I'd define it as the web until the time that Facebook truly took off and conquered the hearts and minds of so many (that was the first huge shot in the losing war of the old web). For example, a key part of the old web was what used to be called the "blogosphere", and the blog's height was those final years before FB (in the ascendancy) and the first years of the FB era (descendancy).
For me the new web came about when if you wanted a website, you hired a web developer. As soon as it become DIY, without your own domain and didn't involve looking at HTML, the new web was born.
Today, if you own your own domain and fiddle with HTML then basically you're still part of the old web.
So basically, the old web required experts to help people get online, the new web negated them through homogenization.
The real experts from the old web basically became startup founders to monetize the homogenization and automation of their worldviews for the less tech-savvy (or specialized) folks.
People pine for the old web, but it was a churning, friggin' mess too. Search results were good though, but only when Google arrived. The standardization and ease-of-use from the new web has been a massive boon. I think things will change as people yearn for a wild-west, where there are new opportunities. The promise of a better life, seeing that the grass is greener, avoiding pain - those things always create golden ages.
Once AI favours people who can afford to pay for the best results.. or surveillance becomes too burdensome or dangerous, then watch this space.
The spirit of freedom always runs into trouble, when considering the notion of:
"Cut off the heads of others to make oneself appear taller."
Surveillance enables this. Decentralize again, but how?
ISPs - help or hindrance? Why/how can ISP charges be diverted to content creators?
I agree with you. When I was a freshman, the school paper assigned me to cover a professor talking about the blogosphere. That was a year before Facebook released its newsfeed. My story did not age well.
In my line of work, we convert words to numbers, and we have a codex that defines meanings for the numbers; that way, we can write publicly but (in making sure we choose words that, when converted to numbers, convert to numbers that have the second meaning we want) our public writing will only be understood on this second level with this second meaning only by those who use this system and codex. It's something like a form of real/human language cryptography: write for the world to see but only those who know the key will see what we're also saying to them. This was traditionally very hard to do for anyone who didn't grow up in a family that did this naturally from when they were kids. And I vibe-coded tools to make it easy. It's been amazingly helpful and worth its weight in gold :)
Hahaha! I love the list! Lots of professions have methods to send messages that simultaneously speak to various different audiences (while the bigger audiences don't know there are also other audiences as well, who will derive other meanings from the same message). The world is an interesting place full of surprises - and even to smart people, the text or image you are seeing might have meanings invisible to you, since you're not the intended audience for the secondary meaning.
I agree strongly with that comment you are quoting.
It means (at least in my interpretation): different people think differently; a great salesman thinks very differently than a great software developer. And the AI wave is trying to force lots of everyday normal employees (who may or may not be good at their jobs already) to think and act like software developers. A great salesman may literally not have the type of mind where we can turn what he does into "processes" and "documentation" like we need to do to make agents. Most humans, by far, don't think in a "process" sort of way, and trying to get them to do so is a path towards disaster on many levels.
This is why most AI digital transformation is failing. Making a creative artist or a salesman or a chef or account manager or whatever into "one of us" (a someone who thinks explicitly about process-itizing everything etc) is, the fallacy of.... well, to use an old Yiddish expression: "if my grandma had balls, she'd be my grandpa." (Sorry for the vulgar image.) It's asking people to be a completely different type of person than they are, and that almost never succeeds.
I've done a lot digital transformation (pre-AI) and my approach was always to not try to change people, but to have a small group of smart process-oriented thinkers go into teams and work hand in hand with them to turn what they do into processes.
PS: all this is said as someone who loves AI and is a huge fan and has invested heavily in it.
Oh wow I always complain about this, I didn't realize other people were also so frustrated by this. Tons and tons of cafes by my house, but I zoom in with about a six block radius, where there are at least 20 cafes or cafe-restaurants there, and literally 1 or 2 come up.
The grocer on my block is so tiny that I hit the max zoom before it shows up. If you pan around fiddle I can occasionally get it to appear, but it effectively does not exist according to google maps.
