Ask Paul: February 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the first Ask Paul of February! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.
Online communities
j5 asks:

What are your thoughts about how the web has changed as far as online communities are concerned? I feel like we had more tech communities online in the '90s to early 2000s. But with the advent of the smartphone and social media apps, it now feels like they've all gone there. And even then they're not long-term communities with archives of information like forums were back in the day or even further IRC chat rooms. As someone that's been reporting on tech for a long time and knows a lot of inside tech baseball, I'm sure you have a unique perspective on this.

I used to participate in all kinds of online communities (for lack of a better term) across IRC, USENET newsgroups, and even FTP (which I know sounds impossible). And then CompuServe, AOL, and so on as things moved forward. But there must be many, many more online communities now than there were 20 years ago. Must be.

I think what’s changed is that these solutions have evolved, and in every way. Social media has happened since then, so that’s sucked up a lot of it. Facebook, for all its problems, hosts a lot of different groups that I’d call communities, including one I actually joined recently called “Buy Nothing,” so that I can give away items locally that I can’t sell. (Nextdoor is another example of something similar.)

The other thing to consider here is that we’re all 20 years older, too, and our needs/wants have changed. So the younger folks that are coming along now and looking for virtual communities don’t just have different (and more) choices, they are living in a more technically sophisticated world in which they will likely access things on a phone and not a traditional PC. It’s just a different world.
He who shall not be named
OldITPro2000 asks:

I read earlier this week that Steven Sinofsky has changed his book plans and has started to publish Hardcore Software over a series of emails through Substack.

Yeah, I saw that.

Let me clear here. I f#$%ing hate that guy.

I hate what he did to Microsoft and Windows, how he took Microsoft’s most important product and reduced it to a rubble we’re still rebuilding from. But mostly what I hate is how he continuously rewrote history, and you just know that this book, or whatever it is now, will be full of lies and misinformation. It makes me nuts.

That he then takes his nonsense and exploding it out to 1000x times the number of words needed to make a point is another frustration. It’s literally a strategy on his part to overwhelm the reader and make it seem like he must be on to something if he’s using so many words. He’s not. He never was.

Are you going to subscribe and read along and if so, are you going to subscribe at one of the paid "premium" levels?

I looked at it. I have a deep moral imperative to debunk his ...