I do not understand the beloved Paul Ford’s Tilde Club experiment. As this month marks my 23rd year onliné, I initially felt left out<slash>as though missing out. But I already spent enough time in or on actual tilde accounts in the era when there was no choice. Plus the very old archives here are indistinguishable from that type of writing.
Tilde Club is, I guess, some kind of pure or authentic online writing because its tools and presentation are worse. (Typewriting is more autochthonous than typesetting?) It’s still HTML, and I’m still the only one who has written consistently correct HTML. A single page with multiple entries is a failing that was overcome by technology.
Setting up a page explaining how to telnet into a box and edit in vi is like explaining how to make your own water. (Is Martha Stuart Living?: “I usually make a test batch and then just multiply the recipe by 800 billion.”) We are not using VT220 terminals anymore. Even if you wanted to go along with this charade, you would use Interarchy or Fetch and BBEdit to create and edit and save documents directly.
How is any of this better? It isn’t.
By what means are we supposed to decide which lucky Tilde Club account-holder to read? There are already more of them than there were early bloggers. Updated editorial sites without RSS are a contradiction in terms.
All the early bloggers won the Tilde lottery. The last thing we need is another power-law effect. You don’t need another place to read mathowie. Nobody on Tilde Club needs a new place to write. Another venue to write in that also pays zilch does not qualify as “self-expression” and devalues your work ever closer to zero. Not unrelatedly, Mr. SICHA refused to let me sponsor his Tilde editorial-content flat file for 50¢ in PayPal.
Which would you prefer: An iPhone or feeding dimes into a payphone that cannot receive calls? Next you’ll tell me, as some twits now do, that cassettes were a great way to listen to music.