27
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
27 points (86.5% liked)
Technology
84354 readers
3953 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It was 100% about the web. But to be clear, for this conversation we have to be pedantic. when i say web, i mean the world wide web, the service that runs on the application layer of the internet. I am not talking about the internet itself. I was working as a software developer and a lot of people thought web pages weren't going anywhere. AOL was how people accessed online but there were competing products to the WWW, the biggest competitor was gopher. Web pages were not as functional at first and were seen as a fad, like an online business card. So yes people doubted the WWW app/tech itself.
I know, I was there. I was on Quantum Link, which AOL would later buy out for the infrastructure to build on. I was with Compuserve and Prodigy before moving to AOL. Webpage commerce was already a thing before the crash, it just wasn't as established as it is now. Even Amazon had started going past just books into selling other things. I'll agree that what the web would be used for and how was still being figured out, but it was far past any niche thing by the late 90s. The wiki on the crash is an interesting history read. In the end, it was a stock crash because people were literally making up companies that didn't exist and getting money for it. Getting back to the topic at hand, sounds a bit familiar.