There undoubtedly has been a cultural change. But I would argue that the cultural change happened gradually and somewhat later. Closer to 2010 than to 2000 and

There undoubtedly has been a cultural change. But I would argue that the cultural change happened gradually and somewhat later. Closer to 2010 than to 2000 and was probably caused by the "Endless September Syndrome" triggered by the rise of the smartphone and the influx of mobile users. What we have seen in this transition is a consolidation of services. News sites and blogs started to migrate to hosted comments systems like Disqus and eventually disabling comments entirely therefore the discussions moved to Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc.. Plenty of companies merged so everything became a lot more centralized. And the structure of the public changed, the ratio of users compared to devs/creators/publishers/etc. grew very much. Services like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo Mail, predate de term Web 2.0 yet they are considered part of Web 2.0. So at least initially Web 2.0 coexisted with Web 1.0. Even today you can still publish static websites (and some people do) even if no one calls them Web 1.0. This just shows that these terms, which were invented after the DotCom bubble burst, were just buzzwords to try and drum interest. I would say the DotCom bubble itself and the mobile revolution were far more significant and statistically measurable than the impact of Web 2.0.