• dan@upvote.au
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    28 days ago

    Sounds like you’re forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn’t fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      27 days ago

      The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren’t the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc…

      • dan@upvote.au
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        27 days ago

        The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn’t figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.

        That’s why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.

        There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.

        • LWD@lemm.ee
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          26 days ago

          That’s a fair thing to bring up. I think your point went over my head, because I was mostly reminiscing about how the less capital-oriented parts of the internet were relatively pleasant before companies like Facebook came along and encouraged them all (with their newly acquired capital) to jump into the big centralized areas.