6 ms·

I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it

I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.

mopsi 9mo ago
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
- whizzter 9mo ago
  The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random. The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow). There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).
panarchy 9mo ago
Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves. Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
haunter 9mo ago
>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. 100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too. Krita is another example of a good project CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
- BadBadJellyBean 9mo ago
  We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design. Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid. Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts. Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
  - Kye 9mo ago
    There always seems to be an incompatibility between the people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who want to contribute. The latter two often try, but the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that even if it's not in conflict. It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming infrastructure. People come to depend on tools made by people without the resources, interest, or personality to run an infrastructure project, or who won't budge on their vision to allow contributions outside of it that might help get the project to a point where it can attract enough vision-aligned contributors. Forking potentially shifts the problem to a new triad, so it's not an obvious solution in all cases.
    - 9mo ago
luma 9mo ago
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
- syntaxing 9mo ago
  Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
  - rcxdude 9mo ago
    True, but PLM is an area where the bar for UX is very low indeed. I think the main barrier to an OSS one is the will to make one and the large list of checkbox features they're often selected by.
crote 9mo ago
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it. Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
- presto8 9mo ago
  > But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good. The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes. IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
- Jedd 9mo ago
  > but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
  - xboxnolifes 9mo ago
    Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.
  - bitwize 9mo ago
    Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user. Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
chuckadams 9mo ago
I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain weird. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.
raincole 9mo ago
It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube. There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya. [0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
- dylan604 9mo ago
  The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it. Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
  - crote 9mo ago
    For the same reason Maya & friends offer heavily discounted (or even free) educational licenses: people tend to stick with what they initially learned. That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses to make content either! So now you've got a decent pool of enthusiastic kids flowing into education with pre-existing Blender knowledge. And Blender is good enough for educational purposes, so as long as it doesn't significantly hamper the students post-education it is very attractive for educators to adopt as well - why bother with all the hassle of getting educational licenses when you can just download it for free? The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.
jandrese 9mo ago
To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces. Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
- pennomi 9mo ago
  GIMP fought against single window mode for ages despite the majority of people wanting it.
- Sharlin 9mo ago
  > To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
- crote 9mo ago
  Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed. On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.
lynndotpy 9mo ago
This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools). By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux. The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends. (I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
- raincole 9mo ago
  The negative example of Blender is Inkscape. I've used Inkscape in ~2015. I picked it up again in 2025. Surprisingly, it feels even slower and more unstable than a decade ago. I start thinking it's an app that will never reach a mature state.
- crote 9mo ago
  It's the same with KiCad! Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist. Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs. It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.
dylan604 9mo ago
Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero. What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
- presbyterian 9mo ago
  It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
  - crote 9mo ago
    I'm definitely one of those strictly-programming people. Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!
    - dylan604 9mo ago
      It's not that hard though to make a drastic improvement over that. Basic CSS isn't complicated. Sure, there's quirky things, but it's still possible. As "over the weekend" type of projects, I have taken websites/apps with UIs that I've thought were interesting and recreated them with HTML/CSS. You learn a lot very quickly, and then your UIs start to suck a lot less. It's still coding as far as writing in and IDE and testing/fixing bugs. You just get to skip the compiling part of it!
- mixmastamyk 9mo ago
Rapzid 9mo ago
Not disagreeing but it's crazy 2.8 was going on 7 years ago. That's 1 less year than from the release of HTML to 9/11. It'd be like saying "Man the internet has been on such an upwards trajectory since HTML" in 2000 ;D

mopsi 9mo ago

That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.

whizzter 9mo ago
The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random. The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow). There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).

panarchy 9mo ago

Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves. Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

haunter 9mo ago

>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. 100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too. Krita is another example of a good project CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"

BadBadJellyBean 9mo ago
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design. Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid. Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts. Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
- Kye 9mo ago
  There always seems to be an incompatibility between the people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who want to contribute. The latter two often try, but the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that even if it's not in conflict. It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming infrastructure. People come to depend on tools made by people without the resources, interest, or personality to run an infrastructure project, or who won't budge on their vision to allow contributions outside of it that might help get the project to a point where it can attract enough vision-aligned contributors. Forking potentially shifts the problem to a new triad, so it's not an obvious solution in all cases.
  - 9mo ago

luma 9mo ago

The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...

syntaxing 9mo ago
Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
- rcxdude 9mo ago
  True, but PLM is an area where the bar for UX is very low indeed. I think the main barrier to an OSS one is the will to make one and the large list of checkbox features they're often selected by.

crote 9mo ago

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it. Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.

presto8 9mo ago
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good. The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes. IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
Jedd 9mo ago
> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
- xboxnolifes 9mo ago
  Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user. Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.

chuckadams 9mo ago

I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain weird. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.

raincole 9mo ago

It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube. There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya. [0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.

dylan604 9mo ago
The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it. Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
- crote 9mo ago
  For the same reason Maya & friends offer heavily discounted (or even free) educational licenses: people tend to stick with what they initially learned. That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses to make content either! So now you've got a decent pool of enthusiastic kids flowing into education with pre-existing Blender knowledge. And Blender is good enough for educational purposes, so as long as it doesn't significantly hamper the students post-education it is very attractive for educators to adopt as well - why bother with all the hassle of getting educational licenses when you can just download it for free? The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.

jandrese 9mo ago

To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces. Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.

pennomi 9mo ago
GIMP fought against single window mode for ages despite the majority of people wanting it.
Sharlin 9mo ago
> To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
crote 9mo ago
Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed. On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.

lynndotpy 9mo ago

This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools). By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux. The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends. (I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).

raincole 9mo ago
The negative example of Blender is Inkscape. I've used Inkscape in ~2015. I picked it up again in 2025. Surprisingly, it feels even slower and more unstable than a decade ago. I start thinking it's an app that will never reach a mature state.
crote 9mo ago
It's the same with KiCad! Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist. Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs. It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.

dylan604 9mo ago

Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero. What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?

presbyterian 9mo ago
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
- crote 9mo ago
  I'm definitely one of those strictly-programming people. Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!
  - dylan604 9mo ago
    It's not that hard though to make a drastic improvement over that. Basic CSS isn't complicated. Sure, there's quirky things, but it's still possible. As "over the weekend" type of projects, I have taken websites/apps with UIs that I've thought were interesting and recreated them with HTML/CSS. You learn a lot very quickly, and then your UIs start to suck a lot less. It's still coding as far as writing in and IDE and testing/fixing bugs. You just get to skip the compiling part of it!
mixmastamyk 9mo ago

Rapzid 9mo ago

Not disagreeing but it's crazy 2.8 was going on 7 years ago. That's 1 less year than from the release of HTML to 9/11. It'd be like saying "Man the internet has been on such an upwards trajectory since HTML" in 2000 ;D