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Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore
(www.newyorker.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I thought Web 2.0 was stuff like AJAX and DHTML, like Google Maps compared to old MapQuest. That started in the mid 00's. The tracking stuff came about a decade later.
Tracking stuff came as soon as you could communicate asynchronously with a server, really. It became widely known and a plague in the 10s but it started as soon as Ajax was available. Keep in mind that Google and most of the websites were free and ads driven almost from the start because that was the only way to create a critical mass of users.
You could definitely track folks with cookies well before Web 2.0, but the storage and processors necessary for the sort of data harvesting we see today didn't really get profitable until the '10s. Before that Google would run ads that were relevant to the search query rather than tracking your move around the web.
I remember hearing about the potential of Web 2.0 in the 00s and thought it sounded like it was going to be really cool.
Now I just want the old web back. Isolated forums had a sense of community that, even on Lemmy, isn't present in the same way.
Web 2.0 was the web going from being just documents to web applications. And to an extend it's great, the problem is when sites that are supposed to be just documents (like news sites) try to become applications.