I remember when Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 for a collection of unrelated web development and business practices. I don’t know if his essay holds up.

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

Clearly something has changed from Web 1.0, but everyone sees that part of the elephant differently. If your interested in APIs, maybe the moment Web 2.0 died was when Twitter killed its RSS feeds. Technically true, but it doesn’t get the social change.

As a „Xennial“ I’m with you: the blogosphere and independent homepages, loosely joined, was and is for me the truest expression how the Web should be.

(But maybe that is just because we spend our early adulthood in that timespan.)

I suggest you read Tim O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0” post first [^1]. Most of what you mention hasn’t progressed beyond that. To be clear, Web3 is MBA/“crypto”bro snake oil sold to an audience looking for a quick fix. Don’t fall for the scam. XR, blockchain, decentralization, distributed computing, etc. will continue to progress on their own.

[^1]: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

I don’t recall anyone looking for a killer web 2.0 app, because they already existed when the term was coined. Examples included Flickr and Wikipedia; YouTube came not long after.

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

> Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now.

Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

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As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...).

I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.

Tim O'Reilly wrote a seminal paper about the "Web 2.0" in 2005 [1]. I remember reading it and it truly was an influential masterpiece "one of it's kind". Since then cohorts of much less important groups keep counting up and releasing things echoing Tim's "2.0", e.g. "Industry 4.0"

From a time line perspective we seem to have reached "5.0". This time with the prefix "Society".

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

>We're all angry at the broken promise of what the web could be

Most users enjoyed the web in 200X. It wasn't a broken promise. It worked. Then there was a concerted Web 2.0 campaign[1] that pushed in the direction of "harnessing the collective intelligence". Well, Twitter is what "collective intelligence" looks like in real life.

[1] Remember this? https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...