I think there was less to be divided about. Back then, the best the evangelist could do was create a blog and try to game SEO to get noticed. They could post on

I think there was less to be divided about. Back then, the best the evangelist could do was create a blog and try to game SEO to get noticed. They could post on a few popular forums, but discoverability was limited and algorithms designed to pump engagement didn't exist because social media platforms were in their infancy. It's a different world today. The barrier is lower. Blogging influentially is as easy as posting a medium article and pushing it on the social media platforms. So specific voices which tend to be controversial are getting way more amplified. Then the algorithms just creates echo chambers to keep the users engaged to pump up the ad revenue. That being said, Web 2.0 had two primary themes and business value propositions. It was social media/ads, and e-commerce. Those were pretty clear and there was no confusion about how money would be made. Out of those was born what I like to call Web 2.5, where basically every industry was getting SaaSified in one form or another. Out of this was born big data and the emergence of the most recent ML hype due to the need to create these algos to maximize ad driven profit. Crypto/Decentralization/Web 3.0 has a much much more challenging road ahead to get mass adoption. Outside of the obvious scaling issues decentralization brings about, decentralized apps have a much less clear path to monetization. That's in essence why they need to create their own economies with tokens and crypto. Really for "Web 3.0" to be successful, we are looking towards a whole scale reimagining of how economies function. This is entirely different than using the internet to create analogs to real world things like stores or newspapers. The value proposition of social media was abundant, and the path to profitability was clear. Ditto for ecommerce platforms. Ditto for the majority of SaaS applications. I think the fundamental divide here is talking about Web 3.0, (or ICOs, DApps, DeFi, NFTs, or w/e the "use case" of the day is), generally seems to be avoiding talking about the true value proposition of decentralization, which will face such tremendous resistance from powerful world governments, that it's akin to a war being fought to creating a new world order and evolution of how human society is shaped. The stakes are much higher and failure is much more likely. I wouldn't be surprised if all the most successful projects just end up being centralized layers on top of the protocols and all they really end up doing is usurping the place of some existing Web 2.0 platforms due to some network effect pushed forward by a few key influencers. That's essentially what happened with TCP/IP and HTTP. I don't see why it will be any different this time.