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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

And that is in turn the eternal claim of bubble believers, usually delivered as reflexively as above.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22this+t...

Is d4vlx mistaken? If so tell us how.

I do not claim to have some proof towards either “side” of bubblism or non-bubblism. I was merely trying to point out that d4vlx’s comment essentially only said “This time it’s different!”, and I wanted to explain that this does not prove it’s not a bubble, since every bubble is different than the last one.

My comment does not show that it is a bubble, nor was I trying to do so. The most that could be claimed is that I was trying to show that the possibility that it is a bubble still exists.

You aren't doing justice to d4vlx’s comment. What he said is that this bubble has not permeated the community outside of tech, whereas the .com bubble did (and I would add the housing bubble, and the per-depression bubble). A larger bubble is always producing a larger bust, with non-linear effect.

"This time is different" is normally referring to "tech is changing the world, we don't need he profits, it will grow forever, this time it's different" or "they don't make any more land, housing prices will grow forever, this time it's different". It's not at all the same things to point out that the scale of the bubble is much smaller. Lumping the two together produces a strong impression that your comment is disingenuous.

So, this could simply be a smaller bubble. “This time it’s smaller!” is an equally non-persuasive argument.

What is the difference between a "market correction" and a "bubble"? Do you think there is a risk of the entire web industry imploding like it did in 2000?

The risk of anything happening very much like the last time is always low.

For what it's worth some of my take aways for why it's different are:

1) I don't see it effecting the tech industry as a whole to the level it did then.

2) It's not leaking out of the tech industry into the media, other industries, the financial world or popular perception to the same extent.

3) The amount of money flowing into tech and especially startups is significantly less now (proportionally).

4) There are many established business models that use the internet now while in 1999 there was much more speculation and few proven models.

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