this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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I think that it's interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.

Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn't make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn't pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn't or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.

Four from me:

  • My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of lynx on a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn't convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then.

  • In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn't think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.

  • When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it's safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.

  • After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering youtube-dl much less useful, the yt-dlp project came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn't tolerate this


it seems to me to have all the drawbacks of youtube-dl from their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn't be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven't throttled or blocked it.

Anyone else have some of their own that they'd like to share?

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[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 22 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 6 points 23 hours ago

I mean you're not wrong, for some people in some cases. But it's not so easy to teach yourself how to learn, nor why to learn it.

[–] Zealotte@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 day ago (4 children)

"Nintendo should admit defeat and focus on making games for other platforms and mobile devices." - Me, after the Wii U and a little before the Switch launched.

[–] Peffse@lemmy.world 12 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

"No parent is going to buy a Wii because of the stupid name" -me, 2005

[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 21 hours ago

“Revolution” was a better name.

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Wii

me, 2005

Unless you are a Nintendo insider or a time traveler, the name of Wii was announced on April 2006. Gamasutra reported it.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 6 points 21 hours ago

Oh no, they were off a year for something that happened 20 years ago!

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[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 10 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that's stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago

I just thought it wouldn't go anywhere. Financially I made the right choice by never investing. No matter how much money you could have made in retrospect, the correct choice is to make the decision based on sound financial strategies. All the value remains speculation

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[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 12 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

"This bitcoin thing is too niche and low value to be worth figuring out"

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.

I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.

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[–] ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I also fell for the Nintendo 3DS hype! I was 12 years old at the time, and I really believed the glassless 3D would be a killer feature and the next big thing in gaming, and I spent six months leading up to the launch date washing cars and doing odd jobs to scrape enough money together to buy it on day one.

I did still love the device and kept it for a long time, but the 3D was a gimmick and got switched off fast. I was sad to have spent all that time and effort saving money, only for the price to plummet soon after launch, but it taught me a good lesson :)

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 3 points 18 hours ago

I thought that the 3d was pretty cool on the 3DS! Now I can’t find my New3DS XL, now that they’re apparently quite jailbreakable…

[–] THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I thought VR would be more widespread by now.

And it's probably because of the two next things I thought as well.

I thought it would be cheaper and easier to do by now. More like a Google Glass kind of thing. But we're still playing 4 figures for dedicated massive headsets to strap to our heads. No wonder it didn't take off.

And I mean dedicated like the HTC Vive. Not the Quest.

[–] AlternateHuman02@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago

This was my thought as well. I really thought it would be better by now. Fingers crossed for the steam frame!

[–] aqua_cat@pawb.social 11 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

I never thought game subscription would take of. The entire concept is stupid to me. Pay per month to *acces selected games but not own them? Take into accoumt 90% of people will play at most 25% of the catalogue. Let's do some math if PS Plus Essentials, where you get 2-4 random titles per month is taken, which costs 9€ per month which if you play down to 25% of the catalogue goes up to 36€ per month (that is you basicly pay 36€ to play that single game which was chosen at random and you still don't own). For that ammount of money I can buy a REAL game I OWN or 5 good games on Steam Sale or GOG.

Still I guess if it sounds good people will smoke it.

To be clear these statistics are purly "Trust me bro" but I doubt someone will play Core Keeper, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and NFS: Unbound all in one month enough that it makes sense, and if you can more power to you, but I know those are not most people. Most people play Minecraft or Elder Scrolls or COD or GT etc.

Still feel free to express yours opinion.

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[–] yakko@feddit.uk 10 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Pessimistically I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now.

I also felt pretty sure that some kind of massive CRISPR/Cas9 catastrophe was bound to occur by now.

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[–] waggz@programming.dev 6 points 21 hours ago

if I had been in the stock market in the 90s I would've gotten very rich then lost it all on iomega

[–] hactar42@lemmy.ml 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I really thought UMPCs would have taken off

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 20 hours ago

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC

An ultra-mobile PC,[1] or ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in Spring 2006. Sony had already made a first attempt in this direction in 2004 with its Vaio U series, which was only sold in Asia. UMPCs are generally smaller than subnotebooks, have a TFT display measuring (diagonally) about 12.7 to 17.8 centimetres (5.0 to 7.0 in), are operated like tablet PCs using a touchscreen or a stylus, and can also have a physical keyboard.

[–] Engywuck@lemmy.zip 6 points 23 hours ago

"This internet stuff is useless" (me, around 1994). Yeah, I'm a visionary.

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