Ask HN: When did the Internet get so slimey? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When did the Internet get so slimey?

7 pointsfnid24 comments

In the old days, say between around 1994 and 1999, the internet was largely unheard of. Then the dot-com boom and it went crazy. The ideas during the boom were still relatively legitimate, though often crazy. Online pet food isn't a good idea, but they weren't trying to scam people or extort money.

But then the crash came and things started getting shady. We invented "Web 2.0" and then it was all down hill. What happened?

Why are the popular internet companies now, like farmville and zynga and yelp and even google doing absurdly ... wrong... illegal things to people to take their money or further their business? And investors in these scams just sit back and laud their great investment decisions -- their "finds". A lot of these people would be in jail if they were running brick and mortar businesses. They'd be taken in for fraud.

It's really gotten bad and I wonder if we can turn the tide on these kinds of disreputable businesses. Why did it get this way and when and how do we stop it?

Weird, I remember 1994-1999 as being full of people selling sketchy get-rich-quick schemes that used the "information superhighway". The spam wars, the invention of domain squatting, and the rise of online porn as a mega-industry happened during that time too.

The internet is a tool of great power, but it magnifies our flaws just as much as our virtues.

Let me preface this by saying that I do agree with your assertion that a large number of 'internet' or 'web 2.0' companies today get a large amount of their money via less than honorable business models.

Having mentioned that, I am now going to engage in some 'what aboutery' even though I know that it is frowned on here at HN.

You see, the ENTIRE dot-com time period was a gigantic scam. The dot-com guys were far worse than the Zynga-types because Zynga is only scamming their customers, whereas these dot-coms were scamming the public markets via crappy IPOs that the dot-com guys knew were crappy. When the music stopped guys like Naveen Jain, (InfoSpace), were left without a chair while guys like pmarca did the smart thing and got out early. The fact that companies today have to scam their customers is a direct consequence of the fact that they can no longer go public and scam some little old lady via her pension fund manager. But really...which is worse?

It is human nature to be fond when remembering the past, and still, the past was rarely as fond as we remember it.

Again, this is not to excuse what goes on today. I have recommended several times that people take a pass on investments because if the business models are already dodgy, they can only get worse. But let's be honest when comparing the now with the then, this brutal honesty is really what teaches us lessons.

I distinctly remember the internet being quite shady starting around 1995, but before that I hadn't really been exposed to those parts of the internet.

There are two things going on here. The first is that everyone is exposed to different parts of the internet at different times. The second is how rose tinted your glasses are when looking at the past.

I recently placed a Jeep on Craigslist for sale.

Within hours my inbox had an email from another "CL'er"

"Hey man, you still got that for sale?"

"yes"

Within seconds, the reply came: "You're asking too little for that. Check out this website XXX to see what I mean"

This was cute the first time, but after a dozen times (with varying and more sophisticated social pitches) it wasn't so much fun any more.

Here's the kicker: I probably know some of the guys doing this. You probably know some of them too. I know for a fact some of them are HN'ers. These are guys who started out wanting to change the world for the better, and now they're writing bots to skim a few cents at a time off tens of thousands of people.

I'm not going to say "get off my lawn, kids!" but I honestly don't know if the benefits of the net are going to outweigh the drawbacks. Do we transform into lots of super-intelligent man-machines? Or one big collective lump of fat sitting in our easy chairs, unable and unwilling to move and engage the real world?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com