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I Miss Web 2.0

Article news.ycombinator.com

I Miss Web 2.0

I moved to SF in 2007.

In those days, Twitter had launched in 2005 in Austin.

I met the founders of Instagram at Cafe du Soleil in Lower Haight back when it was this awesome little site and app with a cute retro camera icon.

I went to the first JSconf in Washington DC in 2008 or 2009. The vibe at the conference were early exercises into creating early server side runtimes for JS. I think Ryan Dahl might have been at that conference. Coffeescript had a presence, and the guys behind CouchDB announced their thing. I forget but if Node wasn't announced there, it was soon after. I remember a competing project called llmjs or something like that I learned about at the conference. I think it was a Japanese dev behind it.

John Resig, the guy that created jQuery was a small celebrity. We shared an elevator ride. I was too nervous/excited to even say hello properly. It's weird that I've met celebrities and it's kinda normal but boring. But standing 3 feet from an otherwise normal, somewhat short dude of my own age who built one of the biggest tools still being used today locked my brain up. Similar thing happened about ten years ago when I ran into Norm from Tested. Apparently I have a weird default behavior of shaking hands too long when my brain locks up in these situations. Sorry Molly Wood, old CNET podcaster. Was nice to meet you though.

There doesn't seem to be any joy in tech anymore. Used to feel like endless possibilities. A lot of those old experiments in discovery and fun have become investor controlled profit machines.

All of the human spirit has been drained out of the things that 20 years ago made me inspired and inventive.

There's so many problems in popular current products that should easily be addressed. But the corpo overlords either don't care or only approve changes that 100 a/b tests or shades of blue get a 0.02 level of user engagement.

YouTube's mobile web site has terrible search, despite being backed by the biggest search engine ever.

Audible is the biggest audiobook market, yet are actively hostile to both their core audience, the narrators who actually make the product, and the authors. Talking about virtual voice among a much longer list of issues.

eBay is still eBay. Actually not much to talk about. I give a heart with little emoji eyes just because they figured out their market in the 90s and have basically stuck with it. Maybe some small things that could be different but overall they nailed their market and have stuck to it. There's nothing wrong with making cardboard boxes. Boring business but everyone needs boxes, if you get my point.

Anyway let's get back to Web 2.0. Notice how there's never been a 3.0? A lot of scammers and MBA folks have tried to force it (web3 etho crypto blah blah). But it's all been corporate and/or scammer related BS, nothing authentic. And this has been the norm for at least 10 years.

To end my wanderings, I'd like to rediscover the joy from 20 years ago. Could be that it's always happening and I'm older. But I don't think so. Younger folks coming out of school seem hyper focused on making money or swindling (drop shipping, AI slop, grifting, etc). They don't seem to know anything else. It seems awful that all of these smart young folks have been trained out of the joy of self discovery that we used to have.

The latest fun thing I ran into was the little multiplayer deliver messages game that showed up on HN a week or two ago. That felt good.

Let's do more of that again.

Discussion 4 comments · 17 points · geuis · 2025-10-06
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