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20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/etc and
by swatcoder 3y ago
20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/etc and new agressively-walling gardens of Facebook/Twitter/etc.
That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.
You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.
- ametrau 3y agoThe internet was TINY in 2004 compared to today.
- swatcoder 3y agoThere was about a third as many users worldwide and about 70% as many users specifically in developed countries. Traffic has increased dramatically with broadband expansion and the streaming that soaks it up, and the number of connected devices exploder, but the number of users are actually only a modest change and the distribution of traffic has decreased tremendously as traffic consolidated onto the few "winning" brands. When you use "tiny" in all-caps, I imagine you to mean an order of magnitude difference in users or well-visited services. It's nothing like that.
- ametrau 3y agoMany “orders of magnitude” qualitatively.