On the internet don't need a 'them' to green light whatever it is we may want to do online. Plus we get to click on the things we want to read or watch, and ignore those things we don't want to know about.
Well, most of the time, anyway.
At this point I think it's safe to say that we've all been on the internet long enough to know that such openness and on-demand everything can yield less than optimal outcomes. Whether it's the bad actors that manufacture disinformation or the ones responsible for ad fraud, bots, or a litany of other undesirable things, the internet exists in the contradiction that the greatest treasure trove of information ever amassed can also have a sewage pipe attached to it. That's the flip side of the ubiquitous connectivity and networks. It seems self-evident that we're infinitely better off with the internet than without it, but we're also at a point in its evolution (about 25 years in to the consumer internet phase of things) that decisions being made now, and companies being built now, will determine where this crazy experiment in global connectedness goes.
At this point I think it's safe to say that we've all been on the internet long enough to know that such openness and on-demand everything can yield less than optimal outcomes. Whether it's the bad actors that manufacture disinformation or the ones responsible for ad fraud, bots, or a litany of other undesirable things, the internet exists in the contradiction that the greatest treasure trove of information ever amassed can also have a sewage pipe attached to it. That's the flip side of the ubiquitous connectivity and networks. It seems self-evident that we're infinitely better off with the internet than without it, but we're also at a point in its evolution (about 25 years in to the consumer internet phase of things) that decisions being made now, and companies being built now, will determine where this crazy experiment in global connectedness goes.
So what can we do about it now? Sometimes looking back can provide a valuable lens as we look forward, as was the case at a recent event that brought together some pioneers of the internet with an academic who has been studying online communities since they began to emerge in the 1990s.
The pioneers sharing their perspectives were David Bohnett, founder of Geocities and Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr. As a quick refresher, Geocities hosted tens of millions of websites at its peak in the late 90s. Some say it was a precursor to social media, with web software that let anyone create and publish a website. And it's easy to forget what a big deal that was at the time. But it really was.
You didn't need to know how to code, you didn't have to pay extra for domain names or hosting. It was all taken care of by Geocities. As noted in a Wall Street Journal article in 2007 on Geocities: “Back then, entries were known as home pages, not profiles. But the basic, expressive elements of today’s Facebook and competitor MySpace…were all right there.” So what happened to Geocities? Well, it was purchased for $3.5 billion by Yahoo in 1999. And shut down a neat and tidy 10 years later. Its founder David Bohnett started his own venture capital firm, investing in other startups, and now runs a foundation focused on improving society through social activism.
A few years after Yahoo's acquisition of Geocities, along came Flickr. It launched in 2004 and was one of the first, if not *the* first online photo-sharing sites. You had pictures that you wanted to post online and tag? Flickr was the place to do that. Basic features were offered for free, and you could pay extra for a premium account with added bells and whistles. After a year of explosive growth Flickr was also acquired by Yahoo, though at about $25 million it fetched nowhere near the price of Geocities.
As Caterina Fake's co-founder Stewart Butterfield put it: "Flickr missed some of the uptick in the market, as others sold for more when the market took off: Myspace sold to News Corp. for $580 million in July 2005 and later YouTube, which Google acquired in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock. We definitely made the wrong decision in retrospect. We would’ve made 10 times [what we did]. But it’s not like I regret it." Fret not, however. Things turned out fine for Butterfield. More than just fine. After a series of entrepreneurial ventures he created Slack, which got acquired by Salesforce for $27 billion in December 2020. Things turned out well for Caterina Fake too. She did another startup after Flickr, and it got acquired by eBay. She became an investor herself, taking bets on Uber, Etsy, and Kickstarter, among others. Today she is a partner in an early stage investing firm called Yes VC.
And with that, let's go to the event, with David Bohnett, founder of Geocities, Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, author and academic Nancy Baym, and moderator Jad Esber, co-founder of the startup Koodos* for a discussion of such questions as:
- How can what we've learned from the social internet's past help us create a better shared digital future?
- If each new social platform is as a new type of 'society,' how have these assumptions shifted over the years?
- And, of course, what might be coming next...
PS And you can see the full transcript from the event here.
*Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Koodos. And may I say it's been a fascinating ride.