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The History of the Dot Com Era

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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#41

Post by noduerme »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
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…

This is an extraordinarily poor comment to see voted so high in the thread on HN. The original author does not seem to have a "midlife crisis ". They seem to have a spot of nostalgia for their first two or three years of real career after college. They also do not seem to be over-glorifying that period. Suggesting that human nature was more noble than it is today, technology or business more pure, etc. They're simply…

Oh, I'm definitely projecting. I'm not sure where the line is between romanticizing and glorifying, but no one should do either. A "fun and wild time" is purely a matter of perspective (and self-persuasion). It's an unwholesome post-mortem. Whether we can say the web legitimately sucks more now, or it just seems that way, someone deeply invested in building things who started around that time might describe the current eradication of free content and hopelessness associated with stifling of creative output as a type of midlife crisis. Or they might long for the simpler days. That too is only about perspective. Mine might be dark and his might be light but I wouldn't have responded to this at all if I hadn't been through the same wringer.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#42

Post by f38zf5vdt »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
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…

This is an extraordinarily poor comment to see voted so high in the thread on HN. The original author does not seem to have a "midlife crisis ". They seem to have a spot of nostalgia for their first two or three years of real career after college. They also do not seem to be over-glorifying that period. Suggesting that human nature was more noble than it is today, technology or business more pure, etc. They're simply…

> They also do not seem to be over-glorifying that period. Suggesting that human nature was more noble than it is today, technology or business more pure, etc.

"It was the peak of human civilization," replied TIKI as rendered by Microsoft Comic Chat.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#43

Post by smallerfish »

After the second startup I'd worked at (NYC based, founded by ex colleagues of Bezos from DE Shaw) started burning out in early 2001, I worked for a consulting company. One of our clients were the shady founders of CyberRebate, who no doubt saw the writing on the wall and were looking to put their capital into a backup product. Their idea was a "plugin" that users would install on your computer, which would proxy all internet traffic - swapping out ads for their own. In return for running it, users would earn coupons and points. Of course, CyberRebate crashed and burned in May 2001, and that contract dried up with it. I vaguely remember a horrific architecture involving EJBs (session beans perhaps) running on WebSphere - a scarring enough experience that I studiously avoided J2EE (although stuck with JVM languages) since.

After that gig fizzled up, I moved to the bay area (in the midst of the tech drought) and did construction gigs sourced from craigslist to pay the bills while attempting to start a brick & mortar retail business. Eventually tech picked back up and I got back behind a screen.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#44

Post by luffapi »

noduerme wrote: post #32
hrh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ideologi…

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect. I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technologica…

> The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

This is a gross simplification that ironically lacks logical rigor. As long as you live in a society and have opinions about how it should work, you have politics. The two dimensional left/right spectrum is less than helpful. The quadrant model that includes authoritarian->libertarian is slightly more useful. The “politic free” group you’re speaking about are presumably the classic center-right libertarians. It’s definitely an ideology.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#45

Post by motohagiography »

Oddly, I don't see 3 years from 20y+ ago as History, as I've still got nameserver IP addresses and domains in my head from back then that are still up, but it's giving me the sense of how a lot of what we think of as history are minor events used as synecdoche (when a part is used to represent a whole) to represent an era.

I took for granted that a 3 day concert in a field gets called the Woodstock Era and that the ideas attached to it were somehow important, and now 2 years of post cyberpunk bubble riding is being used as some kind of a foundation for meaning. That certainly puts that in perspective. :)

It was an inflection point of some kind, sort of marking pre/post-internet in the culture. The story of doing what we were all doing without a sense of the impact it would have would be entertaining. I worked at one of the early ISPs as a teenager in about '95 and was in my early 20s when the dotcom boom happened, all after spending a few years playing in industrial bands and after raves went commercial, and y2k created a sense that if you were going to do anything, you needed to do it now.

What can we learn from it? To me it was a story of co-opting and gentrification, where you had a small community of hackers scaling their bbs and fidonet services into ISPs, the last years of subcultures (as a thing at all) throwing their final parties before they got absorbed and homogenized into the internet. It was the beginning of a new abstraction, where I think culture became unmoored from physical relationships and (as predicted by po-mo theorists) is mostly simulacra.

To use that era as a reference waypoint, I'd say we've reached peak credulity in regard to virtual, simulated culture that originates on the internet, and I'm optimistic the pendulum will swing back.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#46

Post by rexreed »

ghaff wrote: post #36
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…

It probably went a bit longer than that. When I switched jobs in 2000, there were almost certainly some dark clouds on the horizon but there was still a lot of hiring going on in at least some quarters. 9/11 is the obvious end point (which is when I was laid off--and fortunately slid into another position that did go through hard times but was mostly good), although things were clearly on a big downward slide before…

The full dot-com boom period was basically 1995 (Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape in full swing) through 2001 (the dot-com crash in April followed by 9/11).

So roughly a 6-7 year period. 1997-1999 was definitely the "hey day"

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#47

Post by noduerme »

noduerme wrote: post #32
hrh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ideologi…

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect. I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technologica…

@luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion.

I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But ideologically, anyone who has no ideology except answering logical problems fits into a category that is always going to be reviled by people who have a political agenda, because their answers won't necessarily comport with what you want them to look like.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#48

Post by luffapi »

noduerme wrote: post #47
noduerme wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect. I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technologica…

@luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion. I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But id…

There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism.

I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly likely that your ideology is influencing your logic (which does exist for all ideologies even if we don’t agree with it).

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#49

Post by ido »

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.

Probably Warcraft II.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#50

Post by ghaff »

rexreed wrote: post #46
ghaff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably went a bit longer than that. When I switched jobs in 2000, there were almost certainly some dark clouds on the horizon but there was still a lot of hiring going on in at least some quarters. 9/11 is the obvious end point (which is when I was laid off--and fortunately slid into another position that did go through hard times but was mostly good), although things were clearly on a big downward slide before…

The full dot-com boom period was basically 1995 (Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape in full swing) through 2001 (the dot-com crash in April followed by 9/11). So roughly a 6-7 year period. 1997-1999 was definitely the "hey day"

Just a nit. Amazon wasn't in full swing in 1995. It was only founded the year before. I looked at my order history and my first orders (all books) were in 1999. And I was a fairly heavy "mail order" and then ecommerce consumer.

I pretty much agree with the overall timeframe although I'd argue that the party was still in pretty much full swing up to some point in 2000 when earning misses started happening at some of the large vendors.

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