[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Was the early internet used primarily for sc...
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Ask HN: Was the early internet used primarily for scams like
blockchain is now?
See title.
Author : senttoschool
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-08-13 18:07 UTC (4 hours ago)
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| No. Scams have always existed and folks were wary of providing
| personal information. There was a discussion about what to call
| it. Ibahn was my favorite. Broswers and www did not exist. You
| could poke around and find file folders of organizations, open
| them up and read the files therein. People were clueless, the CFO
| at my company spent most of his day looking at pron. Even before
| ATT built its data vacuum in SOMA there was a sense that that
| worst fears of a surveillance state were neigh.
| badrabbit wrote:
| How early? In the 2000s there were plenty of scams. I still
| remember falling for a banner ad scam "You are the 1000000th
| customer and you won a prize" sitting for hours submitting form
| after form survey after survey card after card until I gave up
| from frustration.
| junon wrote:
| Nope. Early days of web were fun, especially since not everyone
| and their grandmother were terminally online.
| peyton wrote:
| Pop-up ads? "Click here for a free $50 gift card!" and so
| forth.
|
| Was everywhere by about 1998 or so.
| icedchai wrote:
| By 1998, the Internet was basically mainstream. Broadband was
| starting to roll out (early cable modems and DSL.) I consider
| "early internet" 1995 and before.
| junon wrote:
| I'd rather pop up ads than the societal breakdown we have
| today, if that was really the choice. Also, popups weren't on
| the niche sites. AdWords really changed that.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Not in the same way, but they're fundamentally different
| technologies. The Internet is fundamentally a communications
| technology; blockchain is fundamentally a financial technology.
|
| The (very-)early Internet was largely used to distribute
| scientific papers. Once it hit the mainstream, it was used to
| setup fan pages for bands, chat with people across the globe,
| share experiences with esoteric hobbies, and basically do things
| like Hacker News but at scale.
|
| If you look at other financial technologies like the joint-stock
| corporation or the stock market, they absolutely were used
| primarily for scams. Read up on the history of the stock market
| c. 1850-1860, particularly financiers like Jay Gould; it was
| absolutely _crazy_ , with scams, panics, market corners, and
| bankruptcies far worse than anything in the crypto space now.
| Same with the joint stock corporation, which was first developed
| so that you could colonize and exterminate the natives without
| any one person having legal liability for that. (Well, that and
| so when a ship's crew never came home, nobody was liable.)
| multjoy wrote:
| WWW != internet
| nathanyz wrote:
| I think the key word in your question is "primarily." And because
| of that I would say not at all. The early Internet was people
| having the ability to connect and communicate with others all
| over the world. Being able to meet, or learn, or buy from people
| even in the next state was completely game changing. Before it
| would have required physical catalogs, or getting someones phone
| number, etc. But the Internet made it happen at an unbelievable
| speed which is why it took over.
|
| That was it's "job" per se. Did people use this new ability to
| try to scam others, sure, just like they did with bogus ads for
| hovercrafts in the back of magazines in prior years. But the
| technology itself was about this instant communication.
|
| So people wanted to move all offline stuff to online. That is why
| first boom was just things you can do offline, but now online.
| Buy pet supplies...online. But groceries...online. Etc, while the
| winners of that era didn't just recreate offline businesses
| online, but improved them based on the paradigm shift it enabled.
|
| Blockchain feels like a technology looking for a "job." I
| understand there are some countries where maybe the job is being
| able to move money, although I am not convinced that it is is net
| positive in those cases. The biggest thing I think I have
| realized is that I have never been in a situation, where I think
| to myself, "If I could just use the blockchain to do this, it
| would be incredible."
|
| And if after all of these years, that thought hasn't hit you even
| once, then I think that says something about whether it is
| actually improving anything.
| jstx1 wrote:
| No, this is what people who are too deep into crypto tell
| themselves and each other in order to sleep a bit better at
| night.
| krupan wrote:
| The early internet, no, but scammers soon came and still use the
| internet heavily. Ever heard of email spam and phishing? Still
| enormous. We have filters that help a lot, but it's still a huge
| problem.
|
| eBay came into existence to try and allow people to buy and sell
| over the internet without getting scammed. I still got scammed by
| an eBay seller in the early days. Everyone did. But eventually
| their reputation system worked and buying and selling on eBay is
| pretty safe.
|
| Just a couple of examples, but if you think just a little you can
| remember various frauds and scams, ponzi schemes, personal
| information harvesting, etc., etc., that all make heavy use of
| the internet
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Stupid people didn't have access to the early internet. Then
| enteral September struck and... well, here we all are.
| gizajob wrote:
| No far from it. The early web was people putting their interests
| online, in the hope that someone might be on the same wavelength
| and discover them. Before that it was just academia and then it
| blew up with the web and email.
|
| I'd say the main thing that revolutionised the public internet
| was TRUST. The early days was an era where people would be
| genuinely cautious about what might happen behind the website. It
| was initially a tough proposition to send your money off to a
| website in the hope that something might arrive in the post some
| time later. What eBay in particular did was create the feedback
| system, where we could gain ratings points for doing what we said
| we were going to do.
|
| I feel like this trust system and the legitimisation of
| e-commerce has made the importance of this fade into the
| background. Now, we are in an age where seemingly millions of
| people get embroiled in schemes of little utility in the blind
| faith they will make them rich, somehow.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I miss the early days dearly.
| krupan wrote:
| The thing with Blockchain scams (shitcoins), is that it feels
| like the creators of these coins often really believe they are
| going to be providing a useful service, a new innovation better
| than traditional financial services, better than Bitcoin. But
| they just don't think it all the way through. It's hard to think
| it all the way through!
|
| But don't get me wrong, there are also most definitely some
| outright scams in the crypto world too.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The thing with Blockchain scams (shitcoins), is that it feels
| like the creators of these coins often really believe they are
| going to be providing a useful service, a new innovation better
| than traditional financial services, better than Bitcoin. But
| they just don't think it all the way through.
|
| Or, maybe, the success and visibility of these types of coins
| is driven almost entirely by the ability of the creators to
| project the illusion of confidence and expertise to _buyers_
| who won't think things all the way through.
| simonblack wrote:
| Money didn't come into it until the first search engines allowed
| the monetisation of the Net. (Unless you consider the difficulty
| of computer faculties getting funding from University
| administrations.)
|
| Prior to that, it was 99% an interactive learning area with the
| oldies teaching the newbies. In fact probably 95% of the Net back
| then was run by Universities all over the world.
| cookingrobot wrote:
| Chain emails were common, and were mostly just annoying. But some
| would ask you to send money in exchange for getting much more
| sent to you later.
| carlosdp wrote:
| As soon as consumers started onboarding to it, absolutely.
|
| On top of the other examples mentioned in this thread, it wasn't
| that long ago that the internet was plagued with pop-up scams
| left and right. We forget about it now because browsers have
| eliminated that vector for the most part.
| silisili wrote:
| The early internet was purely technical...mainly military,
| university.
|
| The early 'mass internet' of the early to mid 90s is when I
| started on it. In my experience, it was mostly people looking for
| entertainment and chatting. The web was new, barebones, and
| fascinating. It was nowhere near as scummy as it is now.
|
| Scams of some sort have always existed...phishing, get rich quick
| schemes, etc. Mainly delivered by email. It definitely was by no
| means primarily for scams. I'd argue the internet today is more
| scammy than the early internet was, ignoring blockchain.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The early internet was mostly academic.
|
| A bit later on, things like viruses and spyware became a major
| issue. It took a while for the people making browsers and
| operating systems to realize how severe a security problem the
| internet would be.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| No.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| The early Internet, I don't know, I wasn't there.
|
| The early web certainly wasn't full of scams. It was mostly made
| of stuff like the strawberry pop-tart experiments, recently
| resurfaced on HN: https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/ . That was at
| the higher end of quality, and there was plenty of commercial
| stuff (think company websites, not eBay yet), but it all had that
| same spirit, which is so rare today. (HN has a bit of that
| spirit, which is worth putting up with some crap to get even a
| small dose of in these troubled days.)
|
| There was a major discovery problem though, which led to things
| like webrings and the birth of search engines and spam. Maybe not
| in that order.
| parkingrift wrote:
| The web was invented in 1989, and by 2002 we already had an
| entire dotcom explosion and collapse. Google was a four year old
| established company. Using the internet was completely
| mainstream. Everyone at every age was using it and had uses for
| it.
|
| No, the early web was not primarily scams. Blockchain is well
| over a decade old and still searching for a way to be useful.
|
| Early internet was mostly military or educational. No widespread
| usage among everyday people. No big scams that I'm aware of, but
| mostly because no one was using it or could use it.
| tornato7 wrote:
| The first email spam was sent in 1978[1], if that's something you
| count. Interestingly, Hashcash, the first proof-of-work system,
| was actually invented to stop email spam. This is a loaded
| question, anyway. Most technologies will eventually become
| 'primarily' used for spam or scams by some metrics. 60% of all
| phone calls are spam or scams[2] creating $18bn+ in losses due to
| fraud[3]. 85% of all emails are spam[4]. 70% of all registered
| domain names are malicious[5]. Yet people don't typically
| describe these systems as 'primarily used for scams'. 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam 2.
| https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-phones-were-hit-...
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_fraud 4.
| https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ 5.
| https://www.scmagazine.com/news/malware/vast-majority-of-new...
| batmanturkey wrote:
| No, primarily larks and amusement and interesting stuff. This was
| largely a labor of love, showing faith in internationalism and
| humanity
| picsao wrote:
| chrismeller wrote:
| It started out for mostly academic and high-end tech uses, so no.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| Came here to say this.
|
| The internet as a mass phenomenon didn't happen until around
| 1994. (They'd send you floppy disks in the mail with software
| to get you on a consumer-friendly "online service" like AOL or
| CompuServe, and this suddenly brought waves of people outside
| the original techie/academic sphere.) And then web browsers
| became popular...
|
| Internet commerce didn't really start happening until later in
| the 1990s -- so prior to that, it would've been really hard for
| scammers to actually draw a line all the way into somebody's
| bank account.
| kirykl wrote:
| Financial scams ? Email and spam supported a fair share such as
| the 419 scam
| solmanac wrote:
| A lot of it was mercifully stuff like alt.tv.x-files. It was
| great.
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