9 ms·
Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link
- pyrophane 5y agoFirst found out about The Well from mailer insert in a print copy of the Whole Earth Catalog I found at the library when I was a kid. I got a membership when I was able to afford it and have maintained it off and on since. Surprised to see it on the front page of HN tonight.
- astrange 5y agoI was going to say this was the invention of the internet forum, but the last time I did Stewart Brand told me it wasn't, and I guess he'd know.
- na85 5y agoCurious about the demographics of the WELL userbase. My impression from language cues in the copy, and from the age of the platform, that the WELL is populated predominantly by graybeards rather than the under-40 crowd. Can anyone confirm/deny?
- jandrese 5y agoMy first impression is that these are probably people who grew up reading the Whole Earth Catalogue.
- mistrial9 5y agoIsnt it the quality of ideas, willingness to participate, and other 'cyber' qualities that make a site like that what it is?
- na85 5y ago>Isnt it the quality of ideas, willingness to participate, and other 'cyber' qualities that make a site like that what it is? Maybe, but different demographics produce ideas and conversation of different character.
- Stratoscope 5y agoI don't know about The WELL these days, but yes it came out of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Truck Store culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I remembered the Truck Store was in Menlo Park near the train station, got curious and looked it up. This MoMA page has some fun facts: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoTools/ https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoT... In more recent years it was a flower shop: https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+Park,+CA+94025/@37.4540124,-122.1827246,3a,75y,313.82h,87.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_xpEM17RzGbmYkErs09yNQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x808fa4ae4b967a5b:0x2db02ee68d1838f2!8m2!3d37.4541829!4d-122.1829861 https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+... And now it is torn down for new construction. Somewhat fittingly, the current Google Street View has a truck driving by in front of the vacant lot: https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+Park,+CA+94025/@37.4539694,-122.1826833,3a,75y,311.38h,89.57t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s5q58C8f8t8qZ7BmkQccHiA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D5q58C8f8t8qZ7BmkQccHiA%26cb_client%3Dsearch.gws-prod.gps%26w%3D86%26h%3D86%26yaw%3D305.7693%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x808fa4ae4b967a5b:0x2db02ee68d1838f2!8m2!3d37.4541829!4d-122.1829861 https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+... Pop quiz! (Actually I'm genuinely curious.) Can anyone name the typeface used in the FUNCTION and Whole Earth Truck Store headings in the MoMA page? I used to know it well (pun intended) but have forgotten its name. Back in those days, you used to buy fonts by the sheet. A sheet of rub-on lettering that is. The sheet had characters that were slightly sticky underneath. These were on the back side of the sheet. I mostly used Letraset and Mecanorma sheets. You would place the sheet so the next letter you wanted was lined up where it should be over the page you were making, and then rub over the letter with a burnishing tool until it came loose from the font sheet and stuck to the paper underneath. Update! I found these newfangled things called "Google" and "Wikipedia". (Well - pun intended again - I guess I already blew my cover with those Street View links.) Anyway, the typeface was called Windsor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_(typeface) One more thing... Here's a great photo of Stewart Brand and the gang at the Truck Store: https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1058035963354583041/photo/1 https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1058035963354583041/photo...
- StevePerkins 5y agoIt looks like this is a web forum, that is supported by user fees rather than advertisers. That's great! But then I look at the membership pricing, and see that it's $15 per month. For a web message board. And an email address with only 500 MB of space allocated, if you even need that feature. Is this a for-profit venture for somebody? Or are they using the most inefficient hosting solution imaginable? Why does a text message board need to cost more than a Netflix subscription?
- Taniwha 5y agoThe Well was around before the ubiquitous internet - think of it as a historical (but still live) object rather than a new and upcoming service
- tdeck 5y agoInterestingly the pricing indicates that they had a $10/month plan at one point: > Do you have an Essential Plan membership? This older membership type has been retired, but remaining accounts are grandfathered in at $100/$10 at this time. Contact Helpdesk (at the address shown at the footer of this page) to upgrade to our contemporary Membership offering.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago$0.20/megabyte for overages on web bandwidth, too. Ow! Better hope your home page never makes the front page of HN. :-)
- Something1234 5y agoI feel the same way.sdf.org includes web hosting and email for free, and if you want to support them recurring. It's only $36 annually. So it's significantly cheaper.
- kristopolous 5y agoThe guy that did the Long Now Foundation and Whole Earth Catalog started The Well in 1985. It's now run by a group of longtime members. It's a different way to do things. Intentionally high barriers to entry protect against eternal Septembers and spam. At a low enough fee, counterintuitively, money is a fairly decent unbiased barrier. It's unbiased in that you don't need to know someone or have specialized knowledge, just the commodity of cash. It's not perfect but it's more blind than most other artificial barriers.
- DanielKehoe 5y agoSome context. The WELL was founded in 1985 (and is still active). Commercial Internet service providers were not widely available until the late 1990s. For threaded public discussions (forums), Usenet was available to people at universities and research labs with Internet connections. Other people connected to bulletin board services (BBSs) with modems. America Online (AOL), Prodigy, and CompuServe were big commercial services; FidoNet was a noncommercial federation of BBSs; and the WELL was a BBS that was mostly known to digerati and deadheads in the SF Bay Area. Apologies to those who know the history (comments? corrections?).
- Taniwha 5y agoUsenet was more widely available than that, lots of small tech companies and individuals were connected, you didn't need an internet connection, anyone who could swing UUCP (ie a unix box and a modem) could join - the whole continent of Australia joined by air-mailing magtapes (ping times were low)
- Turing_Machine 5y agoYou didn't even really need a Unix box. There were implementations of Usenet (and the underlying UUCP transport protocol) for other operating systems, for example the Waffle BBS for MS-DOS. Ah, the joys of getting a $500 long distance phone bill.
- vidarh 5y agoI got Usenet via UUCP on my Amiga exchanged with a BBS that in turn exchanged with their upstream over dialup as well, about 4 times a day. My first "web" access was via CERN's e-mail to www gateway. If I timed it right, and CERNs e-mail gateway was fast enough, I could request a URL, exchange with my upstream, have them send the e-mail to their upstream and download the result in one exchange, and then I'd dial back in 15-20 minutes later and get the page. If I was unlucky I had to wait for the next exchange 6 hours later. It's my "and we walked uphill both ways, in the snow" story.
- TomMasz 5y ago
- annadane 5y agoCan you reply to individual comments on there in the conference? I've never found out how
- ubermonkey 5y agoIt's not threaded, so no. The conversation in any given Topic is strictly linear. With Metafilter, I suspect this is one of the last holdouts on that approach.
- skybrian 5y agoYou can only post to the end of a topic, but you can link to a previous post that you’re replying to using the post number in angle brackets. For example: <123>
- CalChris 5y agoMy first two dialup ISPs were The Well and netcom. Actually my very first was a guest dialup on an ATT 11/45 running v6 Unix. I remember getting a snarling note from a netcom admin for using a compiler.
- DrScump 5y agoI used Netcom when they first started offering Personal PPP accounts in the early 1990s.
- cyberge99 5y agoI was a huge information society fan back in the day and Kurt Harland gave me his contact info at The Well. Great community.
- jonsolari 5y agoJust did a double-take seeing this comment. My first exposure to the Well in any form was seeing Kurt's email address next to the autograph on my sister's copy of their first 12".
- ubermonkey 5y agoA number of famous people have drifted through there over the years, generally without any kind of anonymity. At the Well, your login is whatever you want, but it's tied to your actual real name. IOW, you can have a handle for sure, but there's no provision for shielding your identity. ISTR Billy Idol (again, under his actual name), Geena Davis, David Crosby, and a few others passing through there with varying levels of participation/longevity. (SF author Bruce Sterling was there for years without it really being a Famous Author situation, but I think there's ample precedent for that online among genre writers of that era, so it's kind of a different thing. See also the old GEnie SFRT, where Neil Gaiman used to hang out in the 90s, etc.)
- skybrian 5y agoBruce Sterling still shows up once a year for an annual “state of the world” discussion in January.
- dang 5y agoPast threads; I'm surprised there hasn't been more - unless I missed some: The Epic Saga of the Well (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9892633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9892633 - July 2015 (5 comments) What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754986 - May 2014 (1 comment) Users of The Well buy The Well from Salon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4554354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4554354 - Sept 2012 (8 comments) Salon Sells The Well to Longtime Members - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4552281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4552281 - Sept 2012 (4 comments) The WELL, Birthplace Of Online Movement, Is Up For Sale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470137 - Sept 2012 (13 comments) The WELL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552413 - July 2010 (5 comments)
- dri_ft 5y agoYeah, I'm surprised the WELL never seems to get a mention around here. And the discussion on your links is fairly sparse.
- sasvari 5y agoAlso talked about in this podcast episode: The Dig: Counterculture to Cyberculture with Fred Turner https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/counterculture-to-cyberculture-with-fred-turner/ https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/counterculture-to-cyberc...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- readonthegoapp 5y agoI might have to try it just to try it I do remember all the suicide doxing stuff
- paultopia 5y agoIt feels basically dead to me, but, more troubling, I think there's some financial shadiness. I joined a few years ago, saw that there were no interesting discussions going on, and tried to quit. To my dismay, I found that there appeared to be nobody willing or able to actually cancel my account and stop charging my credit card---after months and months of emailing and calling to get them to stop charging me, I eventually had to report the unauthorized continuing charges to the bank to get it to stop.
- ubermonkey 5y agoI've been a member for 20+ years, and yeah, it's MUCH less active than it was 10 or 15 years ago, but it's still worth logging in every few days. I have friends there. I'm sorry to hear about your billing issue. Unfortunately, the back office has always been a little lax. I don't think for a minute their inability to close your account quickly was nefarious or intentionally fraudulent, but of course from your POV the motivation is quite properly irrelevant.
- cookguyruffles 5y agoI had pretty much the exact same experience as parent comment. There is no apologizing for software that can quickly and easily accept your credit card number, but drag its feet and require non-existent humans to intervene to stop taking your money. Extremely bad look
- mixxit 5y agoI saw this on the documentary about the unibomber and whole earth catalogue https://youtu.be/GY6fb59XFbQ?t=1467 https://youtu.be/GY6fb59XFbQ?t=1467
- api 5y agoThe Unabomber was just an 80s-90s techno-utopian played backwards. He was also a victim of unethical human experimentation, something that I'm sure helped radicalize him. If you read his manifesto it sounds personal in places because the feelings behind it are. There's a line I actually remember about how these scientists "need to be punished." He's globalizing it via his ideology, which is a coping mechanism often employed by trauma victims, but I don't think he's truly talking about "scientists" generally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Harvard_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Harvard_College "In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were turned over to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition.[26] Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly.[26] The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week.[27][28] Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[29]" There was no IRB (institutional review board) in those days.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- korse 5y agoHow do these guys check your identity on sign-up, aside from payment info. Do they call you?
- dave333 5y agoI remember a time in the mid 1980s when it was possible to read the entire content of all usenet groups every day. The novelty soon wore off though as flame wars erupted.