The -ing of Web 2.0

How Users Defined the Social Media Era

Abstract

The standard history of Web 2.0 is built on nouns such as Facebook and Twitter. The history treats platforms as primary cultural artifacts. The most significant remnants of the social web are user-generated gerunds. The -ings formatting turned fleeting digital actions into durable social phenomena. The gerunds are a bottom-up folksonomy of social behavior. Participants coined the terms when platform-issued language failed the complexity of networked life. Each gerund encodes a technical function and a social scene of motive and power. The gerund is what Archaeobytology calls a Vivibyte. A Vivibyte is a living artifact that reveals how individuals inhabited designed systems. The linguistic stratigraphy stretches from the optimism of early friending through the attention-economic machinery of liking. The record continues through the algorithmic opacity of shadowbanning and the despair of doomscrolling. The stratigraphy arrives at Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification as the final sign of platform decay. The gerunds are the linguistic record of a civilization learning what the social shift meant to live inside external frameworks.

Introduction

Users wrote the history of the social web while platforms held the pen.

The most significant remnants of this era are not corporate nouns, such as Facebook and Twitter, but user-generated verbs. The gerunds crystallized fleeting digital actions into durable social phenomena. Terms such as friending and liking emerged from below. Users coined the terms when designed language failed the complexity of networked life. Studying the linguistic artifacts means practicing archaeology at the stratum where culture formed.

The Framework and the Desire Path

A desire path records collective human preference over designed intention.¹ The gerunds of Web 2.0 operate exactly this way. Platforms laid the concrete with buttons labeled 'Like' and 'Friend'. Users wore trails through the grass. The -ing suffix did not conjugate a verb into a progressive form. The suffix captured the social scene surrounding the action. The scene included the motive and the politics. 'Like' is a button; liking is a social calculus. 'Friend' is a database relationship; friending is a performance of accumulation. The gerund carries narrative weight because the gerund speaks the language of participation rather than instruction. The term turns a function into a practice.

Platform vocabularies intentionally flattened social complexity into data-friendly simplicity. Every 'Like' click registered the same way in the database regardless of whether the click signaled affection or reciprocal obligation. The user-generated gerund restored the complexity that the interface stripped away. In the terminology of Archaeobytology, the platform verb is the designed artifact; the user gerund is the Vivibyte.²

The Gerund as Social Fossil

These scattered trails eventually harden into permanent linguistic records. The grammatical shift into the gerund is not accidental. English gerunds hold a peculiar grammatical position. Gerunds are verbs and nouns that hold both action and substance.³ When a community adopts a gerund as a common noun, the language records the moment a technical function crossed the threshold into social practice. The gerund is a fossil of the crossing.

The historical record explains why the words persist long after the platforms that created the terms have changed. The concept of 'unfriending' survives as a cultural concept even as Facebook's relevance recedes. The survival occurs because the social practice names the deliberate pruning of a relationship. The practice is not bound to any single interface. The word encodes human behavior rather than code. Human behavior does not deprecate.

The information architect Thomas Vander Wal identifies a parallel phenomenon in the 2004 coining of the term folksonomy. The term names the user-generated classification systems growing on tagging platforms.⁴ Where formal taxonomies impose hierarchical categories from above, folksonomies grow from below. They are shaped by the collective tagging habits of ordinary users. Vander Wal observes that users will always generate their own organizational logic when designed systems fail. The observation applies to the gerunds of the social web. The -ings are a folksonomy of social behavior.

Accumulation, Curation, and the Cognitive Ceiling

The earliest breakdowns occurred precisely where the interface attempted to scale intimacy. The gerund friending shows the resulting tension between platform incentive and human limitation. Early major social networks such as Friendster and Facebook operated on the premise that connection should remain frictionless and endless. The interface pushed networks toward numerical infinity.

Human cognition enforces biological limits. The cognitive ceiling of approximately 150 stable social relationships holds firm even in digital environments.⁵ The act of friending was a collision between interface incentive and biological constraint. The platform prioritized infinite accumulation. The brain sustained 150 meaningful relationships. Where infinite scaling and biology collided, users forged a complementary gerund: unfriending.

The New Oxford American Dictionary named "unfriend" its Word of the Year in 2009. The decision marked the moment digital social life acquired enough cultural weight to warrant a dictionary entry.⁶ The dictionary entry captured only the sterile database operation of the verb. The gerund unfriending held the fuller story. The term encapsulated the deliberation and the social anxiety along with the dread of real-world fallout. The gerund named the necessary labor of organizing a social network that had grown beyond cognitive capacity. Where friending was an act of accumulation that the platform encouraged, unfriending was an act of organization that users invented for themselves. The practice was a desire path worn against the grain of the interface.

The Attention Economy's Smallest Currency

If friending and unfriending mapped the social graph, liking mapped the attention economy. Facebook introduced its "Like" button in 2009, though earlier versions of the mechanic appeared on platforms like FriendFeed. Within months, the action became the universal unit of low-friction digital approval. The thumbs-up icon evolved into a cultural glyph recognizable to anyone with a smartphone.

For users, the act of liking was a gesture of appreciation and a reciprocal social obligation. The click was also a tool for managing weak ties at minimal cost. For platforms, every click fed the algorithmic machinery. The data generated the behavioral data that formed the real product. The intermittent and unpredictable arrival of digital approval activated dopamine pathways tied to compulsive checking.⁷

The gerund liking encodes the entire ecosystem in a single word. The term names the click alongside the social performance and the algorithmic extraction. The word captures the neurochemical reinforcement and the anxiety of performing for an audience whose approval arrives in irregular pulses. To say "I was liking posts" is to name a web of social and economic relations that the simple noun "Like" could never contain.

Identity Through Amplification

Once the basic unit of attention was secured, the grid demanded a theater for the self. The subsequent gerunds operated as instruments of public assembly rather than mere reaction.

Retweeting shows the pattern. The technical function amplified content. One click ensured another user's post appeared on the timeline. The social practice involved complex layers. On platforms like Twitter, where the timeline moved fast and attention was scarce, retweeting became a primary mode of self-expression that required no original composition. The action signaled endorsement and tribal allegiance. Retweeting also indicated intellectual positioning or outrage without the retweeter writing a single word. Pew Research Center data consistently shows that a small fraction of users generates the overwhelming majority of original content on Twitter. The broader population engages through amplification and reaction.⁸ Retweeting was the verb of the silent majority. The action let users speak through selection.

The culture migrated from conversation to connection. Users abandoned the slow work of dialogue for the faster work of formatted self-presentation through networked updates.⁹ Retweeting was a primary instrument of that shift. The gerund captures the motive instead of the technical mechanism. The term implies the ongoing performance of identity through the editorial act of choosing what to amplify.

Hashtagging followed a related trajectory but with a different origin story. The hashtag did not originate as a platform invention. In August 2007, the technologist Chris Messina proposed using the pound sign to group conversations on Twitter, borrowing the convention from Internet Relay Chat channels.¹⁰ Twitter initially ignored the suggestion while users adopted the practice. The platform eventually integrated the hashtag as a core feature. The integration represented architecture paving a desire path that users had already worn into the grass.

Once formalized, hashtagging evolved beyond the original function as a categorization tool. The practice became a system for folksonomy and commentary. The symbol also supported building community and political mobilization. A hashtag could index a conversation like #climatechange or perform ironic metacommentary like #sorrynotsorry. The tool helped build a subcultural community like #bookstagram or spark a social movement like #BlackLivesMatter. The gerund hashtagging names the practice of using a repurposed technical symbol to claim space in public discourse. The term serves as a fossil of user ingenuity.

Not every significant -ing verb involved production. The practice of lurking consumes content without contributing. Lurking is the dominant mode of engagement on the social web despite remaining invisible in platform metrics. The asymmetry is a feature of the medium. The most active 10 percent of users generate 80 percent of the content. The vast majority are lurkers.¹¹

Lurking is the invisible engine of the attention economy. The cumulative weight of millions of silent page views and scrolls drives advertising revenue and shapes algorithmic trending. The silent views provide the audience required for active participants. The gerund makes the invisible labor visible. The term names the act of silent attention as a form of participation rather than an absence of production. The media ecosystem treats "engagement" as the only legible currency. Within the ecosystem lurking is dark matter. The behavior sits everywhere and makes up the majority of the mass while remaining unmeasured.

At the opposite pole sat selfieing. The hyper-visible practice involved composing and distributing self-portraits through platforms optimized for visual consumption. Self-portraiture maintains an ancient history. The smartphone front-facing camera and the algorithmic feed of Instagram made self-portraiture a common social ritual. The media scholar José van Dijck traces how social media platforms systematically shift the grammar of online interaction from textual to visual. The platform rewards image-centric content with greater algorithmic visibility. The dynamic turns the presentation of self into a continuous and professionalized performance.¹² Selfieing names the performance as a practice. The practice defines an ongoing process of building and distributing a visual identity for networked consumption rather than capturing a single photograph.

The Language of Power and Anxiety

These early rituals operated within the bounds of visible play. But as the underlying algorithms tightened, the vocabulary mutated to name the invisible forces acting directly upon the user. A different category of -ings emerged from the friction and opacity built into algorithmically governed spaces. The terms became accusations rather than descriptions of social practice.

Shadowbanning presents the clearest case. The term appears in no major platform's official documentation. The word originated below as a name for invisible algorithmic suppression. Content appeared visible to the author while the platform de-prioritized it without notification.¹³ Opaque curation breeds suspicion. The suspicion rises sharply among marginalized communities who already distrust claims of corporate neutrality.¹⁴

Shadowbanning matters because the term marks the start of a user-generated vocabulary for holding algorithms accountable. Platform moderation practices remain varied and opaque. The term does not accurately describe a single technical process. The platforms controlled the code. Users controlled the language. By coining and circulating the term shadowbanning, users created a shared framework for articulating a collective experience of powerlessness. The systems offered no channel for appeal or due process. The word is a desire path worn against the scaffolding of algorithmic authority.

Doomscrolling emerged from a different kind of anxiety. The term describes the inability to stop consuming distressing content rather than the fear of suppression. The word entered mainstream usage during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The roots trace to 2018. The Canadian finance reporter Karen K. Ho popularized the term through repeated Twitter reminders to stop the behavior.¹⁵ Merriam-Webster flagged the term as a "word to watch" in 2020. The Oxford English Dictionary included the gerund among the words of the year for the same period.¹⁶

The loop feeds on itself. A user seeking information to reduce uncertainty encounters predominantly negative content. The encounter heightens anxiety and drives continuous, compulsive searching.¹⁷ Doomscrolling correlates with decreased mental well-being and elevated levels of existential anxiety.¹⁸ The anxiety presents a generalized sense of dread about the conditions of existence.¹⁹

The gerund doomscrolling encompasses the behavioral loop. The term names the collision between a human drive and an interface designed to exploit the drive through infinite feeds optimized for engagement. The human drive includes the need to monitor threats and control uncertainty. The word is a diagnostic term and a warning. The term is also a confession. Like the best archaeological artifacts, the gerund reveals both individual behavior and the systemic conditions that produced the behavior.

After the -ings: Platform Decline and the Post-Web 2.0 Vernacular

This psychological exhaustion mirrored a terminal phase for the systems themselves. The gerunds of Web 2.0 continued accumulating even as the dominant platforms began to decay. The late-stage vocabulary grew darker, mapping directly to the power dynamics that earlier -ings had only implied.

The writer and technologist Cory Doctorow captures the shift in the theory of enshittification. Doctorow coined the term in November 2022 to define the lifecycle of platform decline: The system is initially good to users. It then degrades the user experience to serve business customers. It finally extracts maximum value from those customers before the container collapses.²⁰ The American Dialect Society named enshittification Word of the Year for 2023. The formal recognition echoed the Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 coronation of unfriend. The moment marked when a user-generated neologism became the most accurate description of a shared cultural experience.²¹

The entire ecosystem of social-web gerunds emerged from this lifecycle of extraction. The -ings grew during the middle phase of platform life. The scaffolding remained functional enough to support social practice but extractive enough to generate friction and the need for new language. Liking encoded the gamification of social approval. Shadowbanning encoded the opacity of algorithmic governance. Doomscrolling encoded the weaponization of the attention-seeking instinct. Each gerund is a diagnostic of the specific extraction mechanism running at the time of coinage.

The trajectory matters for what comes next. The platforms that defined Web 2.0 enter what Doctorow calls terminal enshittification. The gerunds generated during the era do not disappear with the platforms. Doomscrolling does not require Twitter. Liking does not require Facebook. Lurking does not require Reddit. The practices migrated across platforms because the behaviors remained untethered to a single interface. The actions belonged to the users who named the practices.

The survival provides the enduring archaeological lesson. Platforms are containers. The systems rise and serve. The platforms eventually extract and decay. The gerunds are the cultural deposit left behind. The linguistic sediment records how millions of people handled connection and power during the first sustained migration into networked social life. Studying the -ings means reading the stratigraphy of a civilization learning what life meant inside external frameworks. The civilization always reached for language adequate to the experience.

The Archive preserves the record. The Anvil shapes what comes next.²²