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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

> changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible

This applies to all the web2 naysayers as well

Web 2.0 was the application of AJAX and/or database back-ends to the already functional web. This had already started to happen by the time the "Web 2.0" moniker came to be. "You mean we can blog, or click-and-drag Google Maps? OK, great." Any naysaying was about the term "Web 2.0" - was this really a "second release" of the web? - and not about the technologies already in play.

Web3, on the other hand, appears to be a whole lot of horseshit that is going away now that it's no longer essentially free to borrow money.

Web 2.0 was the application of AJAX and/or database back-ends to the already functional web.

Ajax and database were commonplace before. The 2.0 moniker was about "social" (user generated content.)

You're both wrong, Web 2.0 was about rounded corners. I know I was there!

Honestly that's more accurate and makes more sense than the explanations I remember from the era.

To be fair we did have rounded corners, but they were a bitch to make.

Possibly part of the reason that tables got well overused.

red-corner-tr.gif

Almost, "social" was generally after 2.0. An example of 2.0 was wikipedia. "social" was connecting with other people and content came after they needed to do something more than just poking them

Wikipedia itself defines 2.0 as social. What you call social is the commercialization of social (algorithmic social?), that might be how it's understood today, but then the main idea was user generated content, at least that's how they sold it. But yes, they also used "dynamic vs. static" that, like I wrote in the previous comment, was already in use... it's like they were conflating everything new and good vs. the old and bad. Actually it was very confusing, round corners... almost is right, no wonder they've chosen 3.0 to sell this new gold rush.

Edit: I'm afraid I'm taking for granted that people remembers this, but it's possible that a good portion of you weren't even born. Web 2.0 was something like "you should adopt the Web 2.0 ways in your web presence" being sold to all kind of companies. You have an online shop? You should include a support forum where users can share their experience with your products. In other words: a "web page" is not enough, you need the whole pack. Sometimes it made sense, sometimes it didn't. As with many of this trends, it used to sound a little cult-ish at times.

Web2 had obvious applications that were working. Web3 has been talked about forever, and it's mostly just hype and scams.

To the point where if someone even says 'Web3' I assume it's rubbish, even though I accept there are some neat ideas there. NFTs - laughably ridiculous.

The funny money times are over, it didn't work, time for a new game, let's make it more practical.

No one was talking about Web 2.0 until it was already a popular thing. You can tell web3 is VC bullshit because no useful or popular product exists but billions of dollars were thrown at it.

Here, web4 is just everyone sending me 10 dollars. You wouldn’t want to be a Luddite now would you? Get on the bandwagon everyone

We complained about web2.0 because it was a stupid buzzword that people used to describe something that was already happening and didn't need marketing because it was obviously hot tech that solved a problem: websites had been static, we made them dynamic, marketing took credit for web2.0, which was annoying. We weren't "naysayers," we were simply exhausted by the froth of buzzwords. Nobody ever thought it wouldn't have broad application.

Web3? It skipped straight to marketing, the tech is tedious, kludgy, and seems to make more problems than it solves. The space is saturated with cons and rubes. Outsiders are skeptical because it's apparently garbage, and gets worse any time I look closer.

From what I can tell, Web 2.0 came to pass, whereas Web 3.0 has not, which rather changes the discussion around each of them.

Or am I wrong about what Web 3.0 is?

Well after "Web 2.0", there was a lot of talk about "Web 3.0", some fifteen years ago [1]. And then now the crypto people have created a term "Web3", ostensibly completely unaware of the use of the term "Web 3.0" from the past which meant something completely different. I assume these people were too young 15 years ago to remember.

But "Web3" means stuff with blockchain and similar.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Wait until you learn about an even older term, 5th gen computing. With all the hullabaloo about ML, I've been waiting for that one to make a comeback...

I'm still waiting for someone to give us the next generation beyond VLSI.

SDSI, for Super-Duper Scale Integration, maybe.

Anyway: Fourth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Lisp", Fifth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Prolog", so Sixth-Generation languages will be "Steal ideas from everyone the ML model was trained on". Github/Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this sort of thing, as usual.

web2 got it's name well after it was already common to have user content driven sites and/or ajax interactions.

web3 got it's name before... well it's not here yet so I can't tell what it is

Happy to hear a rebuttal to the points in this article ...

The website you are currently using is a product of web 2.0 (Though maybe not "web2", the ahistorical term invented by crypto hucksters)

No, bog-standard forums were commonplace long before anyone heard of "web 2.0". And web 2.0 was just about the ability to use AJAX to create dynamic webpages, and HN is basically as static as it gets. I don't know where the perception that "web 2.0" means "social networking" is coming from, but it's ahistorical.

> HN is basically as static as it gets.

Functionally every single page request on HN is dynamically generated - I feel like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what "static" means in this context. A static site is where the web server is serving html files as they appear on disk - as opposed to a dynamic site, where LAMP-like stack dynamically generates html responses based on query and session.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page

Is it? This site feels very web 1.0.

This could be just me but in my mind web 2.0 is solving the problem of form submission/link clicking redirecting users away from the current page.

Thus web 1.0 are static sites where the only way to get new content is to manually refresh.

good point, it used to be called 2.0 (the "point o") was very important. Businesses were adding 2.0 to non-computer things to try to make them seem new and high tech

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