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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.

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Facebook only took off in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.

But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.

Also, smartphones made people terminally online, which strengthened network effects and made it more attractive to make social media and games addictive. That doesn't work so well if you can only access the net at night on the family computer that is shared with four people. Even though I was a student when smartphones came around, I'd only check e-mail in the morning and maybe e-mail and socials in the evening.

Within my bubble of college aged people in the US in the late 2000s Facebook was already mainstream by 2007 (and I would say 2006, even, though I'm a bit more worried that I'm misremembering that).

But yes, I'm generally in the "it's the phones" camp of grumpy olds :)

Edit: Oh I just looked up the rollout schedule and it looks like it is more likely that I started my account in 2004. It might have taken it a year (at most) to become fully mainstream among my peers after that, so call it 2005 or 2006.

It was the smartphone that completely ruined the internet. Once everyone was connected 24/7 it became the ultimate eternal September.

Absolutely agree

Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.

Web 2.0 has a few different definitions but one of them is when HTML pages started to contain significant JavaScript, and another is when websites started to be middlemen between users rather than users interacting only with the website operators.

To give it some value as a term, what Tim O’Reilly meant by it was a shift to participatory, user content driven websites. Blogs, Flickr and Wikipedia were quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomena.

To me, Wikipedia was like proto- web 2.0. That is, yes, it fits the definition, but significantly predated the trend. It was ahead of its time.

I think it's a bit fuzzy for "blogs". To me, it wasn't really until blogging became extremely accessible, that is without spinning up a website running software on your own servers, did I consider it "web 2.0". But then, yes, I agree that the explosion of blogs was fully part of that trend. (I was dismissive of this at the time, but in hindsight I think it's rad and I don't understand what my probably was.)

Definitely flickr is quintessential here!

Yeah I think of it as when user to user generated content became prevalent. I think the increasing prevalence of javascript interactivity was more of a response to making such websites more functional.

>> Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012

Facebook didn't even exist 10 years before 2012 ..

They said it in reference to web 2.0 and Facebook (“those”), and the start of both fell into that 5-10 year window.

Facebook was released at my university in 2004 (just looked this up), and I'm sure I had an account within the first month (as did 90% of people at the school, probably). This is smack in the middle of my 5-10 year window preceding 2012...

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