When Yahoo Ruled the Valley: Stories of the Original ‘Surfers’
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.  &quot;We Know You&#x27;ll Love This!&quot; was pretty much our standard line, but we were profitable, in an age where such a thing was practically unheard of.  So...<p>We used to have &quot;Porn Whackers&quot;* at Xoom who would go through user sites that had been reported&#x2F;complained about&#x2F;whatever and decide whether the shady stuff that people put on their free pages was<i></i><p>1) kiddy porn (freeze the account, send directly to the FBI)<p>2) legal, but simply in bad taste (do nothing)<p>3) copyrighted software, PDFs, that sort of thing (delete)<p>4) copyrighted porn (initially delete, but see below)<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s that magical feeling of being one of the first humans ever to see a guy&#x27;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.<p>Eventually Xoom got bought by GE, who had the bright idea (pause not) to make the spam emails &quot;opt-in&quot;.  Way to take a moneymaking idea and turn it into a turd, guys.  Eventually they realized that they&#x27;d killed the goose that laid the sort-of-golden eggs and we all sought other employment.<p>I miss SF from back then.  My apartment in the Mission was $650&#x2F;month and the 21 Club was still the best dive on Earth.  The Excite guys were especially hysterical, they&#x27;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&#x27;t a half bad scene.  Ah well, nothing good ever lasts.<p>* Yes, the obvious thing occurred to us. Nobody cared.<p>* * There may have been a 5th category, &quot;legal and in good taste&quot;, but out of 17 million users and 20TB of sites, I never recalled seeing one that fit this description.  There&#x27;s a reason we talked about categorizing Porn &amp; Warez.