4 ms·

"Tim O'Reilly: As a metaphor, I personally put web three in about 1983. This has been my impression for some time." This is a bit harsh but not wrong. What in

"Tim O'Reilly: As a metaphor, I personally put web three in about 1983. This has been my impression for some time." This is a bit harsh but not wrong. What in my opinion is especially interesting is that we have so many eyes on it already... (this is not necessarily a good thing) While a lot of people are hating on NFTs or laughing at scalability we need to keep in mind that most development is happening in an open source fashion. If you think about the banking sector in general it is quite secretive and speculative and I believe a fresh wind was necessary and banks got the memo. Another big problem I see in web3 is that projects are just trying too hard; in this sense we are way more aligned with the Dot-Com bubble. While we are stuck in 1983 (for now) everyone is promising 2050 by yesterday and it gets tiring quickly. However, the internet was also intended for the individual and was taken away from us as platforms took over... The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

twblalock 5y ago
> However, the internet was also intended for the individual and was taken away from us as platforms took over I'm not sure the internet or the web was ever intended for the individual. The centralization of large platforms was probably unexpected, but an outcome where large numbers of "normal" people ran their own sites or servers was not expected either. Early in the history of the web we did see a lot of personal sites and webrings etc. crop up, but that was a result of the enthusiasm of early adopters, many of whom were technical people, and it never would have had mass appeal for the vast majority of the population. There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for the early days of the web, which misleads people into believing the web would have continued to work that way if not for the big platforms who took over. But the big platforms were introduced at a time when the web was still pretty decentralized, and they took over because average non-technical users prefer them for their ease of use and network effects.

twblalock 5y ago

> However, the internet was also intended for the individual and was taken away from us as platforms took over I'm not sure the internet or the web was ever intended for the individual. The centralization of large platforms was probably unexpected, but an outcome where large numbers of "normal" people ran their own sites or servers was not expected either. Early in the history of the web we did see a lot of personal sites and webrings etc. crop up, but that was a result of the enthusiasm of early adopters, many of whom were technical people, and it never would have had mass appeal for the vast majority of the population. There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for the early days of the web, which misleads people into believing the web would have continued to work that way if not for the big platforms who took over. But the big platforms were introduced at a time when the web was still pretty decentralized, and they took over because average non-technical users prefer them for their ease of use and network effects.