Around the turn of the century, the internet underwent a transformation dubbed “web 2.0”. The world wide web of the 1990s had largely been read-only: static pages, hand-built homepages, portal sites with content from a few publishers.
Then came the dotcom crash of 2000 to 2001, when many heavily financed, lightly useful internet businesses collapsed. In the aftermath, surviving companies and new entrants leaned into a different logic that the author-publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms rather than pages, participation rather than passive consumption.
