The "-ing" of Web 2.0: How users defined the social media era

An era’s story rarely appears in its official blueprints. It is often found in the worn pathways, the shared jokes, and the invented rituals of the people who inhabited the space. To understand the social web—the period we retroactively call Web 2.0—one must look past the sterile interfaces and corporate mission statements. The true history of that time, the emotional and social texture of our first great digital migration, is not captured in the verbs the platforms gave us. It is fossilized in the language we used to describe what we were doing.

This is the central thesis of our work as digital archaeologists: the most authentic landmarks of the social web are not the platforms’ nouns but the users’ verbs.

The architecture vs. the artifact

The architecture of Web 2.0 represented a fundamental shift in our digital lives. The early "hand-built web" was a frontier of personal homepages—digital declarations of "I am." Web 2.0 offered sophisticated, centralized platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, which were less like homesteads and more like grand, shared public squares. We were no longer just broadcasting from our own plot of land; we were interacting within a shared context.

The platforms provided the stage, the props, and a script (the Terms of Service). The users, however, wrote the play. Platforms shape verbs, but users appropriate and ritualize them. They took the simple actions offered by the interface—friend, follow, post, like—and, through mass adoption and repetition, transformed them into complex social rituals.

At the heart of this transformation is a powerful linguistic tool: the gerund. The ‘-ing’ turns a fleeting action into a durable social phenomenon. It encapsulates not just the action, but the entire scene, context, and human emotion surrounding it. "Vote" is a binary choice. "Downvoting," however, indicates the collective, often brutal, mechanism of community justice, rich with social implication. The "-ing" grants narrative weight. It suggests the language of participation, not instruction.

The platforms owned the code. The users owned the “-ing.”

The quiet click of unfriending.im

In 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary named "unfriend" its Word of the Year, marking a moment our digital social lives began to carry undeniable, real-world weight.¹ But the verb itself is a sterile database entry. The real story is often in the gerund: unfriending.

"Unfriending" can be a social drama. It suggests the quiet anxiety before the click and the potential for real-world awkwardness. While early social networks encouraged limitless accumulation of "friends," studies on user behavior suggest that most people maintain a much smaller, more stable core network, indicating a natural need for social curation.² "Unfriending" became the user-carved desire path for this fundamental human need for separation. It is a landmark to the necessary and deeply human art of letting go.

The performance of retweeting.im

A "retweet" is a function for content amplification. "Retweeting," however, is often a complex performance of identity and allegiance. In the theater of the timeline, the act of retweeting can be a way to signal one's values and intellectual position without authoring a single word. It can be an earnest endorsement, an act of protest, or a tribal marker. Data has often indicated that a significant portion of content shared on platforms like Twitter consists of retweets, underscoring its importance as a primary mode of expression, not just a secondary action.³

This performative aspect of online life has been extensively documented by scholars like MIT's Sherry Turkle, who notes a cultural shift "from conversation to connection"—a move toward the accumulation of weak ties and performative updates.⁴ "Retweeting" is a primary tool in that performance. The gerund captures the motive, not just the mechanism.

The invisible engine of lurking.im

To "lurk" is a passive state. But "lurking" represents the primary activity of the silent majority that powers the entire attention economy. This behavior is often explained by the "1% rule" of internet culture, which posits that in most online communities, the vast majority of users are "lurkers" who view content without contributing.⁵ More recent research from the Pew Research Center consistently shows that a minority of users on major platforms produce the majority of the content, confirming that this passive consumption remains the default mode of engagement for most.⁶

Lurking is the secret, universal consumption of content that drives the metrics of "engagement," yet it remains largely invisible. The gerund makes this invisible action visible, a tribute to the quiet act of shaping a space with silent attention.

The language of resistance in shadowbanning.im

This is a prime example of users creating language to define their own reality. The term "shadowban" rarely appears in the official platform lexicon. But "shadowbanning" is a powerful, community-born term that captures a user's feeling of paranoia in the face of an opaque algorithmic authority.⁷ It describes the unnerving experience of posting into a void, your content visible to you but potentially hidden from the wider community without notice.

The gerund here is not just an action; it is an accusation. It is the language of the user fighting back, creating a vocabulary to describe a shared sense of algorithmic oppression. It is a landmark to the ongoing struggle for transparency and voice.

The modern anxiety of doomscrolling.im

A more recent entry, "doomscrolling," captures a specific cultural anxiety of the hyper-connected age. Search interest for the term spiked dramatically during periods of intense global uncertainty, reflecting a widespread, newly named behavior.⁸ It refers to the compulsive need to keep scrolling through an endless feed of bad news, "a modern prayer wheel of anxiety."⁹

The act of doomscrolling highlights a paradox of the infinite feed: our search for informational control can deepen our sense of powerlessness. It is a distinctly modern ritual born from the architecture of the platforms, a landmark to what we lose in our desperate attempt to stay informed.

The user-written history

The great platforms of the social web are the architecture of the era, but they are not the landmarks. The landmarks are often the behaviors that took place within them. The user-generated language of action—the gerunds, the slang, the acronyms—are the digital fossils of our collective experience.

Platforms change, but these gerunds persist — they often outlast UI updates because they encode social practice, not code.

They suggest the authentic, user-generated story of the "-ing of an Era." To study them is to study the true history of ourselves.