What's the biggest example of the domino meme in my life? I'm gonna have to go with "I got bored on the sleepy overnight shift at the data center -> Russia invaded Ukraine".
Struggled to think of something that fit... most of the cause/effect stuff in my life has been pretty straightforward.
I think: AOL Chat Room -> owning a champion schipperke.
1. I got bored on the overnight shift and started volunteering for LiveJournal's support team.
2. I kept getting put in charge of more and more shit, because I got shit done
3. I got laid off from said overnight shift, and since it was the tail end of the dotcom burst, decided to try college again.
4. I told everyone I was going to have to pick up a job that would work around classes, probably waiting tables, so I was gonna have to stop volunteering.
5. Like three LJ employees went to Brad and said "I know you have no idea what she does, but if she stops doing it, bad shit will happen."
6. Brad hired me and told me to keep doing it.
7. I spent the next 2 years cheerfully doing like 7 jobs so Brad didn't have to deal with a lot of the things he hated.
8. This freed him up to work on interesting technical problems, including how to best support text in non-Western Latin encodings.
9. This being before widespread UTF-8 adoption by US services, LJ wound up with a substantial population of Russian users living in Russia who wanted a service that wasn't under Russian government control/influence, including journalists, largely turning LJ into the Russian free press.
10. Brad sold LJ to Six Apart, where I continued to do like 7 jobs except the CEO was a lot more terrible at listening to me than Brad was.
11. So terrible, in fact, that he ignored me when I said "if you do this, your site will be dead within 18 to 24 months" and did the thing anyway.
12. The thing caused a massive drop in revenue (almost like I knew what I was talking about!)
13. The CEO hired a dude with no relevant experience to "fix" it and sprung this on me with no notice (after having been making noises about putting me in charge but not wanting to pay me more).
Even most of the people I knew there more recently don't know about my origins, they all arrived much later, many probably don't even know about Six Apart etc, and it's a different/much more specific social circle.
Reading this bit just reminded me about how I used to be relatively big on InsaneJournal when I was one of the first people who decamped there in 2007 and ran a bunch of the community promotion stuff. (Which is not THAT big, it was still fairly quiet then even compared to now.)
I remember there used to be a site that showed the last 20? 50? Images uploaded to livejournal and it was a fascinating slice of humanity, and I noticed it being suddenly very Russian around that time
Ah! Back then I was on LJ with a bunch of other midwestern sci-fi fans and when the sale to the Russian operation happened we were all like, what the hell just happened? Because you'd only see the people you were following so who knew, right?
I remember you from that time (I was a major lurker). Specifically a long post you made explaining moderation and safe harbour provisions (?) that I credit as sparking my interest in the legal underpinnings of the internet.
But I didn't know much of all this.
I kept my mouth shut at the time because I was still trying to fix it internally, then when I quit I was trying to avoid fucking over my team members who couldn't. Then I had a nervous breakdown for a year or so, and then I was starting up a competing service so it wouldn't have been a good idea.
Even today with Unicode and UTF-8 it's a ridiculous problem. Too many things that are just rules that you cannot reason about because they describe systems that humans grew, not designed.
