Faded Fads
January 27, 2025 11:29 PM   Subscribe

AI is the latest tech fad that has dominated media this past year. What were previous major tech fads that were once everywhere you looked and have since faded?
posted by fairmettle to Technology (75 answers total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
3D TVs
posted by EndsOfInvention at 12:19 AM on January 28 [16 favorites]


"The internet" at one point was a great fad - there were lots of brand new companies dumping money into it just like with AI now, many of whom went bust pretty quickly. Lots of people laughed at the whole thing, thinking it was a flash in the pan and would never catch on.

I don't suggest that the internet itself faded, but the obsession with it certainly did, since it's come to be taken for granted that the internet exists for businesses to use just like roads and electricity.
posted by quacks like a duck at 12:32 AM on January 28 [8 favorites]


NFTs were like ten minutes ago, but now?
posted by dick dale the vampire at 12:48 AM on January 28 [16 favorites]


Auto-changing record players, SQ quadraphonic vinyl, hifi audio in general, 8 track cartridges, VHS, Laserdisc, movies shot on 70mm film, fuzzy logic, expert systems, paperless office
posted by flabdablet at 12:59 AM on January 28 [4 favorites]


Thin client morphed into 'the cloud'.

I recently found bearblog (I think there's about 10000 blogs at the moment), which is much like the old web. Still trying to learn it by making a blog there.
posted by unearthed at 1:39 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


> I don't suggest that the internet itself faded, but the obsession with it certainly did, since it's come to be taken for granted that the internet exists for businesses to use just like roads and electricity.

It's reached the Plateau of productivity. I think for something to be a fad it needs to [almost] disappear before ever reaching that.

I think my own list would include:
  • Big Data
  • Crypto currencies
  • Blockchain
  • NFTs
  • Virtual Reality
  • Micropayments
  • The Semantic Web

posted by lawrencium at 1:44 AM on January 28 [8 favorites]


Foldable phones
posted by Winnie the Proust at 3:42 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


Virtual worlds.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:59 AM on January 28 [8 favorites]


MP3 players
posted by pipeski at 4:29 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


The Apple Vision Pro was a complete disaster, don’t know if you’re looking for specific products. But wearable glasses aren’t catching on like people hoped.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:32 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


Polaroid was partially done in by their Instant Movie cameras, which came out shortly before the video cassette recorder.
posted by Melismata at 4:50 AM on January 28


Blackberrys! They were everywhere for a couple of years and then the iPhone killed them stone dead.
posted by damsel with a dulcimer at 4:55 AM on January 28 [10 favorites]


Sony Walkman, iPad, IPhone.

Air frying is currently in the last phases. Basalmic vinegar, too.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:03 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


I think there is a distinction to be made between tech that gets pushed out by later tech with essentially the same or improved functionality (I would put the blackberry and mp3 players in this category) rather than stuff that gets hyped up but is rejected in terms of consumers not wanting the functionality or at least not buying into it as presented at the time (eg 3D TV, camera glasses).
posted by biffa at 5:08 AM on January 28 [28 favorites]


And here's what's coming next
posted by atlantica at 5:17 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


3D glasses and similar. MPOW paid for a massive "Cube" 3D thinger, and I'll be damned if I ever saw any useful research come out of it.
posted by humbug at 5:22 AM on January 28


Remember when Facebook was going to migrate to the Metaverse?
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:23 AM on January 28 [7 favorites]


Second Life. Otherwise serious and reasonable people and even professional societies held conferences there.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:45 AM on January 28 [12 favorites]


Flash websites!
posted by Zumbador at 5:54 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


Big +1 to biffa's point about overhyped technology vs superseded technology.

In the category of superseded technology, just looking at computer storage, we've seen a lot. They all served a purpose for a while, but have gotten overtaken by A) the Internet, and B) growing storage demands. Iomega's Zip was fairly popular for a while. Zip disks were 100 MB, which was pretty good for the time, and they were pretty cheap. Jaz (same company) were 1 GB. There were other formats that were more niche: magneto-optical, SyQuest, Bernoulli.

In the overhyped category, anyone remember the CueCat? This was a little barcode scanner that was given away free; the idea was that you'd scan URLs from printed media, and the company would make money by licensing barcodes to advertisers somehow. Of course, now we have QR codes doing the same thing, but without dedicated hardware.

Early in the "modern smartphone" era, Microsoft developed a line of semi-smartphones called Kin. This was an actual product you could buy. No one bought it. 48 days after its debut, it was discontinued. Rumors are that, after putting $1 billion into development, Microsoft sold…500 units.
posted by adamrice at 5:56 AM on January 28 [12 favorites]


CD-i
posted by Thorzdad at 6:01 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


The previous wave I remember of hype around AI was for "expert systems"- which were decidedly not language models, but were systems designed to question the user, and based on answers, provide a diagnosis or an answer of some sort. They were called "expert" systems because the database of questions and resulting logic paths were created by exhaustively interviewing an expert or experts on the give subject the expert system was built for. One of the most famous examples was for Campbell's Soup:

"One of the early exemplars of a "successful" expert system was developed for the U.S. Campbell Soup Company in 1985 to gauge how long to cook its products. One of the experts assigned to this effort (Aldo Cimino) was retiring after forty-four years, so the technological system was reportedly designed to replace him rather than training skilled human apprentices." - Jo Ann Oravec

The quote is from the abstract of a paper at a page for The Business History Conference

I think many expert systems might still be in user but you never hear of them. In fact you hardly hear of any other form of AI these days except LLMs which seem to be the darlings of the moment
posted by TimHare at 6:11 AM on January 28 [9 favorites]


The year of Linux on the desktop.
posted by Lemkin at 6:12 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


Theatrical 3D movies have been a fad through a couple different waves.
posted by Ms. Toad at 6:23 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Sony Walkman
posted by Glinn at 6:31 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


The Segway was a huge fad right up to the point when it was announced. People value price and functionality over technical innovation.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:45 AM on January 28 [12 favorites]


Anyone who has had a career in IT has been exposed to countless overhyped products that are pushed like tablets from God for 18 months then disappear. Some still exist in small pockets but most just fade into single lines in old resumes. Silverlight, JavaFX, JavaME, Mercurial, Flash, about 300 javascript libraries, D, BeOS, OS/2, etc, etc.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:12 AM on January 28 [9 favorites]


Still trying to sync my Nintendo Power Glove with my Google Glass on my Blackberry.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 7:12 AM on January 28 [8 favorites]


Curved TVs were briefly the next big thing a decade ago - the novelty faded, and it’s unclear whether you can even buy one today. (Curved monitors survived.)
posted by Seeking Direction at 7:21 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


> Blackberrys! They were everywhere for a couple of years and then the iPhone killed them stone dead.

It wasn't just Blackberry, a whole market segment for smart phones just died the day the iPhone was announced. It took years before Android devices started to sell.

There was a story floating around at the time about how RIM's (Blackberry) engineering department flatly refused to believe that the iPhone was possible. They sat around and laughed at the obviously fake demo, convinced that Jobs had finally lost his mind.

The engineers reasoned that there was no way the iPhone could possibly work, it was physically impossible. To do what the demo showed would require the iPhone to be almost all battery - the motherboard would have to be tiny. They showed their bosses the calculations and everyone relaxed.

On launch day, they obtained an iPhone and took it back to their lab, cut it open, and discovered that the iPhone was almost all battery with a tiny motherboard.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:23 AM on January 28 [15 favorites]


Factory and aftermarket navigation systems in cars (largely irrelevant with smartphones everywhere).
posted by Seeking Direction at 7:27 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


The previous wave I remember of hype around AI was for "expert systems"-

You also had the brief Fuzzy Logic fad. The Japanese bought into it WAY more than the rest of the world.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:30 AM on January 28 [4 favorites]


And I mean navigation systems that are completely separate from a smartphone, not things like CarPlay/Android Auto.
posted by Seeking Direction at 7:35 AM on January 28


Another example of an overhyped technology fad: PointCast
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:37 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


PointCast was the darling baby of the Push (archive.is) fad. But yeah, that counts. Except now it's built into our phones so... maybe it just needed to mature?
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:44 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


CueCat
Flooz
Beenz
posted by emelenjr at 7:46 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


To biffa’s point as well, some things haven’t disappeared. We just don’t talk about them as much anymore. They’re the water we swim in, like Big Data.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:52 AM on January 28 [6 favorites]


Palm Pilot. I loved mine.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:53 AM on January 28 [12 favorites]


I want to say a fad is something specific and different than technology that just gets outdated. Sometimes it's just an idea that grabs hold of the popular imagination and eventually burns out, and other times it's an "enhancement" that turns out to be too clunky or not enough of an advance to stick around. Either way it's something that doesn't just get replaced by something similar, but better.

An example of the first option is Guitar Hero, which was insanely popular amongst early millennials at the end of the PS2/XBOX era, but soon settled into a much smaller group of die-hard fans in the PS3/XBOX360 era before dying out entirely.

An example of the second is quadraphonic vinyl, which resulted in a few albums being released but never really catching on (a second attempt with Super Audio CD, which had 5.1 channel sound, failed even to reach "fad" status).

3-D anything tends to be fad-oriented, whether it's movies or TVs or virtual reality. The dream is good enough that people keep coming back to it, even though the reality is always that it's too clunky to bother with.

(VHS wasn't really a fad—for one thing, the VHS era lasted two decades, and almost every house in the US had at least one VCR. Even after DVDs became more popular as a successor technology, VHS stuck around for another five or ten years; also, the idea of "watching what you want on demand" is still very much with us. The peak Blackberry era was a little more fad-like, especially given the way people identified as Blackberry users, but Blackberries were closer to "first-generation smartphone" than a technological dead-end like NFTs.)
posted by thecaddy at 8:02 AM on January 28 [7 favorites]


VCRs peaked at around 90 percent, according to this great graph of 20th century technological adaptation.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:10 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


I loved my iPAQ and AvantGo.

I took an entire graduate school class to learn Flash and only Flash. The best work I did was in Flash, and I never thought to make screenshots for a portfolio.

Oh, well. We didn't know Apple would not allow it on iOS.
posted by jgirl at 8:17 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


Flash wasn't really a fad - it was the only cross-platform GUI/application toolkit that we had at the time because Java ME was such a mess when it came to graphics.

Those that weren't obligated to use BREW were all busy porting the Adobe FlashLite player to various mobile phone platforms in the mid 00s... and then iPhone killed us all.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:23 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


Netbooks. Had a brief moment of popularity, killed by the iPad.
Web TV. Just sucked from day one.
The 3Com Audrey. This kinda filled the same role as a smart speaker, running the PalmPilot OS. I have a friend who kept his running for years and loved it.
posted by adamrice at 8:30 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


Some would argue that IMAX falls into this category. There are still theaters around but it is very niche and never caught on the way some hoped.
posted by gudrun at 8:31 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


JoeZydeco: "PointCast was the darling baby of the Push "

Funny thing. Push media is really just "scheduled pull," and the underlying technology is what we now call RSS. RSS readers aren't as popular as they were (or IMO should be), but RSS also underlies podcasts, so it remains quite popular under another name.
posted by adamrice at 8:34 AM on January 28


For a year or two ringtones were a billion dollar industry.
posted by mhoye at 8:50 AM on January 28 [16 favorites]


Second Life might fall into this category, at least peripherally; it was a game but also a cultural phenomenon and site of much hand-wringing (profiles about people who had abandoned their real lives in favor of the game, What Does This Mean For Humanity, etc.). I didn't closely track what Zuckerberg was trying to do with the Metaverse stuff but I always had the sense that he was trying in vain to make this particular fetch happen again.
posted by wormtales at 8:54 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Out of everything listed so far, Virtual Reality (including Second Life) and NFTs are the closest in terms of (1) investors throwing money at it and (2) hype in mainstream media. Everything else is either outdated tech, something that was for insiders only, or was never really a thing that consumers got into.

A better comparison would be the Internet--it's possible that AI is moving from its Angelina Jolie-in-pleather stage to its pets.com era, and eventually it'll be there in the background and people will be nostalgic for the time when AI was a prefix for everything just like there's nostalgia for cyber as a prefix.

On preview: ringtones! I've always thought of those as an entertainment fad, but I guess they're a tech fad as well.
posted by betweenthebars at 8:58 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Pet rocks
Tamagotchi
Pokémon Go
posted by flabdablet at 8:58 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Microservices, single page applications, pivot to video, banner ads on all the things, AOL keyword.

And the evergreen “hardware acceleration”
posted by nickggully at 8:59 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


Coding bootcamps
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 9:04 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Farmville, CandyCrush. Worldle (i assume lots of people still play worldle, but nobody talks about it anymore).
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:43 AM on January 28


randomly downloading apps also went away. like here's my app that makes my phone sound like a gun, or here's an app that makes guitar sounds or farts or animal sounds.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:46 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


I think there is a distinction to be made between tech that gets pushed out by later tech with essentially the same or improved functionality (I would put the blackberry and mp3 players in this category) rather than stuff that gets hyped up but is rejected in terms of consumers not wanting the functionality or at least not buying into it as presented at the time (eg 3D TV, camera glasses).

I agree. I also think you can draw a distinction between hype that's more on the consumer side (like Tickle Me Elmos or what have you) and hype that's more on the "we all have to get on this train or risk becoming obsolete" industry/professional side. The web, and then web2.0, were both the latter kind, I think. I know people today whose companies are all implementing AI stuff not because it's necessarily beneficial or effective, but because there's a kind of huge "peer pressure" to do it. And that's similar to, but maybe not quite the same as, the big blockchain fad, where "blockchain" was the hot new buzzword for a bit. I don't think there was quite the same kind of pressure to get on the blockchain trend, but there was a real VC/startup "ecosystem" around it - "we're doing X, but with blockchain" was used as a real selling point.

Not sure where this falls exactly but mobile app development also feels like something that's kind of cooled down. You hear a lot less hype about startups or individuals targeting that space with hopes of hitting it big, and definitely a lot less about exciting new apps that everybody's using, although there's still definitely a perceived need for lots of services/companies to offer mobile versions or channels. (On preview, see The_Vegetables above.)
posted by trig at 9:51 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Follow-up question: what rates highest on the smh/wtf-was-everyone-smoking scale? NFTs?
posted by gottabefunky at 9:54 AM on January 28




what rates highest on the smh/wtf-was-everyone-smoking scale?

The Atari Video Music if only because of this:
According to Atari design engineer, Al Alcorn, when Atari was on tour promoting the device, a Sears representative asked what the developers were smoking when they invented it. With that, a technician stepped forward holding up a lit joint.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:04 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


The Walkman was everywhere, along with copies by other players in the audio industry. Then it was replaced with Discman and the like. Sony tried to replace CDs with their MiniDisc tech, but the platform was so locked down as to be useless by the time the iPod hit the market, which itself is now pretty much defunct, with its audio and video storage and playback functionality having been wrapped into the iPhone.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:13 AM on January 28


Second Life might fall into this category

OMG! We very nearly had a graduate class only in and only about Second Life!
posted by jgirl at 10:22 AM on January 28 [4 favorites]


Web 3.0
posted by aspersioncast at 10:29 AM on January 28


Short-form videos were supposed to be the next big thing. A streaming platform called Quibi attracted a lot of investors and celebrities. It crashed and burned.
posted by akk2014 at 10:30 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


Then there's Juicero, the ridiculous $400 juicer.
posted by akk2014 at 10:31 AM on January 28 [4 favorites]


In the category of fad that become the air we breathe:
1) Micro-transactions, The pandemic made it clear we need to be able to use our cards for every transaction, even the very minimal, and then Venmo, etc.
2) RSS, which is the foundation of podcast publication, and where would Patreon be without that and see micro-transactions
3) Big Data, which is so taken for granted now that it takes something like LLMs consuming all the published words in the world to spark the resistance we all used to feel to our data being collated in one place.
posted by drossdragon at 11:46 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


QR codes faded and then came back due to COVID. I worked at a COVID testing site and we had to show people how to scan QR codes -- it wasn't common knowledge like it is now. (This varies, of course, but I still work with the public and QR codes are rarely a hiccup today.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:36 PM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Oh definitely blockchain. A train operator here wanted to use blockchain for their ticket selling system for heaven's sake.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 12:56 PM on January 28


> Micro-transactions
Microtransactions, in the originally (and sometimes still) hyped version, were tiny charges to view individual pieces of content. So you could pay 0.5 cents per article on the NYT without paying $10 a month for a subscription, etc. A lot of serious people talked them up as the next big thing but they fizzled pretty hard as soon as the realities of implementing such a scheme became apparent.

Nobody really wants to handle transactions less than about $1, it is just not worth the bother.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:26 PM on January 28 [2 favorites]


Videophones kept trying to happen from the 60s onwards, but they didn’t manage it until broadband and computers fixed it to where you didn’t have to buy an expensive unitasker. Nobody really wanted to buy a separate video calling apparatus, partly because nobody wanted to be looked at during a call. In fact, we still don’t, but after COVID we pretty much accept it.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:29 PM on January 28 [2 favorites]


> Follow-up question: what rates highest on the smh/wtf-was-everyone-smoking scale? NFTs?

Possibly. I still get DMs in Facebook/Instagram/etc by grifters trying to exploit these. It usually goes like this:

- "I love your work, can I acquire a couple as NFTs?"
- "Thanks, if you like them that much you can buy a physical print"
- "No, no, I want NFTs and it's more beneficial for you"
- "No it isn't, if you like them you can buy physical prints"
- "I don't think you understand NFTs"
- "I have twenty years experience in the payments space as software engineer, I think I know how they work"

At that point the conversation usually goes silent. I've had some grifters block me when I reveal that I'm very aware how NFTs work and ask them to explain what scam they're trying to pull.
posted by lawrencium at 1:29 PM on January 28 [4 favorites]


FMV video games?
posted by dick dale the vampire at 2:41 PM on January 28 [1 favorite]


Nobody really wants to handle transactions less than about $1, it is just not worth the bother.

Though lots of companies handle fractional-cent transactions: each ad impression is a microtransaction between the seller and buyer of the ad slot (and intermediaries).

Flash is to HTML5 as microtransactions are to ads. :(
posted by away for regrooving at 11:10 PM on January 28


> each ad impression is a microtransaction between the seller and buyer of the ad slot (and intermediaries)
That is one way of looking at it but its not like Liberty Mutual writes a check for 0.0025 cents each time one of their annoying ads are shown. They have an account which is billed hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

I have never used Google ads on my site but I believe that they only pay out in units of $100.

Microtransactions were supposed to replace the whole filthy mechanism of ads with a way for a site to charge a tiny fee directly without an account or subscription. There were a few attempts to implement them but the main problem is no payment processor wants to deal with tiny transactions.

> Flash is to HTML5 as microtransactions are to ads. :(
I think I agree but not in the way you intend.
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:48 AM on January 29


If Microtransactions had taken off the web would look and feel quite different. As already stated, this was difficult to do as it required intermediaries who would batch transactions to reduce the fees to merchants in using the payment rails.

If I want to pay some site $0.05 to read an article that's not possible, I either have to pay for it by:

a) Creating an account and subscribing, which clearly i don't want to do because i don't want hundreds/thousands of accounts/subscriptions to arbitrary websites
b) Seeing ads, which i don't want to do (and block anyway)

It's a shame Flattr, et al, never got enough traction.
posted by lawrencium at 7:21 AM on January 29


If microtransactions had taken off the web would look and feel quite different worse.

A few months ago I published a rant about microtransactions but to save you the click:
* The things people hate about ads (tracking and loss of privacy) are even worse with microtransactions.
* Experience has shown people will flock to a free service if the competitor charges even the smallest fee.
* There is huge amounts of fraud in advertising (clickbots, cloned sites, etc). Imagine how much worse it would be if the fraudsters got the money directly.
* How would chargebacks and fraud be handled? People complain (rightly) about CC fees but a large percentage is the payment processor actually being responsible for things like this.
* I expect a lot of sites would implement both microtransaction and advertising even for people who pay. Why not?
* Forget about search engines and web archives with everything behind a paywall. Even sites like Metafilter would look very different.

Finally, I posted a link to my blog above - be honest, how much do you want to pay me to read it?

Sorry, this will be my last response on the matter. I have strong feelings about it.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:58 AM on January 29 [1 favorite]


I've got two.

Virtual, augmented and mixed reality headsets. There was a boom around VR in the nineties, and another one around 2016. The applications remain relatively niche relative to the hype, which would have had us believing that everyone and their grandmother would be in a headset in everyday life.

So-called emotion AI or affective AI, and sentiment analysis. Whether attempted using facial coding algorithms or voice analysis or text analysis, there is no holy grail here, in part because the underlying models are so limited. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were onto something in critiquing Ekman's notion that there are six or seven universal facial expressions and it's possible to read one's internal state on the face. This is a pipe dream that has attracted unreasonable amounts of funding.
posted by pearl228 at 4:03 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


A notable feature of the recent sequence of hyped-up tech fads (3D TVs, VR, blockchain, web3, NFTs, generative AI) is that they all attempt to create market demand for the same (mostly nvidia) chips in the same datacenters.

If we look a little further back, to the previous sequence of hyped-up tech fads (client-server computing, "dot-com" startups, cloud computing), it now seems like they were all about building those same datacenters.

My impression is that a small number of datacenter-focused investors are moving their favorite marketing strategy from each of these hyped-up tech fads to the next one, cycle after cycle.
posted by Phssthpok at 7:36 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


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