The Stages of the Web¹⁾ is a proposed model of dividing up the World Wide Web's history into Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and so on. It is a bit controversial as you can easily argue that these are just buzzwords that the tech industry would use to persuade tech-illiterate investors.

“Web 1.0” is often used to retroactively describe the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it used to be common to find personal websites with static pages on some hosting service. These pages were full of elements like blink, marquee, frames, guestbooks, hit counters, mailto forms, while most of the imagery (e.g. buttons, stamps) were tiny as dial-up internet couldn't handle that much.

During this era, hosting services like GeoCities, Tripod, or Freewebs were everywhere, and famous pages like Hampster Dance could stand out. People were also free to leave their computer at will, since technology wasn't tethering them to the internet yet. Some people even romanticize the 'Web 1.0' aesthetic to the point of creating a fun little website on Neocities, Nekoweb, etc.

“Web 2.0” is used to describe the internet that developed in the 2000s, where collaborative elements outright replaced the need to write formal letters. This era is characterized by its collaborative wikis, media sharing, microblogging (i.e. status updates), social networking services, and the rise of portable technology to begin the trend of tethering people to the internet by constantly spamming them with notifications.

Unlike the haphazard spread of niche chatrooms and forums, some platforms would aggressively try to frame themselves as a 'one-stop shop' to centralize activity onto their platform, and reinforce addictive behaviors, often through notification spam. This brings us to our current predicament, where YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. have since become household names.

In other words, the internet underwent a monopolization process. Any new 'alternatives' that tries to compete with the status quo will often fall into the usual trap of cutting corners²⁾ unless the owners are willing to face immense debt and pray that it becomes 'successful' enough that some moron buys it, but then it would just repeat the whole cycle of enshittification as these websites usually operate at a net loss.

“Web 3.0” is a stage where machines begin to read and process data across the internet, often in the form of web crawlers. If we follow this line of thinking, “Web 4.0” is a stage facilitating the integration of artificial intelligence, which has its own set of ethical dilemmas. Overall, you can argue that this is just an evolved form of spyware that was now marketable, and you would be correct.

“Web3” was a theoretical stage where the internet would 'decentralize' with crypto and blockchain technology during the late 2010s and 2020s. However, the details of how this would happen are extremely vague. Most have already seen through the façade, dismissing it as an empty buzzword that boils down to “people will use crypto (for real this time)”, which is why there was such a fast pivot to the other Web 3.0.