I agree that the blockchain web3 isn't here yet, but I don't think the other trends / products you've noted are big enough to warrant a major version number. We're still in the web 2.0 business cycle, and I don't think web3 will truly emerge until after web 2.0 bubble bursts
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I think there might be a "big deskilling" during a web 2.0 crash, when engineers working at JAMstack + encrypted messaging startups have to learn PHP or C# and deal with the business realities of a corp like an EMR vendor or even Slack (which built on LAMP)
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The employees of Tumblr that now work for Automattic (WordPress) are getting a taste of this now. I think a lot of people won't be able to deal with this de-skill and de-prestige and stop working on the web.
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otoh it's the oldest story in tech... java people were complaining about this 12y ago... they end up having a market for their skills, but just lose their prestige, and have to play second fiddle to new kids in town as the stack churns through the change
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I think what I'm proposing is that things might actually "go backwards" for the first time, that the web might become more conservative, more WordPress-y, etc, due to a combination of business pressure and the "failures" of the era. And in reality this will be progress
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Going thru your five examples:
1. encrypted messaging as base layer: real trend
2. JAMstack: only a good fit for VC backed startups / individuals
3. Graph databases: feel like this was hot in.. 2013, along with Mongo, but hasn't actually de-throned SQL at all
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4. "Tunnel" like UX patterns (threads etc) with an underground vibe: seems more like a design trend than a major web version number
5. Serious attempts to level up hypertext itself: example?
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5. is roam
reason graph dbs are big now I'm told is increases in single instance memory making them way more useful than they were in 2013, but above my paygrade to comment on whether that is correct
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As for "merely a design trend" I think that's underselling the role of parallel design and tech trends. Remember web 2.0 was also "social media", exactly such a parallelism
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That's very true. I've wanted to document the degree to which the crypto bubble as fueled by particles.js. Roam looks cool, and I may be thinking about things from too pragmatically web-engineer perspective, things like graph dbs and roam are useful for a different type of work
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Yeah, and with a delay, it hits the kind of world you're talking about too. Social media/web 2.0 eventually became enterprise 2.0 and spawned a whole damn social enterprise transformation cottage industry and everybody was bolting on internal blogs and wikis and microblogs
(I had a side hustle writing within that cottage industry for a couple of years)
Oh man, the beginning of the decade was all about "socializing" enterprise software. So many terrible clones of Facebook, But For Business!
It was a great time to be in third-party compliance and archiving tools.


