I remember the term being thrown around a lot in the early days of Youtube. The optimism of the internet being mostly based on dynamic content created by real humans all over the world, with a lower barrier to entry than before.

The internet was a much different place before social media platforms basically took over.

[–] EnderMB 3 points 11 months ago

Wasn't that slightly different, in that people were referring to Web 2.0 as the rise in dynamic content, and interactive web pages/applications?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Shills ruin everything. More robust p2p and federated systems is awesome and seemingly the direction things should be heading (web 3). There is the real question of how do incentivise and fund the infra, and that's where the shills pop in.

[–] EnderMB 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

While to some extent that is true, where it always falls apart is in what tangible benefit this provides to the user. Federation is cool, and there are benefits in terms of moderation, but to the average person the difference between centralised and federated tools is usually that the federated tool has far fewer users/engagement. It's the same for web3, in that the shills are selling something no one actually wants or can really benefit from.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

P2P and federation help reduce the capital and labor costs that is a major problem for these very large systems. That doesn't seem needed based on past status quo but as the age of easy money ends these companies have to do what they promised their investors, squeeze costs and increase profits and consolidate their market share.

It's not a forgone conclusion, big tech aren't idiots neither the engineers or c level folks, but enshitfication gives new players Niches to compete in, but these new players almost need to use any cost reduction tech they can because we are in such a capital sparse environment.

I agree still on the shills. Most are get rich quick minded folks, with pump and dumps or worse just pure rent seeking. Again there is a place, I think, to find better ways to monetize people's work they put towards running infrastructure (as compared to selling the outputs of the panopticon, pcyops for governments and corporations, and the charity of the privileged).

[–] nervoushair 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

web2 has some sort of actual technical meaning, web3 is crypto nonsense.

[–] EnderMB 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Does it? I remember Web 2.0 being a thing many years ago, but the only time I see web2 mentioned is either around social media or to describe "the old web" - both only used to shill web3 as "the future".

[–] cashews_best_nut 2 points 11 months ago

I was around for the dawn of Web2.0 as a web developer. It was used for a group of tech and design such as Ajax and rounded corners. You could say it was the next step after flat HTML pages that included more dynamic front ends with JS, CSS3 and HTML5.