Memes

I think it's useful terminology, but only very generally and in hindsight. Web 1 is a pretty clear era in the 90s and early 2000s, characterized by simple static blogs and personal websites, and email. Everyone knew this would be big, but nobody figured out how, that was the dotcom bubble. Web 2 began with the rise of big tech companies like Google and Facebook in the late 2000s, it has been characterized by social media apps, centralized platforms hosting user created content, funded by targeted advertising and data mining. Web apps became possible and smartphones took over. Every product became a subscription service.

I think we're at the start of web 3, but it's hard to say what that is yet. The big tech companies are crumbling and there's increasing unrest at the old system of web 2. Fed up users are turning to platforms like this. There's a lot of demand for crypto nonsense like NFTs. AI is changing the way we do everything.

I hope that web 3 is the age of decentralization because that would be awesome, but it's impossible to predict the future.

Abusing terminology, especially by marketers, is frustrating and cringe. But don’t underestimate the value in having a simple, shared term to describe a paradigm many things fit into.