Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

This is a rather personal take on any versioning on the web. Web 2.0 was "cool" because it was a change to something beautifully different.

I have heard others say terms such as "industry 4.0", "agtech 5.0", etc. My reaction is the usual WTF!

It is no longer "cool" to say anything after v2.0. It is not about the version number but rather a differentiator. After v2.0, you are just forcing it and it is something like people who keep talking about what great things they did in the past while distancing themselves from the present.

Here is something, HTML stopped versioning after v5.0, and I love that. It is just plain HTML for all of us (even if the specifications have internal versions).

So, no, anything after v2.0 is just cheesy.

I was lucky to be amongst those developers who participated in spearheading the Web 2.0 thingy. I developed a whole lot of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) powered by the Flash Player, and then went on to do a whole lot of Ajax, Web 2.0 without it too.

> This is a rather personal take on any versioning on the web. Web 2.0 was "cool" because it was a change to something beautifully different.

Having been though the whole v2.0 shebang, it was widely uncool and most derided it as a pure marketing play. I mean the term was coined to sell tickets to a conference.

No one could agree at the time about what v2.0 actually was in a way which is not dissimilar to how web3 is currently being pushed. For exemple, you think that RIA applications in Flash are part of Web 2.0. I would definitely say it's not.

Web 2.0 was just XMLHTTPRequest.

Wonderfully reductive and so true. But crucially that was a huge browser innovation that has changed how we use computers. I don't think there's an equivalent in Web3 (from a dev perspective); Web3 is basically just Infura providing an API to a database that's incredibly expensive to write to.

Don't forget rounded corners and overzealous reflections and shininess on buttons!

Oh yeah, and loading spinners.

And CSS shadows

I've always interpreted web 2.0 as

"we finally found a way to make money with this shit"

through advertising money. Old tech.

It's more than that. The "Web 2.0" term was mostly a post-hoc description of the web actually changing due to adoption of AJAX, DHTML, HTTP APIs, crowdsourcing, etc.

The "web3" label has been created upfront to get a halo of Web's influence and legitimacy, while in reality it's nothing but a store-brand soda calling itself a "cocacola2".

Web3 will only succeed if it adds this layer of awe and excitement that the Web had in the 90s and the launch of the iPhone. We are still far away from that point. What makes this even worse are all these opportunistic cash-grab projects that just exploit users. On that note, I am glad that most large crypto businesses are imploding right now.

In the 1990s, the big branding was always "Whatever 2000!"

Since the millennium, I've not seen anything branded with a future year. It's a fad / fashion trend. It'll come back again once people get nostalgic for it.

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