[mrtksn]

That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.

But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.

[skydhash]

I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.

[mrtksn]

That's the time when VC's were making huge investments into the web tech, most companies were losing crazy money.

The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.

It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.

[officialchicken]

The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.

[shakna]

I don't think Altavista came before the bubble burst... They directly competed with Google and Yahoo.