All good things must come to an end... For 6 months or so after Jeff pulled the plug, I thought Zoklet might be capable of carrying on the torch, but I'm now willing to concede that I was dead wrong. What was once a powerful empire has merely limped along for the past 4 years, and now it's ready to meet its final resting place.
Before SpectraL starts spewing nonsense like a broken record, I'd like to clarify that the death of TOTSE had little to do with corrupt admins and abuse of content. The internet has simply changed, an optimist might say evolved. The information age is over, and we're entering a new paradigm, one in which normal everyday folks have infiltrated the web and perpetually pollute a potentially productive environment with parasitic drivel. Erm, 'social networking'. It's a shame but I suppose inevitable. The first time I opened the &T homepage it was on a 486 running a very old release of debian, which was connected to the LAN and 28.8k modem that I had set up and configured myself. See, back then you had to know at least as much as a modern day compsci undergrad just to get on the web, so a board where smart people could gather to discuss controversial topics and share information was able to grow and thrive. These days, computers and those other new fangled devices that sport wireless chipsets are dirt cheap, and easy enough for a toddler to use. Subsequently, the former giants have been overshadowed, usurped by corporate monopolies like Facebook that cater primarily to the double digit IQ crowd. The poisonous population has placed us in an inescapable predicament.
This can't be reversed, as web 2.0 has sunk its roots deep into the heart of our former paradise. This forum will die within a year or two and the internet world will carry on its circlejerk of likes, upvotes, hashtags and cat videos for time immemorial.
And let's not forget how the state of the world and IRL society has contributed to gutting communities like the former temple of the screaming electron. People are scared shitless and paranoid as all fuck. And for good reason too. Citizens of most first world countries have lost an incredible amount of freedom over the last decade, and it's only getting worse with each passing day, as new legislation is drawn up and the media fills our heads with propaganda, germinating the seeds of fear. Everything we do is watched and scrutinized, monitored and cataloged to be used against us at a later date. Nobody wants to be a part of that shit, so nobody is willing to talk openly about the subjects that &T was built on, namely pyro and drug syntheses.
Yep, it's all over. There will never be another TOTSE or another RogueSci. We had our window of chaos and anarchy, just as the wild west preceded industrialized civilization. The new internet order is here my friends, and it's built upon ad networks, cross site tracking, data mining, general dismantling of privacy, and gross overuse of javascript and flash animations.
