[smrq]

This really seems like the exception that proves the rule, given how few Facebooks came out of that era. We had a social contract, but it turned out that being sociopathic is a winning strategy when everyone else is playing by the implicit rules. See also: modern politics.

[dghlsakjg]

The dominant business model that decade was monetization via getting people to fork over their data.

That's basically what Web 2.0 was.

[mopsi]

Indeed. The 2004 chat snippet is notable because it displayed attitude that was uncommon at the time. Zuck made it mainstream.

[dghlsakjg]

Wasn't Google's business model to slurp up literally everything on the web, and everything users would give them to sell eyeballs to advertisers?

Gmail also dates to 2004. If reading your email to sell ads to third parties based on the content of your private correspondence doesn't fit that attitude, I don't know what does.

I stand by my assertion that this shit was always going on, we just weren't wise to it in the 2000s.

[inigyou]

Google's early business model was to make something cool and figure out monetization later, like many firms from that era. When they got acquired by Doubleclick, they pivoted to advertising but still took time to get it to the evil stage.

[dghlsakjg]

Adsense was 2003, 5 years before the doublclick acquisition.

You could claim that google in the 90s was about building something cool and making money later, but not 2000s google.

As an aside, "make something cool, monetize later" is exactly the problem. It's deferred evil. The people who wrote the check to have youmake something cool aren't paying you to make something cool, they are paying you to figure out the monetization down the road.