spiroyster wrote on 2023-02-13, 10:46:
Affiliate link spammers ruined it iirc. Years ago, one of the most popular threads on vogons was (the now) 'infamous' ebay thread... got out of control... for obvious reasons...
Shame the thread was nuked from history, would have been interesting to see "then and now" pricing, I expect some people would be crying to see the prices some of the things went for even 5 years ago... go back 10/20 years and they would be crying even more...
It was considered junk. And I mean literal junk as in something with absolutely no value (or scrap value at best). A few people even wanted to pay me for helping me get rid of their 386.
It's not like these days where 'trash' and 'junk' have become more synonymous to something that isn't top dog.
When concerning prices, things are also different nowdays as hardware that is 10 years old is still somewhat useable. heck, my Phenom 2 lasted me 10 years and while it felt sluggish, I could still at least run nearly every program I threw at it. My Deschutes 350MHz however aged way faster, so it was literally more use-less when wanting to run modern software on it.
I remember Philscomputerlabs explained it very well, there's always a curve where something dips to its lowest point, after which prices will start rising again and this phenomenon is also not new.
Yes, that thraed was indeed interesting. And it would have indeed been interesting being able to read it now. But I think it's for the better overall. A few people got so mad about their affiliate links being nerfed they started to ehh....link to certain ... images and other things that were really on the dark side (and had nothing to do with retro computing). They were doing it out of spite.
And also it seemed to attract the wrong kind of people to the forums, at some point I have gotten tired of all the 2 post accounts sending me unsolicited WTB requests for hard to come by items I had written about (or not even that) and it was getting annoying. I bet most were just trying to scam me, offering me a 'fair price' trying to make me feel emphatic about how sorry they were or something instead of someone asking me in private about drivers or just generic info requests which I find much more enjoyable.
It's not even about the tread or the subject for me personally but about all the trash that came with it (and trash here I don't mean literally 😜 ).