Remember when gmail first came out like almost 20 years ago? You had to get an invite! People loved it. It was a big deal - it made people actually love google. It wasn't just a search engine, it was this awesome company making awesome things and sharing them with you and it just made so much sense. Gmail was a billion times better than the alternatives (hotmail? yahoo mail?) and the competition just looked lazy and bad. The early 2000s was a wild time when the internet and computers got fast enough that it was unleashing all these pent up ideas that suddenly could actually work. But nowadays it's like nobody knows what to do next, so we just spin our wheels optimizing ads and making the world terrible with recommender systems.