1. What is your name?

Nate Oostendorp

2. What is your quest?

To figger out how people use these durn computer machines to coordinate and collaborate -- and I'm especially very interested in how people collaborate to build software for these durn machines.

3. What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Since I use an swallow-based system of airspeed measurement, it is axiomatically 1 SAU (swallow airspeed unit).

4. How did the idea for Everything and later Everything2 come about?

Rob Malda and I were drinking and thought "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome to have a site which was a definitive reference for everything," and then later once everything1 was produced I had a bunch of money my friends didn't need and said "Hey, wouldn't it be great to fix all the ganky shit we did the first time on the site and spend lots of time and money building this extraordinarily elaborate web framework around it."

5. What were the biggest challenges and rewards of creating the site?

I would say the biggest challenge was making about a -90% return on investment over the life of this project, and so therefore always using homebrew servers and stealing bandwith, etc. We banned googlebot for years because our pissant servers couldn't handle it. WE BANNED GOOGLE FOR CHRISSAKE.

The biggest reward was the phe-fucking-nominal social network that arose around it.

6. Do you have any favorite writeups, either of your own or from someone else?

N0b0dY's home node has long been my favorite destination. I also really enjoy some of the early screwing around E1 shit like "pants are optional". And much of the work of toasterleavings.

7. What do you see for the future of Everything2?

An eternal marginal existence as the negative space created by wikipedia and its damnable predilection towards "fairness".

8. What has surprised you the most about the evolution of the site? Is there anything that you expected to happen that hasn't yet?

I was very very surprised at how many friendship bonds were formed by complete strangers in the course of the sites growth. I am also really surprised there has never been an attempt at coup d'etat against the power system.

9. Are there any questions I should have asked but didn't?

I dunno -- maybe something like "Did you ever get (sex/drugs/grey-market technology/pirated music) from your connection to Everything2?" I'm good for 3 of 4 on those.

Everything2 Decaversary Interviews

If you have questions or comments, please contact nate or Jet-Poop.

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