Is “web2” a thing? I’ve only ever heard it used by web3 shills, and never outside of Twitter or LinkedIn.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
