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The History of the Dot Com Era

joshelman.medium.com

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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#61

Post by ghaff »

noduerme wrote: post #40
ghaff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends what you mean by fairy tale years. In the grand scheme of things, "no one" even had access to the Internet pre-Web.

That's not true. I mean, I was gophering and FTP'ing and pirating all kinds of good stuff on a 2400 baud modem in 1992. By contrast, the guys I worked for in 1998 could barely use a computer. But boy could they sling bullshit to other people who couldn't use computers.

Hence the quotes around "no one." As you suggest, obviously some people had access to the pre-Web Internet--I communicated over the Internet as early as about 1978--but it was a small slice of the population.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#63

Post by cptnapalm »

On some stock related subreddits, people are comparing the current bull run to the dot com era. Most of the people doing that have no idea how utterly insane the dot com era was. One company, Pixelon, blew all their capital on a party featuring KISS and a reunion of the Who. One IPO announcement I recall featured a guy holding his burned copy of Red Hat with his name written on it in marker.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#64

Post by MrGilbert »

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…

I think I'd sign that, yes. I wonder if there is a road back to this era…

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#65

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

> 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.

The difficult problems haven't changed much in hundreds or thousands of years. What happens when "people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems" have spent a few centuries actually doing this?

Yep, ideologies. That is, semi-consistent sets of beliefs, assumptions and values that explain why things are the way they are, how they ought to be different and (sometimes) how to go about making the changes. I know it can seem hard to believe, but it turns out that even when extraordinarily smart people think about difficult problems, they don't all converge on the same answers.

If you want to start over from scratch ever generation, be my guest. In your rejection of ideology, you're really just throwing away the work done by our ancestors.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#66

Post by jdthedisciple »

1cvmask wrote: post #30
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

Pure Gold! Never seen it before

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#67

Post by acdha »

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…

> There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing.

I largely agree with this but I think there was a marked turn for the worse when advertising became the dominant business model for just about everyone. That had two problems: the obvious one being that selling directly to users meant you had to prioritize their interests but a secondary issue being that it trained most people to think of $0 as what just about any service was worth.

There's one other trend which I'd class as a bad trend getting worse. In the mid-90s the expected path for a lot of companies was to build a viable business. By at least 1999, arguably earlier, that had switched to “cash out in the IPO; who cares what happens next” and then the consolidation trend pushed that even further away from having to build a viable business to just having something that a fabulously rich company would buy as an aquihire, eliminate a potential strategic threat, or simply for the lavish bonuses handed out to the executives who signed off on it. As with pricing, that's not just wasteful but actively harmful for anyone who is trying to build a real business and has to compete with money being shoveled around by people who never have to worry about running out.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#69

Post by dehrmann »

cptnapalm wrote: post #63

On some stock related subreddits, people are comparing the current bull run to the dot com era. Most of the people doing that have no idea how utterly insane the dot com era was. One company, Pixelon, blew all their capital on a party featuring KISS and a reunion of the Who. One IPO announcement I recall featured a guy holding his burned copy of Red Hat with his name written on it in marker.

Even for average investors, I remember all you had to do was pick a tech stock with a name you're heard of and watch it go up 1%-3% per day. There were windows where cryptocurrencies felt like that in the last 5 years, but the overall market, not as much.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#70

Post by zozbot234 »

MrGilbert wrote: post #64
noduerme wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think I'd sign that, yes. I wonder if there is a road back to this era…

The Fediverse is basically organized the exact same way, with federation as a purely additional layer on top of the individual content hosts.
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