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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

#71

Post by zozbot234 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #65
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…

> 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, sem…

We don't need to throw away everything, just the stuff that we can't reach consensus about. The rest is what we generally call Common Sense.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#72

Post by crocal »

It was summer 99. I was finishing my CompSci MS degree in US. I was driving back from visiting DC with my future wife in my Oldsmobile ‘84 Cutlass Supreme (a.k.a. wreck on wheels). The day was so hot the radiator exploded, so we waited in a diner until the night fell and we could ride in cooler air. A guy and his family parked next to us. His car was also bust. It was a Yahoo guy. 15 minutes later I had a friggin’ job offer in my back pocket, as we rode toward the setting sun.

Those were the days.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#73

Post by zozbot234 »

andrepd wrote: post #60
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…

>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. Why is "ideology" a bad thing? I have ideological positions that can't be rationally derived from first principles: universal human rights, belief in freedom, belief in tolerance. Why are people with strong values and beliefs mere drones, while the…

You're assuming that technologically-focused folks "accept[] the current broad system and ruling class" and have only small ambitions. Neither of these assumptions seems especially warranted.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#74

Post by majormajor »

acdha wrote: post #67
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 t…

> 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.

Wasn't that part of those years? Free webmail, free search, free articles, all with display ads?

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#75

Post by chaoticmass »

I was 15 when the dot-com bubble burst, and I had been following all the hype and madness avidly. Where I lived, our cable provider had ZDTV (later TechTV), and I watched that network all the time. Something you'd hear endlessly was that this was a "new economy" where the "old rules don't apply," and "Business 2.0" was the new game. I played along with the stock market, keeping a spreadsheet on my computer with all of my fantasy stock buys and sells, updated daily. I got excited for each days new highs, even though I didn't really have anything in the game.

Annnnd then the wheels came off. My imaginary stock portfolio left devastated.

Even though I was just an observer on the sidelines, I learned some valuable lessons.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#76

Post by acdha »

majormajor wrote: post #74
acdha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. Wasn't that part of those years?…

It wasn't all free — e.g. for many people, mail was provided by their ISP or a paid service — but I was also thinking that the mentality expanded rapidly. Search is a natural spot for advertising (and doesn't need to be privacy-invading) but over time that moved to include lots of other things, increasingly run by advertising companies like Google or Facebook who were content to run the service at a loss because they could resell user activity data.

The main thing I was thinking in regard to that last point was that while early community sites weren't perfect, there was at least some pressure to maintain community health. If I ran a site like photo.net I had to keep photographers interested — too many scam ads or bad behaviour and the most valuable people will stop visiting. Since you're running your own infrastructure, you have more options for differentiating your site and it was harder for spammers to make sleazy ripoff clones as is now common.

These days a lot of that stuff happens on places like Facebook or Twitter, where they will optimize for “engagement” with little interest in the health of a particular community and things are encouraged to leak across communities unless they reach the level where users stop using the entire service and/or advertisers stop buying ads. As long as people have a boredom behaviour of opening your app it's seen as working well.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#77

Post by emerged »

I caught the tail end. So I got to be a junior dev without stock options and watch everyone who was a far worse coder get rich. But you can easily argue we are all still riding the crest of a tech wave.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#78

Post by mekane8 »

I graduated college in 2003 and I remember the excitement at good job prospects among my CS degree peers growing right along with the bubble. I remember being pretty depressed going into our last semester.

One of my favorite "historical" pieces from the era is "Mother Earth, Mother Board". https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Not specifically about the bubble, but lots of fun tidbits from the internet in those days.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#79

Post by analog31 »

I still remember my non-techie dad's concise history at the time: He watched The Nightly Business Report every evening on PBS after supper. After the crash, he told me: "Every night, they would interview some kids wearing glasses with lenses the size of nickels, spouting jargon that nobody could understand. Now you don't see those kids any more."
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