Hi, It's Me

originally posted by: TheSkepticGuy23

Something tells me there’s more to those stories.

Not really.

was it ever about the community for you

It was always about what the community stood for: free expression and pragmatic examination of controversial topics. Then, can such an entity be profitable enough as a full-time gig?

Were you preparing yourself for the secular workforce,

Two factors hit: 1) the community let me down and rebelled against reasonable ads to fund operations, and 2) the bottom fell out of the online ad industry. I needed to quickly find another source of income, which was really difficult coming off of 12+ years as the "CEO" of a conspiracy website and with no professional network.

or becoming a farmer?

That was a semi-accident. We wanted to buy a house, and the best options within our budget were rural. We thought we'd have chickens for eggs, and just chickens at first. Chickens are a "gateway drug" that brings about thoughts of big gardens and more livestock. I suppose we're more homesteaders than farmers. 80%+ of everything we eat comes from our property. I haven't had processed food for more than 5 years, and I feel great.

I appreciate your candor with your experience as the CEO of ATS.

It makes more sense that it was your main source of income for 12 years. I can imagine that would be life altering to replace, once not profitable. I’d like to hear more how that happened.

What has me perplexed is the “Three Amigo” connotation. We all thought you were all so connected and close. Like to hear more about that too.

Maybe you should do an AMA.

originally posted by: Zarniwoop
Darko came in a fixed that, along with some other stuff that had broken over time.

Initially I was giving him a hand, then I got banned.

The darned mailbox still doesn't light up with new messages though.

That's a long-standing problem... that might not be as big an issue now. The SQL queries to check for unread messages were bogging down page loads... think of it, every time a member loaded a page, the code needed to scan ALL your messages (after authenticating you) to see if there were any unread messages. It was a real pain.

originally posted by: JinMI
a reply to: TheSkepticGuy23
We as a community agreed to a paid membership model along with ads.

How's your experience with large website economics? Ad network operations?

Somewhere, 4-5 years ago, I did a brief calculation of the revenue potential of a paid membership, comparing known percentages from other communities that tried it. Once the math worked out, paid accounts would barely cover our DNS service ($3k/year from what I recall at the time).

Bare metal hosting was expensive, but AWS might have been about 50% of that, but required a complete overhaul of our database schema and query management -- well beyond my skillset. In 2020-ish, we were operating at about 50% of our peak 2008 traffic (when we had 5 servers, 2 web, 2 database, 1 database mirror). But the 2020 monster dual-raid quad-core server was still needing to handle more than 50 simultaneous queries a second, on average. That level of data access on AWS was going to be over $10k/month alone... not counting the huge size of the data, which would be more.

And you forget the uprise in drama from those who would never offer their credit card, or couldn't afford a membership.

a reply to: TheSkepticGuy23

Well regardless, you guys built an amazing community.

the community let me down and rebelled against reasonable ads to fund operations,

I must say at the end you were coming across a bit salty and annoyed with the community so it kind of makes sense now. However now you appear to be more relaxed and actually wanting to engage with the community again. So much so, that I'm actually questioning if its really you, lol

So hopefully that is a sign that things are going great for you and your family

I also recall you were playing with other social platforms like twitter.I guess that never took off but not surprising at the time when twitter censorship was at all time high and a new Hillary scandal was being exposed on here on a daily basis.

Sad to see this site go down as I got a feeling it will near election time, just as twitter will start enforcing their WEF CEO corporateze mumbo jumbo bs "free speech , but not reach " program along with pay to play tiered program.

Again thanks for what you guys done and while I'm sure there are and were some bad memories I can't imagine you guys not having mostly great memories with ATS.

Thank you sir

BTW any ideas on the ghost and or thoughts ?

a reply to: JinMI

Plus many Members complained about ads running the CPUs crazy and some ads blocking the topic content, and driving the phones nuts.

a reply to: WingDingLuey

That was hard to track down. I had an emulator that "pretended" to be several different models of mobile phones, and I could not reproduce it. I think it ended up being a carrier thing, because people were still seeing those ads when we did a test of killing all ads on mobile for a few days.

That being said, mobile advertising sucks, and always will.

a reply to: TheSkepticGuy23
Oh wow that's absolutely a great switch my youngest son wants to become a farmer too, now its not easy these days to become one here with all the rules , but hopefully he will eventually work on farms in the future when he finishes his agriculture and horticulture school

Working with animals nature and crops that's real life
I wish you all the best and prosperity with farming

originally posted by: TheSkepticGuy23
That's a long-standing problem... that might not be as big an issue now. The SQL queries to check for unread messages were bogging down page loads... think of it, every time a member loaded a page, the code needed to scan ALL your messages (after authenticating you) to see if there were any unread messages. It was a real pain.

Or you could add an "unread messages count" field to the member's table, increase that field whenever someone sent a message to a member and decrease it when the message was read.
The above, obviously, is just in theory, as I don't have the slightest idea of how the database is designed.

PS: nice to "see" you and to know that things are fine for you and your family.

a reply to: TheSkepticGuy23

Initially I was giving him a hand, then I got banned.

Seems odd you’d get banned while helping out. Any idea why they did that?

a reply to: KKLOCO

Because Darko made the determination that everyone was a “fed” and trust could not be established.

originally posted by: Djarums
a reply to: KKLOCO

Because Darko made the determination that everyone was a “fed” and trust could not be established.

From much limited talk with this Dark dude here where I asked him jokingly to get Elon Musk or the Canadian woodwork teacher with the big hooters on for a AMA and the way a thread about AI was getting steered , I have come to the conclusion that either Musk or Sam Ban man Fried bought the place , I could be 100 % wrong but thank you for getting my account back

a reply to: TheSkepticGuy23


Howdy SO .

Glad to see you back on the boards and answering questions for the forum members , I was gobsmacked at what this site was costing a month to run easily a 1000 % more than I imagined it would cost .

originally posted by: Djarums
a reply to: KKLOCO

Because Darko made the determination that everyone was a “fed” and trust could not be established.

Interesting, I know he did fix some back end items that needed to be fixed. Unfortunately, I’d still prefer the old ATS pre Darko. It doesn’t feel like the damage that he did (more morale based) can be fixed. The site regularly goes through 10 hour periods with no new threads. He banned or scared most everyone away…

originally posted by: KKLOCO
It doesn’t feel like the damage that he did (more morale based) can be fixed. The site regularly goes through 10 hour periods with no new threads. He banned or scared most everyone away…

I think most everyone would agree. It pained me to come back to ATS and see it in shambles like this. I feel like I grew up here.