The Epochs of the Internet
The great periods of the Internet is a rabbit hole I could go down forever.
I think Dave Karpf1 is overemphasizing the dotcom crash. While it certainly was a big deal for the commercial web and it would have had a big impact on the social web had it not occurred, it had zero impact on the forums, gaming guilds, irc chat channels etc. that was still going on at the time.
Likewise, I've never particularly cared for the Web 2.0 marketing. It felt like a minor outgrowth of the activities that were already ongoing. The blogosphere and citizen journalists became a thing for a brief while (I'd say peaking ~2004 - 2007 but blogosphere was coined in 1999).
By the time you get to the late 2000s though content farms had already become a thing and dominance of the personal blog fell away for people shilling cameras for affiliate links. 2006, Facebook becomes public with it's real-names policy which significantly shifted the social internet towards consolidating your IRL and online spheres. Subreddits are introduced in 2008 and start to cannibalize the forum communities. The "platform" era I'd peg at 2007 - 2017. By 2010 it's fully decimated the vibrant internet of the previous decade.
I consider 2007 - 2017 to be the Internet's lost decade. It just sucked. Particularly if you had seen the decade before this and what the internet could be.
Although the Fediverse started out much earlier, Mastodon started getting a lot of traction in 2017 and there seemed to be a zeitgeist of people longing for the pre-Facebook. Digital gardening and public personal knowledge databases became a thing in 2020. The fediverse became a rich collection of different kinds of services. We are in a kind of Internet renaissance right now if we can keep it.
So there's my major periods. Which ends up looking a little more like Chris Dixon except web3 is never a thing.
| Year | Epoch |
|---|---|
| <1995 | Pre-Web |
| 1995 - 2007 | Golden Age of the Web |
| (2004 - 2007) | Web 2.0 Intra-Epoch Period |
| 2007 - 2017 | The Lost Decade |
| 2017+ | The Internet Renaissance |
External References
- Karpf, Dave. Web3's fake version of Web history. <https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/web3s-fake-version-of-the-history> The Future, Now and Then, 2023. Retrieved 23J0.