The Box of Chocolates Thread (You never know what you're going to get!)

I'm quitting 2+2, mostly. I had a week and a half long vacation with poor cell service so had that time away. And I kind of liked it. I mean, I greatly enjoying reading about different points of view and arguing political topics, but having the extra time in my life was nicer. I've been back to normal life for several days and haven't felt a great pull to be back here.

So goodbye, for the most part, for now. I might pop in here and there or sometime in the future.

i know we had our differences in your duties as mod but i always liked and respected you as a person

hope to see you poke your head into threads from time to time

Thanks, of all the people here I regularly disagree with, I respect you most.

Fair enough. Thanks for modding for as long as you did. Take care and hope to see you around.

Hope you come around again to drop your opinions every now and then.

Your contributions will be missed. GL.

Cheers mate, thanks for your contributions over the years😀

FYP

♥

There are about five posters here who I know, without reservation, that I can believe what they're saying and now we're down one.

Sounds about right.

Down to just me, you, Victor and bahbahmickey now. Oh, and craig obviously. Hard to disbelieve anything he posts.

fully trusting anyone without verifying let alone a poster on this forum seems to be a big flaw.

Source?

Wow, your list is the same as mine!!!

am I the only one who thinks it is getting hilariously inept that if you go to twoplustwo.com it still has all the old magazine and books and **** from the previous owners and that in the years since owning this cite the owners never managed to put in some new boiler plate on the front page?

Remember the 2+2 Magazine? Memories...

It seems like it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to delete the links to the magazine and the bonus program, which have long been dead. Even the books that are on the page are like ten years old.

I expect that the owners bought the site with big plans for marketing and monetization, but it did not take too long to come to the realization that it would take much more work than it would be worth doing considering that online poker is long dead, so they just keep it going as a vanity thing. A few months ago, the site went down for an entire day because somebody forgot to renew the domain, and there was not ONE mention of it anywhere on the Internet, which included UP and SPE. That would have been unheard of back in this site's heyday. They probably just recognize that save for a couple of subforums here and there, this is a mostly dead forum with less users every single day, so why bother putting any effort into cleaning up the front page; there aren't any new users coming in anyway.

That is a trend for most forums I think, even if there is some resurgence here and there.

It is a shame really, the world would have been a healthier place if a lot of smaller independent forums were the standardbearer for debate, instead of today's social media behemoth ruled by professional influencers. Their popularity and income depends giving the audience what they want, which means not rocking the boat. Even popular disruptors are expected to be disruptive in the exact same manner day after day, which is equally funny and tragic.

Reality can be uncomfortable, as a result politics can be uncomfortable. Today's model of "like if you agree" is making our politics unsustainable. And no, I don't think this is "old man yelling at cloud". I'm part of it as much as anyone. I do believe we're all upvoting the slow end of our societies.

Ya I'm sure your narrative is close to the truth, probably the 100k or whatever it was they spent was just lighting money on fire given they didn't find a way to monetize the remaining traffic. Actually thinking back, the model of using the free forum to sell poker books was a pretty decent one. I guess it is just kinda funny they didn't even bother with the basic stuff to make the website coherent like a sensible front page.

And I agree with tame too, I think forums can be better in many ways than shouting on reddit and twitter, but definitely are dying everywhere.

it's just incredible they'd purchase this place for 7 figures and then forget they bought it

I imagine that the $100K figure thrown out by uke is closer to the right number than you are. It may have been worth millions during the late 2000s, but not in the last ten years.

what? i have him on ignore so didn't even know he threw out a number

in the purchase thread both parties state it was a 7 figure purchase, either both sides lying for weird reasons or i imagine mason kept saying no and they asked "what price" and he said 1 mill and they agreed

zero chance mason would ever sell this place for 100k, the domain alone is worth that much as it's a legacy site with major traffic in the past so crushes SEO - it'd be worth at least that to any ambitious poker related company even if they only used it to redirect elsewhere

i've tried purchasing defunct websites that no longer exist in the past in my old tech life, just a domain name parked by the owner, something beijinghomedelivery.com wouldn't sell for less than 30k - a lot of that price is "spite cost" - this is mason's baby, he's never going to let it go for a token amount that won't materially change his life the same way the owner of beijinghomedelivery.com who's business on that site failed and was gone for years and he had no interest in rekindly and was the niche of niche since it's in english ffs and he still rebuffed all our offers - we went as high as 12k for it

there were many others, not one successful purchase because it costs very little to hold onto these and people think if i'm offering 12k today perhaps i'll offer 50k in a year

i imagine they had so much crypto money laying around and figured they could use this as a platform to promote their products and then just never went anywhere with it

Then I stand corrected. Ridiculous that somebody would pay over a million for this site and do literally nothing with it.