Transparency On The Future of ATS

When a conspiracy site is controle'd by things other
than free speech it is Not free speech

ATS should not be control'd by AD revenue and politics.
it should be about breaking secrets, telling the trueth,
leting people know what is being hiden from them.

Not being Nice and Polite.
Its not doing the job if it never hurts some peoples feelings.
ATS should Die.

We need New web site that is run from a country
that is not controled by the US or Facebook and twiter.
that NEEDs money to run it. as the money ends up controling it.

We need people to run the site for free.
we have a lot of members that would do that.
a small donation from members.
that would pay for the site, cloud?

could a torrent site be made to run like a web site?
the info would be stored an all computers.
you would only need one member online to read the posts?

can any of you think about that?
using a torrent web site to post to?

originally posted by: redmage
a reply to: FauxMulder

I don't think you understand how much of a massive shift and catalyst it was for ATS to become a place where uncivilized discussion became something that is actually rewarded.

This, I wholeheartedly agree with

If y'all would stop wasting money on new Harley's an boat's, get a damn liquor license , and a couple of new pool tables this wouldn't be a problem.Lady's night might help as well, I get tied of seeing the same bar flies here every night...

Hope we figure out something quick.

Right now is the time ATS should really be available. Dark times ahead!

This place if even a tiny light, flickers in all of this growing shadow. This is possibly the worst timing for ATS to close it's doors.

originally posted by: StallionDuck
Hope we figure out something quick.

Right now is the time ATS should really be available. Dark times ahead!

This place if even a tiny light, flickers in all of this growing shadow. This is possibly the worst timing for ATS to close it's doors.

Anyone ever notice that there's always "dark times ahead?"
Nobody ever says that good times are coming.
Do good times even exist for some of you?

Harte

originally posted by: buddha
ATS should not be control'd by AD revenue and politics.
it should be about breaking secrets, telling the trueth,
leting people know what is being hiden from them.

Unfortunately, things are not free, and hosting a site with the size and traffic of ATS costs money, so unless the owners are millionaires ATS needs some kind of revenu.

Not being Nice and Polite.
Its not doing the job if it never hurts some peoples feelings.

You can hurt some people's feelings while being nice and polite, the way you make your message public makes a difference on how it is received, even if the content is the same.

Also, when people are not polite things escalate easily and, before you know it, instead of a discussion you have a fight.

ATS should Die.

I disagree.

We need New web site that is run from a country
that is not controled by the US or Facebook and twiter.
that NEEDs money to run it. as the money ends up controling it.

Everything costs money. Even when I ran a server on my own bed room I was paying the electricity the server used and I was paying an Internet provider to have Internet access.

If you can find a free quality host tell me, I have a few dozens of web services and a couple of sites I would like to have hosted for free.

We need people to run the site for free.
we have a lot of members that would do that.
a small donation from members.
that would pay for the site, cloud?

A "small donation" may not be enough. Personnel costs are not the biggest problem when running a site, having a host with enough bandwidth, storage and protection (you don't want your site being hacked every two weeks, right?) is where the money goes to.

could a torrent site be made to run like a web site?
the info would be stored an all computers.
you would only need one member online to read the posts?

I don't know of any forum software that works through torrents, but I suppose it would be slower in response time, because of the added work needed to fetch all the sources and join the pieces together instead of just receiving the text from the database.

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: StallionDuck
Hope we figure out something quick.

Right now is the time ATS should really be available. Dark times ahead!

This place if even a tiny light, flickers in all of this growing shadow. This is possibly the worst timing for ATS to close it's doors.

Anyone ever notice that there's always "dark times ahead?"

Nobody ever says that good times are coming.
Do good times even exist for some of you?

Harte

Yep... When they're good.

Let me guess... Your life is always a bed of roses?

If you don't see these times as someone's dark sense of humor than you need to turn down the dose on your happy pills. They're working too much. That can't be healthy.

a reply to: Harte

I had a good night last night. Cooked a pot roast today. Will add gravy and peas to the leftovers for beef stew tomorrow. Can’t really complain. Would have liked to have seen an enhanced sunset from all the supposed Sahara Dust but no dice yesterday. And I have doubts about tonight as it wasn’t very abundant on the maps today.

I think Starlink is something to get excited about. Not heard about differentiating between residential and commercial access...so it might be a really big deal, if say you wanted to host a particular forum database fairly cheaply...who knows where that could lead.

a reply to: neformore

So the truth finally comes out huh? I thought the quitting of the radio show was you just giving up,and trying to sell that excuse about not having the time was BS. you didnt have the time because you didn't want to.
It would had been more respectful to just had said I have no faith in it anymore. but hey..water under the tims eh?

originally posted by: StallionDuck

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: StallionDuck
Hope we figure out something quick.

Right now is the time ATS should really be available. Dark times ahead!

This place if even a tiny light, flickers in all of this growing shadow. This is possibly the worst timing for ATS to close it's doors.

Anyone ever notice that there's always "dark times ahead?"

Nobody ever says that good times are coming.
Do good times even exist for some of you?

Harte

Yep... When they're good.

Let me guess... Your life is always a bed of roses?

If you don't see these times as someone's dark sense of humor than you need to turn down the dose on your happy pills. They're working too much. That can't be healthy.

I suppose, then that there's nothing but dark times ahead.

This website is filled with prophets of the coming dark times. The "Dark Times" are always coming.
Since there's never been a prophecy for good times, that proves no good times ahead?
Makes you wonder.

Harte

a reply to: Harte

ahh but the pendulum swings both ways and with this swing into darkness then there is only good times ahead

originally posted by: yuppa
a reply to: neformore

So the truth finally comes out huh? I thought the quitting of the radio show was you just giving up,and trying to sell that excuse about not having the time was BS. you didnt have the time because you didn't want to.
It would had been more respectful to just had said I have no faith in it anymore. but hey..water under the tims eh?

Intriguing post, somewhat baffling but still... as you asked.

Firstly the whole radio show thing was voluntary. No one got paid for any of it.

By the time it came to an end I had done five years of working full time five days a week, and then working nights of a weekend to facilitate the show - because 7pm EST is midnight UK time, and we were on air for three hours.

I don't think you understand just how much time it took to pull those shows together. By the end of the run we were old hands but for the first few years - and certainly when we went live on AM and Satellite - we had to do some major research, topic organisation and an editorial process.

When - through no fault of our own - the AM stations got pulled from under us the satellite wasn't viable any more and TAN couldn't fund us but we chose to still run on internet. From that point onwards Semper and myself funded the whole thing - radio server, website etc and we ran under licence from ATS/TAN to use the content.

When we expanded the shows out it became a monster. in hindsight it was a bad move to expand. We were running a full time radio station, I was doing Live, Euro, Unleashed and occasionally M2c2 while trying to manage a content schedule, upload the re-runs and maintain an archive whilst trying to have a personal life and a day job - and then some other stuff went down that I won't discuss here on top of it.

At weekends I didn't have a Saturday night, and I didn't have most of a Sunday because I was tired from the night before.

And after 5 years of that, it was enough. It wasn't that I didn't have faith anymore, it was that I had nothing left in the tank. My personal and professional life were suffering.

So. Hope you enjoyed your explanation and feel better now.

a reply to: neformore

Its interesting that you continue saying this, yet ArMap provides some data that really doesn't agree with your narrative.

Ill add: the site represents an amalgamation of what the people who use the site want to discuss and see. If it were 90% politics, that would be because the users want to see that. It can reasonably be assumed that if the ATS users want to see that, the population at large might want to as well. Human cross section and whatnot.

So, with that said, it would seem that your narrative is needing to be reworked. ArMap has shown us that politics hasn't taken over, and common sense would dictate that a user driven content would reflect content that users want to see.

And, if you add in what SO has mentioned: ATS is being demonetized by Google's ad service, you get to the point. Its not that people don't want to see politics. In fact, the people want it enough that in a user created content space, that is the content they CHOSE to discuss. Its not that people don't want to see it, its that Google doesn't want you to see it.

There is nothing logical about your position. I know you dislike US politics. But you aren't the population at large, who spoke very clearly when they chose to write about politics. And even then...it wasn't a significant change to the site over the prior 7 years.

a reply to: yuppa

Im here to tell you that this is wholly unfair. Nef cut deep into his own flesh to provide ATS radio for us. To insinuate anything other than your appreciation for his personal sacrifices is wholly unfair, and well beneath us.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Ill add: the site represents an amalgamation of what the people who use the site want to discuss and see.

Part of the issue has been a divergence between "what people want to discuss" and "what people want to see".
Putting it another way, the divergence between those two overlapping but not identical groups, the thread-writers and the thread-readers.
The balance of topics on ATS has got political because that reflects the interests of the thread-writers, which becomes a problem because it doesn't cover all the interests of the thread-readers. Then the latter group end up blaming "the site" for the absence of the threads which nobody has been writing.

a reply to: DISRAELI

I really don't think that is the case, although i have no data to base that off of.

To me it would seem that we still have plenty of thread readers and writers. Although the volume of both has dropped off over the years, if i recall its not like a massive ratio shift. We still have TONS of lurkers reading, but used to have several tons.

In any event, i think what you are pointing to is more of a culture shift. This is a bulletin board system. Great for boomers and Gen X. But everyone else uses a social media platform like FB or Insta, or has moved to a platform that integrates with their actual life style (and has potential for monetization) like Twitch or maybe even Discord.

At one point SO tried to make ATS more social media like, but the members were not fans at all. The current design doesn't even really use the friend feature anymore (if at all...i'd have to check).

I think that a chance for ATS to evolve platforms may have passed. And I think that SO sees that writing on the wall, in one form or another. One thing he mentioned was that the current design of ATS tested the limits of his ability...i can relate to that. Having a team creates a synergy. Coding all alone after you've completed a full day at work already does not.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan
It's just an inference which I was drawing from the multiple complaint threads over the years saying "There aren't enough threads about X,Y,Z, and too much politics instead". That implies a demand for more threads on other topics. The demand must be coming from the people who want to read threads, and isn't being met by the people who write them.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

How much time do we still have? Is there a date & I missed it?

originally posted by: Peeple
How much time do we still have? Is there a date & I missed it?

Yesterday, around 1PM EST.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

You dumbass lol I meant was there already an announcement of the date