Ask HN: Was the early internet used primarily for scams like blockchain is now?
See title.
No, the early web was not primarily scams. Blockchain is well over a decade old and still searching for a way to be useful.
Early internet was mostly military or educational. No widespread usage among everyday people. No big scams that I’m aware of, but mostly because no one was using it or could use it.
Scams did exist, as they do in every communication medium (chain letters used to refer to actual letters you got in the mail!), but they were a sideshow.
The “non-commercial” internet was used for financial speculation for decades, while this is seen as an invalid use case of blockchain transactional activity by those who chose to denigrate the whole concept. For services that do distinguish scam vs licit transaction types, the highest estimates of scams in the billions of dollars pale in comparison to all the rest of the transactional activity by volume and asset size.
Its nearly impossible to have an answer to the premise presented.
I wouldn’t consider blockchain ecosystem growth as moderate at all. There is no growth. There are zero unique use cases on blockchain. No blockchain apps or use cases that couldn’t exist without blockchain. It’s an ecosystem for gambling on shit coins and reinventing the wheel.
Having been involved with ratification of various protocols in the blockchain space
Most of the speculative action from new types of assets comes before ratification
Its much more similar to a rudimentary networking protocol than a commercialized internet
The early web certainly wasn't full of scams. It was mostly made of stuff like the strawberry pop-tart experiments, recently resurfaced on HN: https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/ . That was at the higher end of quality, and there was plenty of commercial stuff (think company websites, not eBay yet), but it all had that same spirit, which is so rare today. (HN has a bit of that spirit, which is worth putting up with some crap to get even a small dose of in these troubled days.)
There was a major discovery problem though, which led to things like webrings and the birth of search engines and spam. Maybe not in that order.
The early 'mass internet' of the early to mid 90s is when I started on it. In my experience, it was mostly people looking for entertainment and chatting. The web was new, barebones, and fascinating. It was nowhere near as scummy as it is now.
Scams of some sort have always existed...phishing, get rich quick schemes, etc. Mainly delivered by email. It definitely was by no means primarily for scams. I'd argue the internet today is more scammy than the early internet was, ignoring blockchain.
- Personal websites
- Porn
- Instant messaging via ICQ
- Chat via IRC
- Multiplayer video gaming
- Communities via Messageboards
- Downloading software and music
- Searching for aliens (SETI)
It all felt very wholesome. Although there was a movie about hacking for fun and profit (Hackers), so I'm sure there was some of that too - but eCommerce and social networking didn't become a thing until the mid-2000s, which gradually brought the real masses and along with them, scams galore.
That was it's "job" per se. Did people use this new ability to try to scam others, sure, just like they did with bogus ads for hovercrafts in the back of magazines in prior years. But the technology itself was about this instant communication.
So people wanted to move all offline stuff to online. That is why first boom was just things you can do offline, but now online. Buy pet supplies...online. But groceries...online. Etc, while the winners of that era didn't just recreate offline businesses online, but improved them based on the paradigm shift it enabled.
Blockchain feels like a technology looking for a "job." I understand there are some countries where maybe the job is being able to move money, although I am not convinced that it is is net positive in those cases. The biggest thing I think I have realized is that I have never been in a situation, where I think to myself, "If I could just use the blockchain to do this, it would be incredible."
And if after all of these years, that thought hasn't hit you even once, then I think that says something about whether it is actually improving anything.
eBay came into existence to try and allow people to buy and sell over the internet without getting scammed. I still got scammed by an eBay seller in the early days. Everyone did. But eventually their reputation system worked and buying and selling on eBay is pretty safe.
Just a couple of examples, but if you think just a little you can remember various frauds and scams, ponzi schemes, personal information harvesting, etc., etc., that all make heavy use of the internet
The late 90's also saw the rise of retail electronic stock trading(where previously, one called up the broker and they handled the trade), which created a huge boom in pump group activities. Often the tactics were quite simplistic and just involved spamming forums with sockpuppeting. Though there were prosecutions years later, the learnings of these pump groups did persist in the penny markets, and ultimately carried over into crypto and created some foundational archetypes.
During the 2000's, scam activity shifted towards ecommerce, affiliate marketing, MMO item trading and the like. This was when "search engine optimization" first became a thing. And as you can see by looking at the current results of most Google searches, SEO has basically won. The open Internet outside the walls is overrun with noise.
So, while you can absolutely have gotten around back then without being personally affected, I believe it is also correct to say that it was always there, and in fact, has become a deeper problem over time. Blockchain tech is another useful vehicle, but it's one among many, and the open nature of the most popular ledgers makes for more eye-popping headlines.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Money_Fast (I recall it with the excessive dollar signs, the article has it with periods. So I did both.)
Was everywhere by about 1998 or so.
I'd say the main thing that revolutionised the public internet was TRUST. The early days was an era where people would be genuinely cautious about what might happen behind the website. It was initially a tough proposition to send your money off to a website in the hope that something might arrive in the post some time later. What eBay in particular did was create the feedback system, where we could gain ratings points for doing what we said we were going to do.
I feel like this trust system and the legitimisation of e-commerce has made the importance of this fade into the background. Now, we are in an age where seemingly millions of people get embroiled in schemes of little utility in the blind faith they will make them rich, somehow.
Maybe something will come out the crypto space which is actually revolutionary and useful, but it remains to be seen. With early internet it was immediately obvious that this was going to be a gamechanger, and had real utility whereas most of the crypto space appears to be ponzi speculation.
Keep in mind that between 1969 and, say, ~1990, there were very few people on the Internet. Many of them were academics who had access to Internet via their university. Internet access wasn’t a mainstream thing. So trust was probably quite high between them. And very little commerce took place on the Internet. In the 80’s, Internet was not free from criminal activity, but it was not really that much compared to how cyber criminals operate today.
Some pointers to further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...
But don't get me wrong, there are also most definitely some outright scams in the crypto world too.
Or, maybe, the success and visibility of these types of coins is driven almost entirely by the ability of the creators to project the illusion of confidence and expertise to buyers who won’t think things all the way through.
The (very-)early Internet was largely used to distribute scientific papers. Once it hit the mainstream, it was used to setup fan pages for bands, chat with people across the globe, share experiences with esoteric hobbies, and basically do things like Hacker News but at scale.
If you look at other financial technologies like the joint-stock corporation or the stock market, they absolutely were used primarily for scams. Read up on the history of the stock market c. 1850-1860, particularly financiers like Jay Gould; it was absolutely crazy, with scams, panics, market corners, and bankruptcies far worse than anything in the crypto space now. Same with the joint stock corporation, which was first developed so that you could colonize and exterminate the natives without any one person having legal liability for that. (Well, that and so when a ship's crew never came home, nobody was liable.)
Hard to take the question seriously when it's such a loaded question.
Maybe don't state a hypothesis as a fact in the question.
The internet as a mass phenomenon didn't happen until around 1994. (They'd send you floppy disks in the mail with software to get you on a consumer-friendly "online service" like AOL or CompuServe, and this suddenly brought waves of people outside the original techie/academic sphere.) And then web browsers became popular...
Internet commerce didn't really start happening until later in the 1990s -- so prior to that, it would've been really hard for scammers to actually draw a line all the way into somebody's bank account.
You were just as likely to be scammed in a retail store or a magazine ad.
The technology was horrible. I would take today's CSS3 and JS frameworks any day. It was slow, despite being largely text and JS free.
But the content made up for it. The content was all written by real people, on real pages you could link to, no endless scrolling.
I always say 2005-2009 was when everything but tech got really miserable.
Prior to that, it was 99% an interactive learning area with the oldies teaching the newbies. In fact probably 95% of the Net back then was run by Universities all over the world.
pre-commercialization (pre-1993) there were prevalent scams purely due to being a communication method without a transactional method
pre-commercialization there is no way to quantify it at this point, but if we are looking at transactional demand then maybe it was primarily for scams? if we are saying speculation isn't utility, then the internet was primarily useless pre-commercialization as well, as much of the daily demand was also volume for stock trading and speculation.
it might be becoming clear that blockchains would also have to be held to an equivalent standard of determining if you want to like the prevalent use cases of speculation, or consider it all a scam all the way down. but for people within the blockchain space, the volume is primarily not within things those people call scams, things that undermine expectations aka rug pulls.
but also, your premise itself may be misaligned, when people say early internet they aren't talking about the WWW, many are talking about the protocols, the time period where it wasn't clear if TCP/IP was even going to be the underpinning standard, and other protocols were co-existing and continuing being developed by different teams, or even early with Darpanet in the late 1960s. A more direct comparison here would be all the different blockchains and all the different protocols on top of those blockchains. Where each one rapidly iterates to more traction and there is crossdrift to implementing the same protocol design on a different blockchain.
with that view, blockchain has been wildly successful and growing at a very fast pace, compressing 40 years of activity into just 10. But when thinking about just the WWW +10 years, then blockchain is only growing at a moderate pace.
Even in the very early 2000s, it very easily was dozens of spam messages per legitimate email, and most commercial tools at the time were simple filters, regular expressions and blacklists.
Bayesian filtering took us from 5-10% effective to >99% effective overnight.
On top of the other examples mentioned in this thread, it wasn't that long ago that the internet was plagued with pop-up scams left and right. We forget about it now because browsers have eliminated that vector for the most part.
A bit later on, things like viruses and spyware became a major issue. It took a while for the people making browsers and operating systems to realize how severe a security problem the internet would be.
The answer is no -- the internet wasn't rife with scams. The dotcom bubble, however, was RIFE with garbage companies that formed and dissolved in months.
Bitcoin has been around for 14 years now. If we map blockchain progress to the internet itself, or even 3d graphics (which materialized at roughly the same time as the internet with Jurassic Park coming out in 1992 and DOOM in 1993), then we are basically in the year 2003.
By 2003, we basically had all the big players we have today - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, but they were much smaller. EBay and Yahoo were considered in the same league at that time. Cloud computing and centralization of the infrastructure of the internet was not yet a thing.
The problem with blockchain and VCs is that there is this cargo cult attached to it. The idea is that a bunch of libertarian nerds in their 20s made it big on the internet, so the 2022 version of that must hold true with blockchain. This is a bit silly. If we step back, blockchain is mostly an improvement on ACH bank transfers and a few other things. The rest of that space is just pure Ponzinomics.
i think no matter what the decade is, scammers gonna scam and fools gonna get taken advantage.