Tim O’Reilly Coined Web 2.0. He Thinks Web3 Hype Is Naive.
‘If the bubble pops, are we going to find value in those bored apes?’
Five years after the dot-com crash, Tim O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0.” Instead of simply placing media on the web — the web’s first iteration — a new era of internet companies were treating the internet as a platform. Sites like Wikipedia, Google, and Amazon harnessed the collective intelligence of internet users, and their services got better as more people used them.
Today, advocates for blockchain-based technology say a new web is coming, which they call Web3. This new web, they say, solves Web 2.0’s biggest weakness: its tendency to concentrate power and profits with the few. Instead of the centralized web, Web3 will be decentralized, democratic, and a place where users are owners. But O’Reilly — who knows the context — isn’t buying the hype just yet.
“The rhetoric of Web3 seems very naive to me,” he told me over tea and scones at his Oakland, Calif. home. “They haven’t actually thought through how hard some of the problems actually are.”
“The rhetoric of Web3 seems very naive to me”
When O’Reilly wrote his seminal “What Is Web 2.0” article, it was long after the rubble of Pets.com and the…
