Comment by hx8
1 day ago
What age were you in 2011? I'm willing to bet 14-21.
I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people.
I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.
I was 30 in 2011, and working on building that Internet future.
2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.
I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.
I divide up the world into the pre-iPad world and the post-iPad world.
Less because of the iPad itself (though it was the first mainstream 'consumption first' device in my mind) and more because of those sorts of early user-hostile and spyware-first models that were coming out around that time.
I am much older but I consider Ivy Bridge and the iPhone 4S to be the best. So that's around 2012. I also think the 11 inch MacBook Air was the best laptop, but there is no equivalent nowadays because Apple wants you to buy an iPad+keyboard, which is actually heavier. The last year for that MacBook Air was 2015. Nothing has come out after 2012 that interests me at all, including the 'AI' stuff
For me I think 2004 with the launch of Halo 2 and playing over xbox live with the homies.