articles at the time of the launch, so. Idk, seems like the DVD feature was important to sales of the PS2!

^{The above was adapted from a thread I made on Twitter. I'm adding the following new thoughts!}

I woulda been 6-ish when the PS2 launched, so what I know first-hand of the era is skewed. Listening to people I trust talk about games has given me the impression the DVD drive and playback was important to the PS2's sales and initial success, making for a solid foundation for people to develop a shit ton of amazing, system-seller titles for the platform. It's a hand-in-hand situation, not an either-or situation. Based on what I remember growing up, the PS2 was a good investment for a video game household that loved movies but didn't have the funds to get a DVD player and get a game console. For us, the PS2 was a best of both worlds situation.

But that's kinda... not the point? It wasn't difficult to find these sources talking about price, but it shoulda been easier. Articles talking about DVD player prices should have been in the Wikipedia article, but weren't. That's super strange to me, a wikipedia article about a large and important type of media player has only 5 sources, and more than half of them are talking about it's first year. Google search should have been a lot better to allow me to find more sources from the time, because it was hard to find any coverage of the launch day vibes of the PS2. Thinking about this more after the fact, I think I need to learn how to search magazine scans because I know gaming print magazines at the time would have said something about DVD playback and how important it may or may not have been!

Idk where to end this. Seems like there's a weird bit of misinfo on the DVD player Wikipedia page, which seems hard to correct because I'm not sure where to look for better sourcing. Someone should do something about this I think!

I've been thinking a lot about posts on here and elsewhere about "moving to a new site" in regards to Twitter's downfall. And while that used to be a common thing in the past, to move from site to site, it's not as common anymore. And I don't think you can go back to that era of the internet unless you are willing to get a lot of people making sites that people wanna go to.

When I was between the ages of Middle School and High School (I graduated in 2012, if that helps) I was on a Whose Line message board, various gaming message boards, various podcast message boards, the Meez message boards, IRC chats on occasion, Myspace, Google+, Facebook, Reddit, and probably many more places I'm forgetting at the moment. There were websites aplenty, and they were easy to find. You had a hobby or interest you liked, you could find a board, then find more from the people who posted there, and so on and so on. Services like StumbleUpon could also get you to some new places you'd never been before, and that's one more vector of discoverability into a bunch of cool websites and places to hang.

Now, in 2024, where on the net do those places exist? I could go back to some of those old message boards, but most of them are dead if they still exist at all or I've grown out of the community¹. Some people have made throwback websites, like SpaceHey, and some people have made cool little websites in general, but it's not like people are rushing to go back to them. Where are all the users, and can you convince your friends to check in on them? Even though I follow Some Cool People on here, I still couldn't tell you of alternatives to Twitter outside of Bluesky (bleh) and Mastadon (even more bleh).

Which kinda gets me to my larger point, which is who's making sites like that anymore? Who's making message boards? Who's making other social media sites? That shit costs time and money, and while they're fun little projects a lot of the time (let me show you my list of ProBoards message boards sometimes) they will more often than not lose steam or interest rather quickly (RIP my message board I made with the help of Tumblr). It doesn't feel like new sites are really happening, and most that manage to happen feel like fly-by-night operations.

There's lots of talk about diversifying and getting setup on a bunch of different sites, but... where? What sites or platforms exist? Are we going back to forums? Which ones? Is there a different social media site that scratches the Twitter itch that you really like? Be specific, talk them up.

Like, even in the wake of Twitter's downfall, there's three "replacements" as far as I can tell: Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. Which one are you moving to? Threads at least has the support of the new @midnight reboot After Midnight, but what's Bluesky and Mastodon got going for it at this point? Bluesky's got the blocked user high score list and Mastodon seems to be built around in-fighting and declaring other instances are ontological evil so good luck picking the "right" instance. And even if we don't get into my issues with a lot of these also-rans in Twitter's wake, where exactly are we going?

And that's just thinking about Twitter! What about a Tumblr replacement (I guess I'm already here, so ignore this one), a DeviantArt replacement, a Facebook replacement, an Art Fight replacement, and on and on and on and on and on.

I'm down to sign up for new sites and give things a shot. I'd love to be fully off of twitter, I'd love to look at Discord a little less, I'd love to have a new username and password to use somewhere. But where are you going? What's the site or sites you're going to?

And, more importantly, where are we going? Who are you going to convince to follow you to the new sites, whatever they may be? I made my migration from Facebook to Google+ back in high school, but that didn't matter when none of my friends did. If you can't convince people to join you, or you don't talk up the new place, then what's the point of wondering why people don't move to new sites anymore. We know the reason at that point.

1. Talking about you, 4-day-a-week nerd podcast that definitely taught me some unhealthy and toxic nerd habits that I had to unlearn as I grew up! I checked back in on that message board and podcast recently and I'm glad I'm gone lmao.

As I continue to diversify my online presence, and see people talking about leaving other sites, I keep coming back to this.