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Comment by doe_eyes | Hacker News Reader

The obvious answer is "no", but it makes you wonder. The first wave of tech platforms that defined the online experience for millions (Aol, Myspace, Yahoo, etc) are now largely gone. Will the history repeat with the giants of today?

On one hand, we see some signs of that. For example, Facebook is no longer "cool" with younger folks. On the other hand, Meta has so much $$$ that they can try to reinvent themselves or acquire "cool" platforms, thus ensuring corporate continuity even if Facebook fizzles out - they have Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.

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Those first platforms didn't have the same market cap. The current tech giants have so much money they can keep acquiring companies to stay relevant (line Facebook).

They’re just kind of big ol’ moneyballs with easier access to at-cost resources. But even then they’re so big getting those resources can feel like you don’t even work at the same company.

But that's precisely why those other platforms failed as they couldn't/didn't monetize anything.

The common story of MySpace failure was they tried too hard to monetize and they couldn’t innovate because anything that made the platform nicer to use would short tearm cause fewer ad impressions.

I’m pretty sure yahoo is still profitable.

> I’m pretty sure yahoo is still profitable.

Moving the goal posts within topic, are they relevant though? I see Yahoo!Sports pop up in my news feed from time to time, but that's about it.

there were so many 'waves', so many years apart, that I have a hard time lumping them all together.

aol and yahoo, maybe. aol was much earlier, but they both hit max valuation at around the same 2000-01 period.

myspace hit max valuation at 05-06. 5 years might as well have been a century at that point in history with the amount of flux in that industry.

my first wave was the tail end of BBSs and the beginning of the walled gardens of compuserve and aol. a bit later came The Palace, The Well, and various other (incredibly formative and impactful) social cliques.

The social aspects was what separated the 'waves' for me, and the gradual shift from an idealist concept to something more corporate.

I had sort of forgotten but MySpace was really read-write web/web 2.0 era, i.e. post dot-bomb. There was really a whole wave of companies and behaviors, e.g. blogging, that weren't really part of the original dot-com era at all but the wave of the late 2000s companies.

Purely as a matter of interest, Compuserve was founded in 1969 as a business offering time-sharing on minicomputers. It opened to the public in something very much like the form you're remembering in 1979. This later date is roughly contemporaneous with the first BBSes.

I also remember Compuserve in the same mental slot as AOL and Prodigy, but it considerably predated them.

>The first wave of tech platforms that defined the online experience for millions (Aol, Myspace, Yahoo, etc) are now largely gone.

The first were search engines like Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, free webhosts like Tripod and Angelfire (RIP GeoCities), and all those Usenet boards.

Now git off mah lawn ya greenhorns. :V

I miss that time. Xoom, Namezero, Bravenet, Napster...

The worry is that the current players are too big to be disrupted. Reddit and Twitter turned openly hostile to users last year and few people left. There's a critical mass of docile users that are no longer willing to start over elsewhere.

How can Reddit and Twitter turn openly hostile to users? They're just platforms for users to submit posts. I haven't seen a major change in Reddit since the UI overhaul in 2018. And even that I wouldn't call hostile. Just annoying. And it can be worked around.

Reddit killed 3rd party apps almost entierly.

> 2018. And even that I wouldn't call hostile. Just annoying. And it can be worked around.

How please?

old.reddit.com

Both sites killed third party apps, Reddit took control from moderators, Twitter fucked up the verification system and turned it into an entry level advertising tier.

Twitter has this algorithm that shows ads based on "interest", but the way it derives "interest" is based on the ads it has shown you, and the ads they show you are mostly garbage. They give you this settings page so that you can see all the "interests" they have forced on you. You can remove those badly inferred interests, but the page resets every day.

Twitter is not just a tool with bad defaults, but one that actively disrespects user preferences. "Openly hostile" seems like a fair assessment.

But they still have more users than some other place.

You have to stay off ‘Popular’. It is toxic

There are niche subreddits that are very good and responsive without all the drama

Twitter wants you to believe few people left but they've lost as many as 30% of their users since 2022.

Got any good data to cite for that number? I've seen the Edison phone survey, but not sure a phone survey is a reliable way to measure internet use.

Twitter also had a ton of fluff labor. He was right to let a ton of them go

It's still yet to be seen. Twitter has nose dived since the staff left, so perhaps they were providing value.

That's what yahoo was doing until it's board decided to "focus" their efforts. If I recall correctly they had an investment in something that they sold way too early and would have made a killing.

Alibaba

I am willing to bet that yes, even the giants of today, will be memories of tomorrow.

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