No.

No.

I think some of the lists are/were manually updated. The Cafe-page "recent" list seemed to wait for a time then unload a bunch at once. Must be that the interns are ignoring that page. "Your Profile" seems to run automatically.

Ah, memories. We used to have not only our blog page, but one that went back months and years. We used to have all our comments, years' worth. we used to have tracking that showed whether there were new comments, and which took us right to the new ones. We used to be able to send private messages within the site. We used to have Discussion Tables with group-moderated submissions. We used to be able to up-rate comments, or down-rate them to hide them from view, if troll-quality. Gosh we had fun.

But that kind of software was demanding on the servers and didn't easily accommodate the linked adserver system, which meant pages would not load, and revenue was limited. So it goes.

TPM is still the best, but there is a kind of WalMart-ization of the web going on, where traffic is the goal of every site, to earn the highest ad revenue. Maddeningly, the ads compete with active video, distracting the gaze (intentionally), clogging the bandwidth, and causing an arms race of data dominance which will lead to over-exploitation of the commons. Early symptoms include AT&T wanting to charge different rates for high-demand use.

I would stay behind the curve, and not pay for higher speed, if that was the only difference. But before I gave up on dialup I noted that many, maybe most, sites would ignore the slower connections in order to service the high demand connections. That is, I would have some data coming in slowly, then it would simply stop. It was like being shunted to a siding, while the express roared through. Sites that seemed buggy and unreliable worked fine once I switched to DSL.

Just the way it is, if left to commerce. Just like billboards beget more billboards, all ads beget more ads.