(Not quite - some of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)
But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very *evil* territory.
7/
As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.
Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.
6/
The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time.
5/
Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you.
4/
Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" - J. Hodgman) - rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" - D. Byrne), and also, how the *world* got this way.
There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about *this* moment - both for me, and for the world we live in.
3/
Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean - it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).
2/
How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/#bayesian-terrorism
1/
@Daojoan buying and selling non-dividend common stock is not much different than betting on a horse named after your favourite actor, or on the sports team that has the same name as your city.
@evan you mean, if you cache the one that worked? Sadly I don't have that available to me directly in GoActivityPub... Of course one might add support for that, but there isn't a straightforward way to introspect which knock worked for a specific request. Maybe something I need to add to my todo list...