Full disclosure: I damn near am Eternal September. Buddy had a CompuServe account to go with his Gateway2000 (back when they were Gateway2000!) in '92. Me? I got my first email address in September '94, first surfed the visual web in Mosaic in October '94, and was knee-deep in UseNet by November '94. Gotta say - maybe it was pure as driven snow the year before I got there but by the time I was mixing it up, alt.anything and rec.anything looked a lot like Reddit comments.

Here, watch this. Honestly, the whole movie is worth watching, but that "it was just '66… and early '67" fuckin' nails it.

The Internet has always sucked for communication. It may get better, but there's this halcyon glow around Reddit pretty much for "just 2008… and early 2009." And while I've said some mighty complimentary things about Reddit, I said them back when there was still a chance of it getting better, not worse.

I'll say this: everything I've seen tells me the New York Times is right about paywalls. Ryan Holiday sides with them. Paul Carr sides with them. The economics are actually for it, if you look at it.

Let's say you've got a budget of $10,000 a month. Your site's click-through rate is 1 percent (very high) and your cost-per-click is 30 cents (great). How many eyeballs do you need on your content in order to make your budget?

Three million hits. Three million and a bunch of threes, but three million hits.

Let's say you've got a budget of $10,000 a month. You're charging subscribers a dollar a month. How many subscribers do you need in order to make your budget?

Ten thousand. Ten thousand subscribers.

Obviously there's wiggle in there but we're still two orders of magnitude below the crazy numbers.

Doesn't SomethingAwful charge a dollar a month in order to turn off ads and release the obscenity filter? It's a nuisance fee, really, but multiply it by a few thousand subscribers and suddenly it's money. I've been giving a dollar a month to somafm for like, eight years now and I barely notice. You can't get coffee for that.

I know that my favorite websites aren't crawled by robots.txt. Three of my favorite communities are invisible to Google. There's something to be said for exclusivity: check the comments for something on TPB, then check them on what.cd (we won't even get into the darker corners of the world). If you can keep out the riffraff, you win, pretty much forever. I've got one online community where my first "featured" post was nearly ten years ago, and the community is largely the same. The calibre of discussion hasn't diminished much. Some of the names have changed, but not all of them.

I think that, in this age of Cracked, HuffPo, QZ, Upworthy and all the rest of the clickbait bullshit, we'll start to see communities that do not let you register by default. That do not let you wander through and post comments like an angry toddler. That are curated for the defense of their existing userbase because they recognize that their existing userbase matters.

This is one thing I like about Hubski - every now and then mk hits a sweet spot that promotes interaction with new blood without driving out the old. It gives me hope that it can be done, and that we needn't flock from oasis to oasis like angry locusts looking for conversations to strip down to "this" and "lol upvote."

But I think it's also important to remember that many of those verdant pools on the horizon were mirages.