[kibwen]

Can you be more specific about what sites you're referring to? As much as the dotcom bubble gets remembered by history, I personally wasn't frequenting any of the darlings of the VC world. My haunts were backwater forums hastily hand-coded in the 1999 dialect of PHP and other sites with totally ordinary text ads. These weren't billion-dollar overvalued companies, these were sites stood up in a server in someone's garage, and users made all the content. Even the biggest of the fish back then, Yahoo--fancying itself a media company--was relevant to me only because it hosted Geocities (again relying on user-generated content, and Yahoo was hardly one of the companies hemorrhaging money in this era).