It was always a cruel joke, never to be taken seriously. At its core were SEO hucksters trying pass off page rank hacks as a business model for consulting work

It was always a cruel joke, never to be taken seriously. At its core were SEO hucksters trying pass off page rank hacks as a business model for consulting work, during the post-dot-com bust period, when money was scarce and web design couldn't pay the bills anymore. Many ascended to the priesthood of RESTful web microservice development, where they poo poo and tisk-tisk improper path grammar and noodle with JSON objects, in between periods of intense navel gazing.