We are living in the gold age of user-generated content. Anyone can post a joke before breakfast, become a meme by lunch and be fired for the joke at the end of business. Ok, it's more like the "tin age", but still a unique moment in human history. Here at Stack Exchange, we're doing our part by hosting some of the very best content produced entirely by individual users at scale. I think it's fair to say we are the Wikipedia of Q&A.
It all started back in 2008 with a site named after a class of bug. Even so, it achieved some popularity within the developer community. The network first expanded to fairly technical topics, but very quickly sites popped up for just about every form of human knowledge including an endless variety of CMS and blockchain schemes. In the days BSE (Before Stack Exchange) it was certainly possible to share knowledge. There were podcasts and blogs and forums and Geocities pages. You could post on someone's Wall or microblog or be Tom's friend. And of course there were wikis and social news sites with alien mascots. But none of them capitalized on the simple genius of the question and answers format quite like Stack Exchange.
The Web turned 30 this year and we got to thinking it's too bad Stack Exchange sites have only been part of a third of that history. What, we pondered, would the world be like if Stack Exchange had started back in the year 2000 1998? Relieving you of the need to imagine it, we are proud to announce a new Time Machine feature that lets you experience Stack Exchange before its time.
What's that? It says "WELCOME TO STACKOVERFLOW" you say? I asked our designers about that and they tell me dank fonts don't need lower case. Oh, you mean why isn't it STACKEXCHANGE? That's a bit of a time travel paradox. We set the baseline at 2008, but the Stack Exchange brand didn't really show up until a couple of years later. We have our crack quantum mechanics working on it. Once they patch the timeline, we won't have any way of knowing.
As you explore the Stack Exchange off-ramp of the Information Superhighway keep your eyes peeled for content that could only exist in the '90s such as:
- Crystal Pepsi
- Spice Girls
- Funny Jim Carrey
- Descent secrets
- Pokémon or Digimon?
- Transgressive Simpsons
- Unblemished Star Wars movies
Feel free to note especially appropriate examples in the answers below, but please don't spoil The Sixth Sense.