
When Yahoo Ruled the Valley: Stories of the Original ‘Surfers’ - miraj
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/technology/when-yahoo-ruled-the-valley-stories-of-the-original-surfers.html
======
apathy
Xoom.com was once a site where, in exchange for free web space (kind of like
Geocities), you gave the company permission to spam you. "We Know You'll Love
This!" was pretty much our standard line, but we were profitable, in an age
where such a thing was practically unheard of. So...

We used to have "Porn Whackers"* at Xoom who would go through user sites that
had been reported/complained about/whatever and decide whether the shady stuff
that people put on their free pages was __

1) kiddy porn (freeze the account, send directly to the FBI)

2) legal, but simply in bad taste (do nothing)

3) copyrighted software, PDFs, that sort of thing (delete)

4) copyrighted porn (initially delete, but see below)

At some point it dawned on us that we were throwing away money by simply
deleting the sites in category 4. I wrote a redirect and we cut a deal with
Playboy to display ads for their website instead of a regular 404 page when a
visitor landed on a nabbed-for-copyright-infringement freebie site.

Needless to say, the pornwhackers were awesome to drink with. When you stare
into the abyss for 8 hours a day, you develop some excellent coping
mechanisms. Either that or you found something else to do. Plus there's that
magical feeling of being one of the first humans ever to see a guy's tied-up
nuts being stomped on by a crazy woman in high heels. We never did figure out
whether that was a nasty domestic dispute or some sort of fetish thingy.

Eventually Xoom got bought by GE, who had the bright idea (pause not) to make
the spam emails "opt-in". Way to take a moneymaking idea and turn it into a
turd, guys. Eventually they realized that they'd killed the goose that laid
the sort-of-golden eggs and we all sought other employment.

I miss SF from back then. My apartment in the Mission was $650/month and the
21 Club was still the best dive on Earth. The Excite guys were especially
hysterical, they'd show up to the colocation facility so zonked on heroin that
servers which were literally on fire gave them pause in terms of how to deal
with the situation. Plus the amount of pretty girls around was obscene.
Combined with all the free booze, it wasn't a half bad scene. Ah well, nothing
good ever lasts.

* Yes, the obvious thing occurred to us. Nobody cared.

* * There may have been a 5th category, "legal and in good taste", but out of 17 million users and 20TB of sites, I never recalled seeing one that fit this description. There's a reason we talked about categorizing Porn & Warez.

~~~
bcjordan
Wow, finally someone who remembers Xoom! Here's perhaps a more innocent
perspective on the service :)—back when I was 10 or 11 years old I wanted so
much to make my own websites using HTML and CSS. Making sites on
members.xoom.com and hanging out in the help desk (Java based) chat room
trying to solve other people's website issues was how I first learned to make
websites back in fifth grade. That room had a super friendly and helpful set
of volunteers/staff.

From the skills I learned in that chatroom I would wind up making sites for a
fee (I think I charged $30, felt like a lot of money but wow must have been a
steal for the business folks). Years later I've been working in SF,
recognizing the locations you describe and envying the rent.

A website on overfishing I hosted on xoom as a project for fifth grade science
class got me an A, so there's one site that was legal and in (in my teacher's
opinion) good taste!

This all reminds me how important free things are to kids who want to learn
things but can't spend any money (even $5 for a SquareSpace is prohibitively
expensive).

~~~
apathy
That's really cool to hear!

The customer service people at Xoom were great ones, many of the more colorful
characters I've ever met. Ed went off to start a security firm, Bryan moved to
LA to star in gay porn, and I dated a crazy pink haired girl who ended up in
SF by hopping trains all the way from North Carolina. It was a good group of
people, by and large. As previously noted, many Xoom ops people eventually
ended up at Google, and I like to think it was a net positive there, too.

Of course we also made mushroom-and-peanut-butter sandwiches in the break room
and piped the heat exchanger from the "machine room" into the rest of the
building (an old bank building on Montgomery), but overall it was a good
group.

------
gkop
Where does human curation of the web live now? Is it all temporal (Reddit,
Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc), or is there somewhere central that humans
organize it "for all time"? Would a modern Yahoo with the staff surfers
replaced by the crowd provide value to the world? Could it possibly work
without being horribly gamed? Are there good examples of having tried this
idea?

~~~
avar
The right answer to this is Google: You can search for any combination of
things you want from any time. No need for a centrally maintained directory.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Google is not the right answer. Far from it. Lack of imagination is what makes
it the de-facto standard. Why do I need a centralized body to do filtering and
curation? Why can't it be a collaborative effort augmented with some machine
learning? People should be in charge of their own information bubbles.

~~~
avar
I don't mean that Google literally 100% replaces that use-case, but that the
answer is that search engines got good enough that directory curation was no
longer marketable.

So nowadays what you'd previously look up in something like dmoz you now just
search for in Google.

------
nxzero
Google still uses huge amounts of human curation, it's just harder to see;
examples include: reCAPTCHA, Google Quality Raters, Google Maps Editors, etc.

~~~
frik
Right. Google has employed a lot of human curators. Though it's little known.
Some articles covered it over the years but with little details.

------
greggman
I remember the movie Frequency (2000) about a radio that transmits through
time. Somewhere in the movie a character from the future tells a character in
the past to "buy Yahoo".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_\(film\))

~~~
guessbest
That movie was made before the dot-com collapse. Also, it could have been
product placement.

------
discardorama
> Today, with more than one billion websites across the globe

Huh, what? There are estimated to be more than a trillion sites out there,
from what I've read.

~~~
chubot
Nah, there are on the order of magnitude of a trillion web _pages_ (though
it's hard to count given dynamic pages and such), but a billion domains (which
also has many dupes).

The number of domains is definitely closer to a billion than a trillion. This
number can be verified pretty easily (unlike the number of web pages).

------
joezydeco
No mention of Scott Yanoff?

------
frik
"Surfing the web" used to be a common term one to two decades ago.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/01...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/01/30/when-did-we-stop-surfing-the-web/)

[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/surfing-the-
web](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/surfing-the-web)

~~~
drauh
It started with Gopher, IIRC: "Surf the Internet." I recall having a GIF of
the gopher mascot with those words.[0] It was sometime between 1992 and 1995;
I'm fairly sure it was before Netscape. The Jargon File[1] doesn't mention
Gopher, specifically, but 1995 is just after Netscape was released.

[0] This PDF of an article by P. Frana (p.31) is the only reference I can find
to this image[2] I clearly remember. [https://instructure-
uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/account_1770000...](https://instructure-
uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/account_17700000000000001/attachments/869722/Frana%202004%20Before%20the%20Web%20There%20Was%20Gopher.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJFNFXH2V2O7RPCAA&Expires=1468822467&Signature=velQlCiqpRa6IpXii5Z5sQbJON4%3D&response-
content-
disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3D%22Frana%202004%20Before%20the%20Web%20There%20Was%20Gopher.pdf%22%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27Frana%25202004%2520Before%2520the%2520Web%2520There%2520Was%2520Gopher.pdf)

[1]
[http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/surf.html](http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/surf.html)

[2] [https://imgur.com/EHYdgMG](https://imgur.com/EHYdgMG)

------
more_corn
"I don't know why the company exists."

