Reflections on my first year
Saturday, January 31st, 2009Today’s my first birthday at Hubdub and its forced me to do some reminiscing… A year ago today, I read about Hubdub in Wired magazine — it looked like fun so I signed up, but like many of the early adopters didn’t get my initial 1000 stake. The Hubdub servers were unprepared for the onslaught and crashed. I was quickly mollified though when Nigel wrote me a personal note to apologize! I got my husband signed a couple days later and my mother a month after that.
In the beginning, I wasn’t very interested in my net worth. I put down random 10 and 20 dollar bets on what I wanted to happen and paid little attention to my dimishing bank account. It wasn’t long though until my husband was nearing the 10 thousand mark and all of a sudden I got a lot more competitive. I remember the days of obsessively tracking the stock market, listening to all the financial news prior to the opening bell and researching what earnings reports were being released that day — and at what time. I remember being *so* anxious that the American Idol market wasn’t settled within minutes of the reveal, because I was desperate to reinvest for the next week. (It took me a while to learn that all the editors at the time lived in the UK and were asleep then!).
The early days were short on rules. There were questions about aliens meeting with the UN and a lot more focus on the leaderboard rankings. New rules were usually hashed out over on the getsatisfaction board — ahh those were the days. Here’s one of my alltime favorite threads. I think what I miss most was the little emoticons at the end of every message. I would love it if we could include that in our new forum!
We developed some Hubdub venacular early on in the year, which seems to have fallen by the wayside recently (via meanderingsearcher who was the official Hubdub vocabulary keeper):
“Spitzer” - literally “screwed”. Check out the history on this market…
“fistinction” - its gotta to be my way or “to the moon Alice”
“pics4ded” - I’m gonna take my toys and go home
“cognositis” - the act of deliberately losing your net worth, just to prove a point
One of my favorite missing users — lucidstates. Which was clearly a misnomer, because he was rarely lucid, but a great player. He was the first to get me addicted to box office markets. He also spammed nearly every single open market during the Hubdub strike of 08! Craziest question, hands down, goes to Destry, who, while clearly being sarcastic made a pretty great question encapsulating every single important news item of the week.
Now a year later, I’ve been a user, a superuser and now a category editor. I figure by next year I should own the company (kidding, Nigel!). I find myself wishing the birthday cake on my profile was edible, but am thankful for the year of experiences that it represents. Can’t wait to see what another year will bring! [Did I leave out your favorite Hubdub story? Post it in the comments!]
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