this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Usenet and IRC were the good ole times.
00s internet before corporations colonized it was beautiful. I'm deeply sad that it's gone but thankful that I got to participate.
Amazon: 1994
eBay: 1995
Match.com: 1995 (same parent company as tinder)
Hotmail: 1996 (MS owned in 1997)
Google: 1998
PayPal: 1998 (eBay owned in 2002)
If you look at the dot com bubble, there's a lot of corporate colonization in the 90s. Many of them didn't survive their stock crashing in 2000 (pets.com is a good example). Some things were not able to be launched until the internet infrastructure supported it properly (YouTube, for example), so yes some things do date to the 00s. But largely, by 1998, the internet was already on its current trajectory.
The reason Google was so disruptive at the time was that they didn't charge websites to get listed -- it was a business model that relied on actually finding what people were searching for. The fact that this model was disruptive at the time tells you how corporate it was even by then.
You pretend like they are dead?
Downloading QWKs from local dial-up BBSs was the good ole times.