Why Do We Blame Our Parents for Missing the Real Estate and Internet Booms, Yet Hesitate When Faced with the AI Era's Dividends?

@VincentVanMeow: Because the losers at the forefront of trends have been forgotten, giving us the illusion that "catching the right wave" is easy.

Take the internet industry, for example. You only see "WeChat and QQ" surviving, but you forget the instant messaging software that has already died:

Fetion (2007-2022), peak registered users 500 million;

Sina UC (2002-2017), peak registered users 80 million;

NetEase Popo (2002-2011), peak registered users 15 million;

Mi Talk (2010-2021), launched 40 days earlier than WeChat, peak registered users 17 million.

Then there's Weibo. The surviving "Weibo" is run by Sina, but back then, many big tech companies made their own Weibo platforms, which have now disappeared:

Tencent Weibo (2010-2020), peak registered users 373 million;

NetEase Weibo (2010-2014), peak registered users 260 million;

Sohu Weibo (2010-2014), peak registered users 69.56 million.

In the e-commerce sector, the survivors are "Taobao, JD.com, and PDD." Do you think no one wanted a piece of the pie back then?

Yihaodian (2008-2020)

Paipai.com (2005-2016)

ICLINK (2006-2016)

Joyo.com (2000-2011)

eBay China (1999-2022)

And the even more brutal Group-Buying War—you only see the surviving "Meituan" and "Dianping." But starting in 2010, over 6,000 group-buying platforms emerged nationwide, and more than 99% ultimately became cannon fodder, including once-familiar names like Lashou.com and Baidu Nuomi, which have all exited the public eye.
In the more recent live-streaming war, behind the surviving "Douyu" and "Huya" lie hundreds of dead live-streaming platforms: Panda TV, Penguin Esports, Quanmin TV, Zhanqi TV, Longzhu TV, and so on.

Even Zhihu, which we are using right now—did you think there was no competition in this niche Q&A track? In 2017, ByteDance launched "Wukong Q&A," poaching hundreds of top influencers from Zhihu, but it ultimately failed and shut down in 2021.

Therefore, hindsight analysis is easy, but if you truly went back to the past and lost your god's-eye view, you would find too many factors interfering with decision-making. Even these big tech companies holding massive resources can make misjudgments, so it's not easy for individuals to catch the dividends of the era either.

More importantly, most retail investors have limited capital—usually saved up from years of working—and poor risk tolerance. Faced with uncertainty, they naturally lean toward conservatism.

Thus, in any era, "conservative ordinary people" make up the vast majority, because "aggressive ordinary people" quickly cease to be ordinary: a small few get rich, while the majority fall deep into debt.