The coordinated push to eliminate weather websites

[Andy Wehrle]

Great to hear, @Tony Laubach ! Yours was one of my go-to sites back in the '00s along with the others I mentioned.

 

[Dan Robinson]

@Tony Laubach, great to hear and hoping this inspires more to do the same!

It is definitely a labor of love type of thing. I'm not good at writing, but I enjoy it anyway. I make at least a one or two sentence summary of even the most mundane bust. I think it helps paint the picture of how chasing really is, including all of the failures and not just the highlights. I'm at 1,377 chases logged on my site to date.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Reddit is moving toward paywalling some of its forums. Not sure if Reddit is used much by chasers, but this type of thing (charging users to access content that is all user generated!) should bode well for a return to specialized niche forums like ST.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Learning HTML is a thing of the past. I would have considered myself beyond expert level at one point but I rarely have to code anything by hand now.

The secret to having an extremely fast site is to use Amazon AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Cloudfront to host the site. To do so, I use a plugin called Simply Static to export my site to static HTML files. It takes about 15 minutes since my site is full of so much content, but then I just sync the changes to S3 and clear cloudfront cache. There are also other providers such as Cloudflare and Github pages that function similarly. I host the actual wordpress locally here at my house, then and don't have to have the scripts online, which also makes my site pretty impossible to 'hack' the original.

 

[Dave C]

I’ve been having similar thoughts today about starting my own project as well. I enjoy reading Dan’s blog and a few others that focus on the photographic, personal, and insightful journeys of storm chasers and photographers. If I find value in these stories, I’m sure others would appreciate them too.

I’ve seen your Flickr account and would love to hear your personal account of the events you’ve captured. There’s so much to learn from chasers like you and Dan.

I say go for it!
- Laney

Whenever I re(read) through one of the relatively few extant thorough, still-updated chaser websites such as OP @Dan Robinson's or @Skip Talbot's and am briefly inspired to create my own in order to have a "one-stop shop" for all my chases and what I've observed on them; instead of having my words and images scattered among, say, Reports threads here, captions on Flickr, and YouTube descriptions, it's Dan's original rationale for creating this thread that gives me pause. Would anyone actually see it, or would I basically just be doing it for myself?

Story telling is the main reason I think most people care about things, as it helps us relate or explore from others perspectives. I applaud all of you for getting inspired to launch new initiatives and you should! I am pushing myself in this direction also.

Any media such as images, video etc that is just dumped out randomly here or there is ok I guess, but gets kind of stale and does not stand out. If media tells a story on its own (like a great photo can) or better if a detailed story is crafted and presented with the media, that is where the big engagement and interest comes from it seems to me, and rightly so. Who doesn't love a good story or something crafted by effort to have a certain presentation? Most of the content I enjoy is storytelling, whether fiction or non, rather than just dumped out footage or photos set to the same old music or words. Tell me a unique story! Sell me a dream or teach me something I never knew! That is what good entertainment and learning is all about and it has become lost in the noise of social media idiocy, where 256 characters is all the thought in some people's brain.

I hope you all start these new projects. My own about to start youtube channel will be about night sky timelapse so I will have to post in bears cage or photography area or something probably. The most important thing is if its your passion, share it, someone out there would love to hear your story I have no doubt (just going by how my own curious content consumption goes).

The interwebs and socials are full of vapid trendism, AI, and regurgitated content that gets clicks from people who are equaly vapid robots. If we had higher signal to noise on good content with quality, I would think search algorithms and social algorithms will eventually shift to match if people like the deeper stories, which I know they do.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Not sure if this is the best place to post this; there have been several threads touching upon the migration of chasers to social media - but this one is the most-recently active of those, so figured I would post it here.

Read this blog post by author, computer scientist and thought leader Cal Newport, discussing what he believes is an inevitable trend away from global platforms and back to niche online communities (like ST!) Also check out his New Yorker article on the topic that he links to in the blog post.

Back to the (Internet) Future - Cal Newport

On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the ... Read more

calnewport.com

 

[Dan Robinson]

Some thoughts on a realization I made recently. It appears that the newest generations of internet users (under the age of 16-18 or so) just don't use the web. There is no search engine literacy or much use of them at all. They appear to gather all of their information from social media discussions and just watching what others are doing. Reddit's a good example of this. A large percentage of threads there are users asking simple questions that a one or two-word Google search would give the answer to - yet they choose to rely on someone "spoon feeding" them an answer, many times taking that reply as gospel and then using it to make real-world decisions.

The biggest indicator of this for me is the interest in the El Reno tornado. Traffic to my site and FAQ on that incident remains flat, but rumors, speculations, myths and fabrications about it are running wild across social media as if those web pages don't exist. I'm not even sure if many users even know how to copy and paste a link at this point.

It's an indication of how complete the capture of the internet by Big Tech really is. It's essentially a done deal now, with the only vestiges of the web dying out with the literal death of its legacy users. The new generations are growing up with this new internet state as "normal" and have no concept of the web as we once knew it.

 

[Tony Laubach]

I've seen this with the analytics of my site I launched earlier this year... in the interest of full disclosure, I never intended this to be anything more than a place to put my stuff with very little if any ambition to 'make' anything from it. It's become more of a place to archive my career that is open to the public. As was expected, once the thrust of the season rolled in, my time to work on it became nearly non-existent, but I imagine I will start catching up on things in the coming weeks as things slow down for me and I can start putting together the 2025 logs.

My site relaunch was always for me; in the end, it was a good medium to put everything together in a neat little package that made it easy to archive my stuff. There was never really any intention to do much beyond that. I've found my "income" on my Facebook page, enough in the year that will easily cover the costs associated with maintain the site, which wasn't the intention going in, but I've found enough stride in my Facebook page over the last 12 months where I can shove over that money as needed to keep my site up for a bit.

But going back to what Dan said above... that's a very interesting point... most of them have grown up on social and the interaction which comes from that. Most would rather, as he said, get spoon fed their answers as opposed to "go here to learn about X". Which of course breeds it's own set of issues in terms of whether the information they're getting is even accurate.

But yeah, I guess as long as I have a personal investment into my site, I will keep it up... but I fortunately went in expecting very little, and even that was probably too much. haha

 

[JamesCaruso]

There’s a lot to unpack here in @Dan Robinson ’s post.

I think internet search will stay alive - or, in the case of these younger users - be resurrected by AI. Problem is, LLMs like ChatGPT don’t always by default show sources. But Perplexity does.

The broader issue is “compression culture” - not my term, I first saw it here, in this brilliant essay by a Gen-Z’er compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting

This is what is driving the desire for “spoon feeding”.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I'll continue to be an advocate for the open web and I'll always keep my site online (as I've invested 30 years into building and maintaining it). I'll hold onto the hope that one day the world can rid itself of social media's grip - though barring a seismic societal wake-up, I'm not really expecting that to happen in my lifetime.

 

[Jamie H]

There’s a lot to unpack here in @Dan Robinson ’s post.

I think internet search will stay alive - or, in the case of these younger users - be resurrected by AI. Problem is, LLMs like ChatGPT don’t always by default show sources. But Perplexity does.

The broader issue is “compression culture” - not my term, I first saw it here, in this brilliant essay by a Gen-Z’er compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting

This is what is driving the desire for “spoon feeding”.

Thanks for sharing that James, it's an interesting essay. Which reminded me of the following Ian Malcom quote from Jurassic Park (I think a little more succinct in the movie!):

"Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can’t be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.

“Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won’t use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that you won’t abuse it.

“But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify—it doesn’t matter. Not to you, or to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast.

“And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You don’t even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it. And the buyer will have even less discipline than you. The buyer simply purchases the power, like any commodity. The buyer doesn’t even conceive that any discipline might be necessary.”

And in response to Dan:

Some thoughts on a realization I made recently. It appears that the newest generations of internet users (under the age of 16-18 or so) just don't use the web. There is no search engine literacy or much use of them at all. They appear to gather all of their information from social media discussions and just watching what others are doing.

This is totally correct. Even 20 somethings don't visit news sites or search engines - if something is happening they look on TikTok to find out what it is.

 

[Mikaela Norris]

I want to jump in here, specifically with regards to Reddit. I'm a younger millennial, and despite spending most of my life with social media, I also fondly remember the days of internet forums being a source of information for pretty much anything. Are you into aquariums? There was a forum for that. Old Subarus? There was a forum. Video games? There was a forum for that too. And of course Stormtrack has been in that arena for quite awhile, as we all know. What I've noticed when I perform Google searches is that answers on Reddit are often among the very top results. Sometimes there will be results from an old forum, but many of them are dead now. The way Reddit is setup with the huge variety of sub-reddits for every niche imaginable reminds me a lot of how varied forums used to be. It seems to me that specific sub-reddits are now filling the void left by the death of specific internet forums. I think niche Facebook groups are another way this is manifesting. I wonder if that isn't the reason people will go and ask on Reddit, or other social media platforms, instead of searching, because Google searches so often point them to those places anyway. Is there really that big of a difference between asking questions on a dedicated forum and asking questions on a dedicated sub-reddit? Where should the line be drawn between viable sources of information and non-viable ones? I myself much prefer asking a group of people with experience on a specific topic to searching on Google and sort of taking a shot in the dark. Of course I realize that not every topic works this way, especially the news where you can easily fall into the echo chamber trap, but for many other things Reddit or a dedicated Facebook group isn't a bad option. I really do miss the days of having an internet forum for everything, but there are modern alternatives to fill that void.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Those are fair points. With Stormtrack and most of the old legacy forums, you really couldn’t find some niche information anywhere else and more importantly, you usually knew who was giving you the answers and whether or not you could trust them.

 

[NancyM]

I want to jump in here, specifically with regards to Reddit. I'm a younger millennial, and despite spending most of my life with social media, I also fondly remember the days of internet forums being a source of information for pretty much anything. Are you into aquariums? There was a forum for that. Old Subarus? There was a forum. Video games? There was a forum for that too. And of course Stormtrack has been in that arena for quite awhile, as we all know. What I've noticed when I perform Google searches is that answers on Reddit are often among the very top results. Sometimes there will be results from an old forum, but many of them are dead now. The way Reddit is setup with the huge variety of sub-reddits for every niche imaginable reminds me a lot of how varied forums used to be. It seems to me that specific sub-reddits are now filling the void left by the death of specific internet forums. I think niche Facebook groups are another way this is manifesting. I wonder if that isn't the reason people will go and ask on Reddit, or other social media platforms, instead of searching, because Google searches so often point them to those places anyway. Is there really that big of a difference between asking questions on a dedicated forum and asking questions on a dedicated sub-reddit? Where should the line be drawn between viable sources of information and non-viable ones? I myself much prefer asking a group of people with experience on a specific topic to searching on Google and sort of taking a shot in the dark. Of course I realize that not every topic works this way, especially the news where you can easily fall into the echo chamber trap, but for many other things Reddit or a dedicated Facebook group isn't a bad option. I really do miss the days of having an internet forum for everything, but there are modern alternatives to fill that void.

My daughter just read your post & said she agrees with everything you said. She's also a millennial, probably a bit older than you.