9 ms·

Keep the web free, say no to Web3

130 points by disqard 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chroem- 5y ago
> Keep What kind of freedom is it if it's completely dominated by hostile megacorporations?
- martin_a 5y ago
  Is it, though? There are still many good blogs out there, niche news sites, people who really love sharing what they know. What we need to do (again) is to make these hidden gems accessible and "findable" by whatever means, as we see that search engine providers are often motivated by money alone which leads to declining quality in their results.
jwblackwell 5y ago
The article raises some valid concerns, all of which can be addressed. What it doesn’t do though is propose any sort of solution.
- kome 5y ago
  because you don't need solutions to a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place... the only solution is "perhaps let's not do it?"
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  its a bit odd that they don't mention any of the other projects that are being worked on today that don't rely on cryptocurrency, the "SAFE Network" being one of them
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Proposing is fine. Building is better.
- muglug 5y ago
  I think it's implied: don't pursue cryptocurrency or the blockchain where traditional methods work just fine. The problem right now is that there's a peverse incentive for entrepreneurs to jump on the crypto/NFT bandwagon because a bunch of VCs are desperate to fund those sorts of companies. Nobody in that space is incentivised to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
  - gogopuppygogo 5y ago
    You cannot criticize a religion without upsetting all of the followers. Crypto has become a religion.
    - joelbondurant 5y ago
      Yes, in response to the religion of the military Science state.
    - ziml77 5y ago
      There's a lot of people who have their money tied up in the crypto space. If it takes off, they get rich without doing anything. If it crashes, they become poor. So they have a huge incentive to push crypto even if it's not actually good for anyone but themselves.
      - cinquemb 5y ago
        s/crypto/neg eps, never made a profit publicly listed, need a bailout every 10 years, stocks/g
- bfung 5y ago
  The solution is to not perpetuate this web3 thing. What problems does web3 attempt solve anyways? The internet is mostly decentralized already. Maybe the apps and services are localized walled gardens, but you can already vote not to participate in them w/o hashing anything.
  - SXX 5y ago
    It does solve problems. The question is whatever current solution should be adopted as it's has it's own flaws and we can get stuck with them for decades. Censorship resistence for developed world countries. When you cant just rewrite history we might finally get rid of "illegal numbers" situations like blue-ray keys and such. And for less fortunate, failed or just athoritorian states there will finally be some option to access international banking system. It's like tor for money. Because crypto is controversial in countries with functional government, but it's might be the only way to fund opposition activity in more oppressive regimes.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > Censorship resistence for developed world countries. This is one of those things that either can't really work or is going to cause a massive disaster, such as when someone publishes the next OPM leak on the blockchain.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > And for less fortunate, failed or just athoritorian states there will finally be some option to access international banking system to do what exactly? and how is this censorship resistant if the traffic is easily recognizable and blockable?
- SXX 5y ago
  Can they be solved? How would you suggest to solve early adopters / whale issue? In crypto you're represented by pair of keys and by design anyone can have as many pairs of keys as they want. And to fix it you'll have to compromise on decentralisation and / or privacy. For now almost every single crypto project including majority of legit ones is some sort of pyramid scheme.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  That's because no solution is needed. "Web3" is a typical case of "solution in search of a problem".
ericls 5y ago
All the things about "community" owned just raise the question that what are the structures the communities adopt, what are the roles and what are their rights and responsibilities, and how are people elected to the roles. And how do you make sure these communities don't end up like the existing communities (countries, companies, NGOs, etc...) that you are trying to differentiate from? You can't just have a bunch of people and call it community owned. By that definition then this world is already community owned, the internet is already community owned. You can't also just bypass humanity, this world is the way it is largely due to humanity, not capitalism, not socialism, not because it's not community owned. If the human beings in your community inherently have the same traits as human beings in other communities, how can you make sure you community doesn't end up like the other communities?
- smitty1e 5y ago
  That is, the tragedy of the commons[1]. The individual precedes the community, and results tend to wobble around a Pareto Optimal[2] 80/20 solution. The ones to keep an eye on are those preaching some idealistic ultimate answer this side of ${APOCALYPTIC_EVENT}. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency
exdsq 5y ago
Ah yes, let’s keep the web “free” as it is today. Btw, anyone else have issues today because AWS-US-East broke?
nowherebeen 5y ago
The web is free because companies are profiting off your data. In no way has server costs ever been free.
- martin_a 5y ago
  That is over-simplified. The web is also free because I can use it to promote myself and my work by writing articles, posting images, doing whatever I like. I'm willing to pay the hosting fees for that and it's my decision not to pass this on to any visitors.
  - nowherebeen 5y ago
    > I'm willing to pay the hosting fees for that and it's my decision not to pass this on to any visitors. You are willing to pay hosting fees. But do you pay for Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and a whole host of other platforms that the majority of the population uses? Remind me how companies that have billions of users pay for it? How many people are going to visit your website compares to theirs? How much do people like you contribute to the entire revenue stream? The creator economy is tiny compared to these platforms.
    - elzbardico 5y ago
      The same way we never paid for open tv or even the true cost of newspapers and magazines. Advertising.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  To be fair, if you hook up a raspberry pi or some random old laptop to the web you can serve a significant amount of traffic as long you mind how you construct your website. You don't need to rent hosting.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 5y ago
ziggystardust 5y ago
The web is free, and the web is free to adopt or not adopt web3
ccamrobertson 5y ago
It seems really odd to lambast the 'claims of web3' and then link to a project with far great ambiguity in how it intends to 'make a better, free, decentralized internet'. Indeed, even the authors have to write a dripping apology justifying why they are reliant on Discord, a highly centralized chat service.
cell303 5y ago
People are losing their minds over this. Barely anything web3 has even been built yet. Perhaps it never will. Still, the idea that young people want to do things differently is so terrifying to these geocity boomers that they must churn out pamphlets like their life depends on it. Embarassing.
- georgebarnett 5y ago
  Yes, it’s definitely not that older people with experience understand why this is a bad idea. The hubris of youth is useful for bringing change, but experience shows that often the effects of that change are poorly understood and often cause significant issues.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Why do you think this is an age thing? I know plenty of older people that are wild about anything blockchain related and plenty of younger people who despise it all.
hardwaresofton 5y ago
If we really want a decentralized internet, the right ISP needs to come along and strike the right balance between allowing ingress traffic and pricing. If everyone could run a website from their homes without worrying about DDNS then things would be much easier -- buy a <$25 SBC, buy a domain name, and you're off to the races on the "small" internet -- if you ever need more then pick what you want. We don't need blockchain for this.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  In web3 you'll have a public key. You won't need to worry about domain registrars or anything like that, nor DDNS. Just point people to your immutable public key, that's it.
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    I’d argue that the complexity of domain registrars and DDNS is less than that of public key cryptography and blockchain. Also again the right ISP would obviate the need and do both things for you, and that gets even easier when ipv6 is even more mainstream. It’s easy to explain how web2 works right now to a lay person in non technical terms. I think it’s much harder to explain blockchain and even more so the systems and standards built on top. You’re basically going to be asking for blind trust from consumers
JaggerFoo 5y ago
I don't agree with your conclusions about Web3, but if you have a vision for the future of the web, go for it - you may be right. Most of the problems cropping up are due to insecure computer programs that run on a blockchain (aka Smart Contracts). Centralized control whether VC's and money, or Goverments and regulations, skew the decentralized world into a framework that works for Profit or Fit a government model. Cheers
sdn90 5y ago
The criticism of catering to early adopters and whales is a bit weird to me. How is this different than any project that receives funding? What's the ideal solution for this? Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token. I don't think those projects will ever get any meaningful use aside a few nerds and outcasts that got booted off of Web2 properties. You'll probably get speculators in it purely for profit, but to me it sounds better than the alternatives.
- jwblackwell 5y ago
  > Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token Agreed. Most of the people criticizing Web3 are underestimating the power introducing token incentives will have. "Ordinary people" just don't care enough about decentralization of data for projects like Mastodon to take off otherwise. They've been around for a while, and they're not competing with Big Tech. A Web3 platform that rewards successful content creators natively with a token and not hearts/likes might though.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > A Web3 platform that rewards successful content s/Web3//
seanhunter 5y ago
Every time web3 is mentioned, a sizeable portion of HackerNews goes into "old man shouting at clouds" mode and logic seems to go out the window. Noone who has any interest in web3 is going to change their minds based on strawman sloganeering arguments like those presented in this article, and it's hard to imagine someone who is currently undecided being persuaded when the very first arguments presented are as weak as 1)"There are projects with this thing called 'quadratic voting' that I don't like" 2)"You don't need cryptocurrency to be decentralized" 3)"If it was good why would FB and Twitter allow it?"
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  It's okay, if Stephen Diehl's 18 (!) [1] anti-crypto blog posts didn't convince you, I'm sure this will be the one. [1]: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog.html
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    Yeah I've read a bunch of those and if nothing else they actually make some points that need to be discussed. I think things like pointless and excessive energy use, "don't you just need a database really", "doesn't decentralized storage kind of suck in lots of important ways" are much more substantive criticisms that web3 projects need to address than "I disagree with how some projects choose to organize voting", which is nothing more than a bottomless bikeshed and could be made validly made about "pre-web3" projects as well. For example, I can remember Debian for example having "lively debates" about its voting system inside and outside the community since at least as far back as 2000. I don't think anyone outside that project has any right to an opinion about how Debian want to arrange their voting and I feel the same way about every weird-ass token-voting system some web3 project wants to put in place.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Not only that, somehow his "Tech Blog" and "Blog" are two separate things, but every single blog post in the "Blog" section is about cryptocurrencies.
winternett 5y ago
The web is fraught with scams because it's grown to the point now where the only remaining ways of making next-level Internet money on the web are to resort to wildly complex and unethical tactics and/or deception to get attention, to fake success, or to spend a lot of money to gain attention. Social media is also not accurate in it's portrayals of potential for many because they simply are too big to allow users to succeed or even to be organically visible now. Something like NFTs, which are totally worthless digital files in real life, are marketed as "valuable goods", and it's literally insanity... Trust me, I've seen plenty of pitches even when I didn't want to on social media... Non stop. If you lose your wallet your money is gone? No FDIC protections? Good luck waiting for government to catch up on proper regulations. Even if this poorly though out pyramid scheme of branding the online greed heist as "Web 3" succeeds, it will be short lived once the rich cash out, and all that will be left is a totally broken internet with no commerce flowing through it, and the value of real world products and services will be severely corrupted by it all. Everyone will suffer for it, from the rich that get literally mugged on streets by the disenfranchised to the disenfranchised that spend years trying to find success with their last dollar. The solution is to stop supporting platforms that are peddling this phony pyramid scheme, and to reinvest in keeping the Internet open, and to stop money and influence from changing how the Internet worked 5 years ago, but even if you don't change this terrible course, you'll suffer too when you realize that everything has been dumbed down or made overly-complex on the Internet and function and utility have been corrupted to get you to pay for upgrades each month... Internet-based business had been making record breaking profits for years based on fair payment for advertising space, and for selling tangible goods and services. If you start a high-overhead business for free and then try to convert it into a paid service then that's where the business model went wrong, not because users are now dependent on the service and primed for milking that dependency. The only people advocating the schemes are people who are invested in them, but they're too caught up to admit the simple truth. We will learn how to communicate in real life again probably while the Web3 dumpster fire burns out, and then rebuild hopefully... :/
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>If you lose your wallet your money is gone? No FDIC protections? Good luck waiting for government to catch up on proper regulations. You can use a smart wallet where you assign your own set of n guardians (even your own phone can be a guardian), and m and n of those guardians can recover your wallet, with you deciding on m and n. Such wallets can even have software enforced daily withdrawal limits, which can only be overriden with the approval of the guardians. It's a completely open system which can be configured any way one wants. A one-size-fits-all government solution destroys innovation and breeds rent-seeking bureaucracy. I suspect the people most vehemently lobbying against open-finance/Web-3.0 are those most deeply entrenched in the centralized power structures of the establishment. One thing I could agree on is the multitude of scams, deceptive marketing etc in the Web 3.0 space. This is a consequence of money being freed from its reigns. It has both positive and negative consequences, and those are the negatives. But finance is on the balance beneficial to humanity, by facilitating more sophisticated coordination, so when you turbo-charge finance, you get a net boost to human coordination.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Listening to Stephen Diehl is a good way to stay poor. Web 3.0 is not a sector that Diehl and his ilk will be able to get their favorite left-wing legislator to squash.
- yunohn 5y ago
  > Listening to Stephen Diehl is a good way to stay poor. Wait, so is web3 a technology/concept that can benefit people in general? Or just a “get rich quick” scheme, since ignoring it will make you “stay poor”?
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    These two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      They are - if people buy in for the get rich side more than the “this will help me” side?
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        People investing in something due to profit motive does not preclude that investment having social benefits.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  So the web's purpose is just to make some people rich? Thanks for the insight :/
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Web3 is very clearly a ponzi scheme, like most things in the crypto and blockchain space. You gotta get in early go get rich. Or stay away and spend time and energy on things that matter instead.
catlikesshrimp 5y ago
Everything wrong with the internet, for me, is nothing crypto can solve. I am concerned about monopolies turning evil. Average Joe wants facebook, and google. People need those services to be regulated. And average Joe can't deal with descentralization. Average nerd should deal with that.
koonsolo 5y ago
I think we arrived at the "then they fight you" stage :D
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jollybean 5y ago
The web is mostly decentralized, set up a server in your home and off you go. I wouldn't worry that much about Web3 because very few organizations will care to partake, there's not value in it for them. If a bunch of kids want to make fake money, tokens and have fun in the their 'Web Tree House' and call it 'Web 3' with Paper Pirate Hats and Wooden Swords then so be it.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  web3, AFAIK, is not about serving pages, they "want" to reimplement direct economy on their computer. Whatever that economy is ..
eejjjj82 5y ago
Brought to you by "my friend Auzzie, a pretty smart dude."
- mrkentutbabi 5y ago
  and then the blog proceed to write some political article called "gift economy" even though it promises to not be political.
elzbardico 5y ago
Web3, metaverse and things like that are just vaporware. Not going anywhere. Someday in the future we will laugh about those terms as much as we do when we remember bill gates vision of “the information superhighway”
maccolgan 5y ago
It feels as if 5 similar articles reach the HN top page every day like this. The same arguments are made, the same rebuttals are made, the same comments are made ad nauseam, every single time, with no apparent conclusion. Are we officially living in a simulation? What's happening?
- cyberge99 5y ago
  I read this as a parody piece. Perhaps I’m jaded, but My common sense immediately had a rebuttal for each “point”. It also offered no solutions.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Easily the lowest signal to noise ratio topic on this site. If I was the mod, I'd ban the topic.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I wish I knew but it's definitely degrading the quality of conversation on the site IMO.
carlosdp 5y ago
> “Now imagine with this proposed Web3 that it’s true that users will own their data and experience. Why in the world would FB and Twitter and the mega corporations allow that? They stand to gain so much.” - my friend Auzzie, a pretty smart dude. This defeatism is kinda almost the point. Why are we just conceding the internet to this small group of companies? Why not at least try to take it back? I really don't understand what this particular bullet-point is trying to say here. People tend to forget that users determine the course of things, companies just build for users. Web2 gets better as things centralize, Web3 gets better as they decentralize and compose/interoperate. That is how we change this dynamic and "eliminate the middlemen."
danlugo92 5y ago
1. "Quadratic voting" Not all web3 apps will use this, in fact most will run away from any kind of voting system, so moot point. 2. "on a handful of very-expensive-to-run nodes hosted on Amazon Web Services and maintained by insiders." Use Bitcoin, with lightning, runs in your Raspberry. 3. I don't even get the point he's making. 4. Ethereum themselves suffered a leak that drained their cryptowallet of $55M. Again, use Bitcoin, don't use centralized hackable shitcoins. 5. "These attacks happen at least a few times a year. Some famous events are Bitcoin Gold in 2020, Etherium Classic in 2019, and Verge in 2018." And again, the answer is use Bitcoin. "Any entity (or group of entities combined) that control 51% of the hash rate have the collective power to control the network," So you want to buy 51% of bitcoin's mining capacity? You absolutely can, it would only cost you billions, well within the reach of any tech magnate or nation state. But the more you pour into it, the more profitable the mining becomes, thus other miners get more BTC, that they can in turn transform into USD to buy more mining equipment. 6. Artificial scarcity. I don't even follow. 7. Early adopters etc. And again, the answer is to use Bitcoin, not preminted centralized shitcoins.

130 points by disqard 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

chroem- 5y ago

> Keep What kind of freedom is it if it's completely dominated by hostile megacorporations?

martin_a 5y ago
Is it, though? There are still many good blogs out there, niche news sites, people who really love sharing what they know. What we need to do (again) is to make these hidden gems accessible and "findable" by whatever means, as we see that search engine providers are often motivated by money alone which leads to declining quality in their results.

jwblackwell 5y ago

The article raises some valid concerns, all of which can be addressed. What it doesn’t do though is propose any sort of solution.

kome 5y ago
because you don't need solutions to a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place... the only solution is "perhaps let's not do it?"
mackrevinack 5y ago
its a bit odd that they don't mention any of the other projects that are being worked on today that don't rely on cryptocurrency, the "SAFE Network" being one of them
aww_dang 5y ago
Proposing is fine. Building is better.
muglug 5y ago
I think it's implied: don't pursue cryptocurrency or the blockchain where traditional methods work just fine. The problem right now is that there's a peverse incentive for entrepreneurs to jump on the crypto/NFT bandwagon because a bunch of VCs are desperate to fund those sorts of companies. Nobody in that space is incentivised to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  You cannot criticize a religion without upsetting all of the followers. Crypto has become a religion.
  - joelbondurant 5y ago
    Yes, in response to the religion of the military Science state.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    There's a lot of people who have their money tied up in the crypto space. If it takes off, they get rich without doing anything. If it crashes, they become poor. So they have a huge incentive to push crypto even if it's not actually good for anyone but themselves.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      s/crypto/neg eps, never made a profit publicly listed, need a bailout every 10 years, stocks/g
bfung 5y ago
The solution is to not perpetuate this web3 thing. What problems does web3 attempt solve anyways? The internet is mostly decentralized already. Maybe the apps and services are localized walled gardens, but you can already vote not to participate in them w/o hashing anything.
- SXX 5y ago
  It does solve problems. The question is whatever current solution should be adopted as it's has it's own flaws and we can get stuck with them for decades. Censorship resistence for developed world countries. When you cant just rewrite history we might finally get rid of "illegal numbers" situations like blue-ray keys and such. And for less fortunate, failed or just athoritorian states there will finally be some option to access international banking system. It's like tor for money. Because crypto is controversial in countries with functional government, but it's might be the only way to fund opposition activity in more oppressive regimes.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > Censorship resistence for developed world countries. This is one of those things that either can't really work or is going to cause a massive disaster, such as when someone publishes the next OPM leak on the blockchain.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > And for less fortunate, failed or just athoritorian states there will finally be some option to access international banking system to do what exactly? and how is this censorship resistant if the traffic is easily recognizable and blockable?
SXX 5y ago
Can they be solved? How would you suggest to solve early adopters / whale issue? In crypto you're represented by pair of keys and by design anyone can have as many pairs of keys as they want. And to fix it you'll have to compromise on decentralisation and / or privacy. For now almost every single crypto project including majority of legit ones is some sort of pyramid scheme.
flohofwoe 5y ago
That's because no solution is needed. "Web3" is a typical case of "solution in search of a problem".

ericls 5y ago

All the things about "community" owned just raise the question that what are the structures the communities adopt, what are the roles and what are their rights and responsibilities, and how are people elected to the roles. And how do you make sure these communities don't end up like the existing communities (countries, companies, NGOs, etc...) that you are trying to differentiate from? You can't just have a bunch of people and call it community owned. By that definition then this world is already community owned, the internet is already community owned. You can't also just bypass humanity, this world is the way it is largely due to humanity, not capitalism, not socialism, not because it's not community owned. If the human beings in your community inherently have the same traits as human beings in other communities, how can you make sure you community doesn't end up like the other communities?

smitty1e 5y ago
That is, the tragedy of the commons[1]. The individual precedes the community, and results tend to wobble around a Pareto Optimal[2] 80/20 solution. The ones to keep an eye on are those preaching some idealistic ultimate answer this side of ${APOCALYPTIC_EVENT}. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

exdsq 5y ago

Ah yes, let’s keep the web “free” as it is today. Btw, anyone else have issues today because AWS-US-East broke?

nowherebeen 5y ago

The web is free because companies are profiting off your data. In no way has server costs ever been free.

martin_a 5y ago
That is over-simplified. The web is also free because I can use it to promote myself and my work by writing articles, posting images, doing whatever I like. I'm willing to pay the hosting fees for that and it's my decision not to pass this on to any visitors.
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  > I'm willing to pay the hosting fees for that and it's my decision not to pass this on to any visitors. You are willing to pay hosting fees. But do you pay for Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and a whole host of other platforms that the majority of the population uses? Remind me how companies that have billions of users pay for it? How many people are going to visit your website compares to theirs? How much do people like you contribute to the entire revenue stream? The creator economy is tiny compared to these platforms.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    The same way we never paid for open tv or even the true cost of newspapers and magazines. Advertising.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
To be fair, if you hook up a raspberry pi or some random old laptop to the web you can serve a significant amount of traffic as long you mind how you construct your website. You don't need to rent hosting.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
5y ago

ziggystardust 5y ago

The web is free, and the web is free to adopt or not adopt web3

ccamrobertson 5y ago

It seems really odd to lambast the 'claims of web3' and then link to a project with far great ambiguity in how it intends to 'make a better, free, decentralized internet'. Indeed, even the authors have to write a dripping apology justifying why they are reliant on Discord, a highly centralized chat service.

cell303 5y ago

People are losing their minds over this. Barely anything web3 has even been built yet. Perhaps it never will. Still, the idea that young people want to do things differently is so terrifying to these geocity boomers that they must churn out pamphlets like their life depends on it. Embarassing.

georgebarnett 5y ago
Yes, it’s definitely not that older people with experience understand why this is a bad idea. The hubris of youth is useful for bringing change, but experience shows that often the effects of that change are poorly understood and often cause significant issues.
ziml77 5y ago
Why do you think this is an age thing? I know plenty of older people that are wild about anything blockchain related and plenty of younger people who despise it all.

hardwaresofton 5y ago

If we really want a decentralized internet, the right ISP needs to come along and strike the right balance between allowing ingress traffic and pricing. If everyone could run a website from their homes without worrying about DDNS then things would be much easier -- buy a <$25 SBC, buy a domain name, and you're off to the races on the "small" internet -- if you ever need more then pick what you want. We don't need blockchain for this.

danlugo92 5y ago
In web3 you'll have a public key. You won't need to worry about domain registrars or anything like that, nor DDNS. Just point people to your immutable public key, that's it.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  I’d argue that the complexity of domain registrars and DDNS is less than that of public key cryptography and blockchain. Also again the right ISP would obviate the need and do both things for you, and that gets even easier when ipv6 is even more mainstream. It’s easy to explain how web2 works right now to a lay person in non technical terms. I think it’s much harder to explain blockchain and even more so the systems and standards built on top. You’re basically going to be asking for blind trust from consumers

JaggerFoo 5y ago

I don't agree with your conclusions about Web3, but if you have a vision for the future of the web, go for it - you may be right. Most of the problems cropping up are due to insecure computer programs that run on a blockchain (aka Smart Contracts). Centralized control whether VC's and money, or Goverments and regulations, skew the decentralized world into a framework that works for Profit or Fit a government model. Cheers

sdn90 5y ago

The criticism of catering to early adopters and whales is a bit weird to me. How is this different than any project that receives funding? What's the ideal solution for this? Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token. I don't think those projects will ever get any meaningful use aside a few nerds and outcasts that got booted off of Web2 properties. You'll probably get speculators in it purely for profit, but to me it sounds better than the alternatives.

jwblackwell 5y ago
> Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token Agreed. Most of the people criticizing Web3 are underestimating the power introducing token incentives will have. "Ordinary people" just don't care enough about decentralization of data for projects like Mastodon to take off otherwise. They've been around for a while, and they're not competing with Big Tech. A Web3 platform that rewards successful content creators natively with a token and not hearts/likes might though.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > A Web3 platform that rewards successful content s/Web3//

seanhunter 5y ago

Every time web3 is mentioned, a sizeable portion of HackerNews goes into "old man shouting at clouds" mode and logic seems to go out the window. Noone who has any interest in web3 is going to change their minds based on strawman sloganeering arguments like those presented in this article, and it's hard to imagine someone who is currently undecided being persuaded when the very first arguments presented are as weak as 1)"There are projects with this thing called 'quadratic voting' that I don't like" 2)"You don't need cryptocurrency to be decentralized" 3)"If it was good why would FB and Twitter allow it?"

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
It's okay, if Stephen Diehl's 18 (!) [1] anti-crypto blog posts didn't convince you, I'm sure this will be the one. [1]: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog.html
- seanhunter 5y ago
  Yeah I've read a bunch of those and if nothing else they actually make some points that need to be discussed. I think things like pointless and excessive energy use, "don't you just need a database really", "doesn't decentralized storage kind of suck in lots of important ways" are much more substantive criticisms that web3 projects need to address than "I disagree with how some projects choose to organize voting", which is nothing more than a bottomless bikeshed and could be made validly made about "pre-web3" projects as well. For example, I can remember Debian for example having "lively debates" about its voting system inside and outside the community since at least as far back as 2000. I don't think anyone outside that project has any right to an opinion about how Debian want to arrange their voting and I feel the same way about every weird-ass token-voting system some web3 project wants to put in place.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  Not only that, somehow his "Tech Blog" and "Blog" are two separate things, but every single blog post in the "Blog" section is about cryptocurrencies.

winternett 5y ago

The web is fraught with scams because it's grown to the point now where the only remaining ways of making next-level Internet money on the web are to resort to wildly complex and unethical tactics and/or deception to get attention, to fake success, or to spend a lot of money to gain attention. Social media is also not accurate in it's portrayals of potential for many because they simply are too big to allow users to succeed or even to be organically visible now. Something like NFTs, which are totally worthless digital files in real life, are marketed as "valuable goods", and it's literally insanity... Trust me, I've seen plenty of pitches even when I didn't want to on social media... Non stop. If you lose your wallet your money is gone? No FDIC protections? Good luck waiting for government to catch up on proper regulations. Even if this poorly though out pyramid scheme of branding the online greed heist as "Web 3" succeeds, it will be short lived once the rich cash out, and all that will be left is a totally broken internet with no commerce flowing through it, and the value of real world products and services will be severely corrupted by it all. Everyone will suffer for it, from the rich that get literally mugged on streets by the disenfranchised to the disenfranchised that spend years trying to find success with their last dollar. The solution is to stop supporting platforms that are peddling this phony pyramid scheme, and to reinvest in keeping the Internet open, and to stop money and influence from changing how the Internet worked 5 years ago, but even if you don't change this terrible course, you'll suffer too when you realize that everything has been dumbed down or made overly-complex on the Internet and function and utility have been corrupted to get you to pay for upgrades each month... Internet-based business had been making record breaking profits for years based on fair payment for advertising space, and for selling tangible goods and services. If you start a high-overhead business for free and then try to convert it into a paid service then that's where the business model went wrong, not because users are now dependent on the service and primed for milking that dependency. The only people advocating the schemes are people who are invested in them, but they're too caught up to admit the simple truth. We will learn how to communicate in real life again probably while the Web3 dumpster fire burns out, and then rebuild hopefully... :/

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>If you lose your wallet your money is gone? No FDIC protections? Good luck waiting for government to catch up on proper regulations. You can use a smart wallet where you assign your own set of n guardians (even your own phone can be a guardian), and m and n of those guardians can recover your wallet, with you deciding on m and n. Such wallets can even have software enforced daily withdrawal limits, which can only be overriden with the approval of the guardians. It's a completely open system which can be configured any way one wants. A one-size-fits-all government solution destroys innovation and breeds rent-seeking bureaucracy. I suspect the people most vehemently lobbying against open-finance/Web-3.0 are those most deeply entrenched in the centralized power structures of the establishment. One thing I could agree on is the multitude of scams, deceptive marketing etc in the Web 3.0 space. This is a consequence of money being freed from its reigns. It has both positive and negative consequences, and those are the negatives. But finance is on the balance beneficial to humanity, by facilitating more sophisticated coordination, so when you turbo-charge finance, you get a net boost to human coordination.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Listening to Stephen Diehl is a good way to stay poor. Web 3.0 is not a sector that Diehl and his ilk will be able to get their favorite left-wing legislator to squash.

yunohn 5y ago
> Listening to Stephen Diehl is a good way to stay poor. Wait, so is web3 a technology/concept that can benefit people in general? Or just a “get rich quick” scheme, since ignoring it will make you “stay poor”?
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  These two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    They are - if people buy in for the get rich side more than the “this will help me” side?
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      People investing in something due to profit motive does not preclude that investment having social benefits.
flohofwoe 5y ago
So the web's purpose is just to make some people rich? Thanks for the insight :/
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Web3 is very clearly a ponzi scheme, like most things in the crypto and blockchain space. You gotta get in early go get rich. Or stay away and spend time and energy on things that matter instead.

catlikesshrimp 5y ago

Everything wrong with the internet, for me, is nothing crypto can solve. I am concerned about monopolies turning evil. Average Joe wants facebook, and google. People need those services to be regulated. And average Joe can't deal with descentralization. Average nerd should deal with that.

koonsolo 5y ago

I think we arrived at the "then they fight you" stage :D

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jollybean 5y ago

The web is mostly decentralized, set up a server in your home and off you go. I wouldn't worry that much about Web3 because very few organizations will care to partake, there's not value in it for them. If a bunch of kids want to make fake money, tokens and have fun in the their 'Web Tree House' and call it 'Web 3' with Paper Pirate Hats and Wooden Swords then so be it.

agumonkey 5y ago
web3, AFAIK, is not about serving pages, they "want" to reimplement direct economy on their computer. Whatever that economy is ..

eejjjj82 5y ago

Brought to you by "my friend Auzzie, a pretty smart dude."

mrkentutbabi 5y ago
and then the blog proceed to write some political article called "gift economy" even though it promises to not be political.

elzbardico 5y ago

Web3, metaverse and things like that are just vaporware. Not going anywhere. Someday in the future we will laugh about those terms as much as we do when we remember bill gates vision of “the information superhighway”

maccolgan 5y ago

It feels as if 5 similar articles reach the HN top page every day like this. The same arguments are made, the same rebuttals are made, the same comments are made ad nauseam, every single time, with no apparent conclusion. Are we officially living in a simulation? What's happening?

cyberge99 5y ago
I read this as a parody piece. Perhaps I’m jaded, but My common sense immediately had a rebuttal for each “point”. It also offered no solutions.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Easily the lowest signal to noise ratio topic on this site. If I was the mod, I'd ban the topic.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I wish I knew but it's definitely degrading the quality of conversation on the site IMO.

carlosdp 5y ago

> “Now imagine with this proposed Web3 that it’s true that users will own their data and experience. Why in the world would FB and Twitter and the mega corporations allow that? They stand to gain so much.” - my friend Auzzie, a pretty smart dude. This defeatism is kinda almost the point. Why are we just conceding the internet to this small group of companies? Why not at least try to take it back? I really don't understand what this particular bullet-point is trying to say here. People tend to forget that users determine the course of things, companies just build for users. Web2 gets better as things centralize, Web3 gets better as they decentralize and compose/interoperate. That is how we change this dynamic and "eliminate the middlemen."

danlugo92 5y ago

1. "Quadratic voting" Not all web3 apps will use this, in fact most will run away from any kind of voting system, so moot point. 2. "on a handful of very-expensive-to-run nodes hosted on Amazon Web Services and maintained by insiders." Use Bitcoin, with lightning, runs in your Raspberry. 3. I don't even get the point he's making. 4. Ethereum themselves suffered a leak that drained their cryptowallet of $55M. Again, use Bitcoin, don't use centralized hackable shitcoins. 5. "These attacks happen at least a few times a year. Some famous events are Bitcoin Gold in 2020, Etherium Classic in 2019, and Verge in 2018." And again, the answer is use Bitcoin. "Any entity (or group of entities combined) that control 51% of the hash rate have the collective power to control the network," So you want to buy 51% of bitcoin's mining capacity? You absolutely can, it would only cost you billions, well within the reach of any tech magnate or nation state. But the more you pour into it, the more profitable the mining becomes, thus other miners get more BTC, that they can in turn transform into USD to buy more mining equipment. 6. Artificial scarcity. I don't even follow. 7. Early adopters etc. And again, the answer is to use Bitcoin, not preminted centralized shitcoins.