Good Prevening all,
To start with this is not meant as a foot stamping or a whine nor am I looking to get in a big drawn out argument with amazing gifs flying about, it just feels like this place has changed a fair bit recently, after talking to a few people on irc about it I thought I would risk my neck and start a thread.
I remember when I first stumbled on LEB in the early days and I thought it was pretty amazing as a concept, obviously others did too which is why it grew so much that the original owner chose to sell it on due to time constraints.
Rather than write war and peace I will just point out a few things in a simple enough format.
The old days:
Fairly free flowing, community driven and well lead by the owners
A lot of buzz about what you could make a tiny VPS do
A good healthy community not without its degree of controversy but it was usually justified.
Although the adverts started creeping in it was minimal and fair
There was a good low end spirit about the place
Good offers were posted as well as bad
Now:
Seems a lot more moderated but with a lack of top level involvement.
Feeling more commercialised every day now with about 40 advert spots which are 3 x the price they used to be (avg $100)
The rules are creeping in
It seems more about how much people can (over)sell for $7 rather than what people can achieve with a low end box
Offers seem heavily vetted and there is a check list as long as your arm for posting an offer.
I suppose what I am getting at is that the feeling I personally get is that the whole place has gone very commercial / market place driven and while I don't mind that as a host as it is a good market place I feel like that's what drives things now and as a result its harder to take part in the real community of it all due to being a host.
I keep throwing the name WebHostingLowendTalk/box around in my head as the phase it seems like things are at now and with LET and LEB being so heavily entangled now as the same common market place it feels like something is missing.
I hope no one takes that as a rant (I know I am good at rants) more of an observation and a wonder if I am the only one?
Possible suggestion: make another tier, no adverts, community only, no marketing, just talk/help/scripts/look what I did with 96mb of ram.
Thoughts?