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The History of the Dot Com Era

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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#21

Post by MrGilbert »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physic…

> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit;

Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with several links to different forums or blogs.

There is no similar searchability of Discord, Facebook and Twitter that I'm aware of. Maybe that's where the "more open back in the days" comes from.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#23

Post by jazzyjackson »

null_object wrote: post #20

One aspect of these retrospectives of the dot-com boom era, is the mistaken idea that everyone at the time was unquestioningly swept along with the hype. Here in Sweden, while the newspapers were full of proudly patriotic articles about how boo.com was part of a new paradigm of internet-based economies that somehow didn't need to be 'profitable' in some ill-defined 'old-fashioned' sense, pretty much all the serious d…

Appears this is a long tradition with pineapples! I remember hearing people used to rent them, here’s one source, “The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple” [0]

> A pineapple which had overcome all those hurdles was scarce enough to be valued at £60 (roughly £11,000) … Concerned about wasting such high-value fruit by eating it, owners displayed pineapples as dinnertime ornaments on special plates which would allow the pineapple to be seen and admired but surrounded by other, cheaper, fruit for eating.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-53432877

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#24

Post by noduerme »

MrGilbert wrote: post #21
noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physic…

> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with sev…

The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tolerance, as long as you found the right place to meet your peers, and as long as what you were saying made some kind of intelligent sense. That doesn't exist in any social media platform today. Social media rewards people for saying the dumbest possible thing that everyone else will agree with, or else the dumbest thing that will anger people.

For context, we're on the old web and the BBS forums right now. Upvoting is a modest improvement. The way a place is run, the culture, is everything. Twitter is the Carnival Cruise. Smart speech is always on the leaky freighter. People with smart phones forget that the internet was for nerds, outcasts and rebels, while they were absorbed in TV. The nerds and rebels haven't disappeared. (We just need to stop the really angry ones who took over retail and software).

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#25

Post by Slartie »

noduerme wrote: post #17
mprovost wrote: post #16

I moved to California to work at a dot com on March 3, 2000. The NASDAQ peaked one week later on March 10. To me that era is captured in Douglas Coupland's novels Microserfs (pre-crash) and JPod (post-crash). JPod was also made into a show for Canadian TV that's a lot of fun!

I don't know whether to laugh or cry for you. Being part of it was something. I took a greyhound to San Francisco in 97 and went through the yellowpages trying to find jobs. Lived in a scary as hell weekly bum hotel in the tenderloin and walked, in a suit, to the Hilton every day to make phone calls for interviews. I was 17. Called one company called "Sunset" or "Sunrise" productions, who needed a designer. Interview…

> The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies.

Sure about this? World of Warcraft was first released in 2004.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#26

Post by noduerme »

Slartie wrote: post #25
noduerme wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry for you. Being part of it was something. I took a greyhound to San Francisco in 97 and went through the yellowpages trying to find jobs. Lived in a scary as hell weekly bum hotel in the tenderloin and walked, in a suit, to the Hilton every day to make phone calls for interviews. I was 17. Called one company called "Sunset" or "Sunrise" productions, who needed a designer. Interview…

> The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Sure about this? World of Warcraft was first released in 2004.

I'm not sure and I cringed when I wrote it b/c I wasn't playing the games they played. They were playing some RTS thing involving bases and armies on the local network. A top-down 2.5D game you could scroll around a map on. [edit] after some checking I'm pretty sure it was some earlier version of Warcraft, not WoW.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#27

Post by Slartie »

noduerme wrote: post #26
Slartie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Sure about this? World of Warcraft was first released in 2004.

I'm not sure and I cringed when I wrote it b/c I wasn't playing the games they played. They were playing some RTS thing involving bases and armies on the local network. A top-down 2.5D game you could scroll around a map on. [edit] after some checking I'm pretty sure it was some earlier version of Warcraft, not WoW.

Yep, sounds very much like Warcraft. That also matches the timeframe much better.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#28

Post by hrh »

noduerme wrote: post #24
MrGilbert wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with sev…

The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tole…

Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often.

HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better.

I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#29

Post by noduerme »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physic…

Just for the hell of it because I can't wind down tonight, here's a fun story from 1998.

The "web shop" I worked for got a contract with a company I believe was called Sansom Street Associates. They controlled the Gap, Old Navy, and the Mendocino Redwood Co. The last of which we were tasked with designing a website for.

It quickly became known in the office the MRC was in the business of chopping down old-growth redwood forests. They wanted a website that looked eco-friendly for this purpose. I was one of the two designers on the job. We built a prototype and were told in no uncertain terms that it was too glossy, too slick. This is 1998. We're dealing in tags and every mockup has to be set with table slices in photoshop with rollovers as a second layer.

Too glossy? Yes. They wanted it to look more like it was designed by a high school student. Lower the images to dithered 256-color GIFs. Get rid of the font and color choices. Everything should be in random fonts.

I remember being told, "they just want some website where the hippies can dump their emails into a black hole".

Then we got wind that this company had paid our bosses something over $150k up front for this simple website job - downgrade included. At that point it became toxic among the designers.

What's funny is, I bet MRC paid triple that for the stupid site they have now, because money means nothing to them. But I'd never work for them again in this or any other lifetime. /rant.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#30

Post by 1cvmask »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physic…

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

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