Web 2.0
Defined as the read-write, centralized, participatory internet. Pay per Click, Subscription services, multi-user contributions, etc.
2004: Dawn of the Nightmare
When Facebook launched, I don’t know if anyone realized how disruptive it would become. I don’t think anyone realized what kind of standard it would set for websites that followed in its footsteps. The entire human socialization process was almost immediately disrupted.
You can see your ex wife all over the place. You can become artificially popular. You could realistically manipulate people or pixels into giving you bigger numbers on a screen. Just follow the trends, present yourself in the best light possible.
The social rewards for manipulating, or incentivizing numbers on a screen became greater than the social rewards for actually interacting with humans in real life. It’s been all downhill since that became normal.
Opinion pieces became quite interesting in that regard. Why bother having your own unpopular opinion when the rewards of having an opinion that made you look good online was obviously the better decision? Surely this wouldn’t have a consequence in our political views…
Degeneracy on TikTok and Discord, these things shouldn’t come as a surprise when we prioritized online behavior over real world behavior. It’s all the same tree dropping its fruit everywhere. Discord runs most of its services on Google Cloud Platform btw.
None of us had any privacy in doing any of this. We still don’t. All of our actions became quantifiable. All our our lives became petrie dishes of data stored in a vault you and me do not have authorization to look into (aka big tech server rooms, and subsequent access permissions). Easy to target with advertisements.
We had no control of our data, and we let our collective behavior control us. If a core centralized service had extended periods of downtime, we all became affected.
The funniest part, is we barely even know what exactly was influencing us on large platforms. Our social circles definitely had sway, but what guided the collective behavior? Why do frequent users of platforms all kind of end up behaving the exact same way? Where did the diversity of thought go?
The Kicker
The fundamental flaw of Web 2.0 is that there was never any verifiable way to prove who is human and who is not.
There are no signed keys. You do not have access to centralized proprietary hardware. You can’t see what is happening on the backend with centralized cloud services.
How can you verifiably, mathematically, prove the difference between the human Elon Musk sending out a Tweet/X-Post or if it was a bot or AI spewing out nonsense? How can you verifiably prove that the first interactive response is not the same human, or another bot, or another AI generated blob of nonsense? You literally can’t. Not when someone else owns the hardware making it all happen and purposefully makes things opaque.
Does anyone remember AOC’s Zaza Demon incident? It highlights this branch of Web 2.0’s problems very well. There is no way for any of us to know how many occurances of things like this have happened in the 21st century.
Reddit is quite literally founded on the principle of faking user activity. Add this on top of the power certain Reddit mods have + the authority Reddit, Inc. has, and the power to guide the direction of one of the worlds largest platforms is concentrated in very few hands. Censorship and content moderation do not have a gold standard, and are quite nuanced and arbitrary relative to the personal views of the holder of power.
It became ridiculously easy for the masters of the platforms to nudge human behavior in a certain way, while making it look completely organic.
Shut down 2,500 people with an opinion you don’t like, pad the metrics with a few thousand fake accounts, now you have a Web 2.0 cocktail at your fingertips. None of your investors or users will even know it’s happening. This problem became fundamentally exacerbated and accelerated with the backend use of LLM’s as of 2023 and onwards.
Read-Write-Trust, Verifiable
The only path forward is leaning into the mechanisms of trust that newer technologies like Ethereum solve.
Full disclaimer, I’m not a crypto bro. I fundamentally believe most cryptocurrencies are either straight up scams or are treated purely as speculative assets.
That said, I’ve recently been introduced to some innovative ways to apply the technology. As of the time of writing this, It’s still closer to a beta product than a 1.0 release, but we are getting better at being able to verifiably prove the members of your communities are human; and that they are who they say they are; and that they are not also the same person on another account.
Web3 is just a marketing term. Semantically, maybe Web 3.0 will actually yield improvements. Things like more emphasize on tightknit verified communities, an emphasize on privacy, and not fighting for the spotlight in the ocean of all humanity on the internet.
More Consequences of Web 2
I could probably write an entire separate post on other critical aspects of Web 2.0. Honestly, you could write multiple 1,000 page books on it.
All the analytics tooling, trackers, cookies, advertising tools, the rise of Cloudflare, DNS and Domains getting gobbled up, API’s, how it influenced mobile design and applications (Which is also centrally controlled by Apple and Google), the increasing complexity and quantity of Frontend toolings, lead captures and marketing impact, the rise of Big Tech in general (and their influence on the labor market), the rise of the survelliance state replacing the nation state, How it makes sense we wound up with TikTok and YouTube Shorts as the dominant form of entertainment, and you could go on.
These platforms rallied billions of real users despite the plethora of fraudulent activities. That’s a lot of power in the hands of the few.
Web 2 has thus far been the most consequential era of the internet, with nearly all of humanity having been affected by the fallout.