• early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 days ago

      Makes me wonder whether people saw the dot com bubble the same way in the late 90s, with investors smelling their own farts and everyone else on the sidelines screaming about how stupid this is.

        • wewbull@feddit.uk
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          4 days ago

          …and start rebranding with 2-colour logos, whilst missing vowel out of their names.

          • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
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            4 days ago

            Not quite the same, but remember when everyone had a bare -r at the end of their name, flickr, tumblr, etc. What was up with that?

        • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
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          4 days ago

          The only difference then was that they would all IPO. The current bubble is consolidated to a few large companies and a lot of venture-backed bottom feeders. Other than that, yeah, just obvious insanity.

          • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            They tightened up the rules on IPOs after so many companies with no futures basically pumped and dumped their stock on the public. Now the way to dump on public bagholders is through SPAC mergers.

        • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 days ago

          I was technically around as well, but I was in high school and was busy worrying about my own problems. Adults were doing adult things and making adult mistakes and bearing adult consequences. Even back then I knew adulthood was going to suck.

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Yes. There were plenty of people saying “but this business doesn’t have a path to making more money than it spends.” There was, at the time, serious doubt about internet advertising as a viable business.

        And the companies building out the telecommunications infrastructure. Between the 1996 reforms creating a lot of redundant competition for competing telecommunications networks, mania about the information superhighway, there was basically never going to be a way for these companies that spent billions deploying real resources in creating telecommunications lines to make enough money to even make their interest payments. So they mostly went bankrupt and their assets got sold to others at a fraction that it cost to build them.

        Warren Buffett sat the whole thing out and his portfolio significantly underperformed the market as a whole. His philosophy of only wanting to invest in companies that he saw as undervalued, with a low price for their earnings or dividends or general enterprise value, didn’t work really well for the prevailing investor sentiment at the time.