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I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats. The balkanization of the w

I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats. The balkanization of the web seems like a threat that gets bigger every year. Surveillance gets worse every year. Regulatory attempts to combat certain kinds of surveillance do so by shifting the burden of "consent" on to users who don't understand what they're consenting to. Fewer and fewer people have any kind of "ownership" of the web in the form of personal servers, privately-hosted websites, independent self-managed communities, and so on. Perhaps web3 could be a danger if it proposes unworkable solutions to those problems. Token economies and blockchains do give a kind of "ownership" and "participation", but the sheer volatility of the pricing of the goods, services and induced-scarcity "land" on offer makes it impractically risky or expensive for anyone who isn't running some kind of trading strategy. There are lots of good critiques of web3, and good arguments against specific projects, features, or consequences it produces. "Keep the web free" is a fine idea, but I'm not sure that web3 is where the real danger comes from.

version_five 4y ago
Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. So far there is no evidence of that.
- Agamus 4y ago
  Also agreed - I don't think it would be a threat to the freedom of the internet. Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. For many of them, there are alternatives (email), and for the worst offenders, abstaining is easy, and the only option (social media). The old-school internet and web will always be available, ready to use, and superior in almost every way to the dumpster fire of modern websites. Did anyone else experience a palpable feeling of euphoria when visiting OP's website? For me, it was blissful and uncanny. Here is a webpage with design pulled non-ironically straight out of 1999, which also somehow feels like it was made in 1999. Not a hipster's prerequisite "indie-web" presence, not an emulation or demonstration built in a framework -- a simple, flat-file webpage that speaks to the defense of the original web, and in the native tongue. Perhaps we should encourage web3. After all, it is by virtue of this crisis that so many more people are realizing why even web 2.0 was mostly just a commercialization of web, and has changed us for the worse.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't.
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >> Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. <Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't. I may be misunderstanding your point (if so, my apologies), but if someone is a friend, an actual, real friend, not an online acquaintance, there are many, many ways to stay in touch and maintain those relationships that have nothing to do with online social media sites. I'd posit that if someone is unwilling to interact with you because you don't wish to use the same social media site, they're not really your "friend," just an acquaintance on (or a shill for) some social media site(s).
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        People say this but that's not my experience. People just don't keep up by other means and some people just don't even have or use other means at all. In some places, Facebook is the entire Internet, for example. I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps. This has no bearing on whether we have deep friendships (and sometimes more) or not.
        nobody9999 4y ago
        >I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps. Then those folks aren't your friends. Feel free to disagree (as I'm sure you do), but if such folks actually gave a rat's ass about you, they'd use one or more of the dozen or so other ways to stay in touch should you leave such social media sites. I can't (and wouldn't pretend to) speak for anyone else, but I want to be around folks who want to be around me. And not all of those. tl;dr: If someone's "friendship" is contingent on the use of a particular website/app, then they're not really your friend.
- twox2 4y ago
  But a lot of people do use it?
- arinlen 4y ago
  > Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. That does not change the fact that Web3's main selling point is it's ability to eliminate their user's basic freedoms.
sacul 4y ago
I'm not sure we can have it both ways. In other words, I'm growing in my conviction that freedom and privacy on the web require increased balkanization. Neil Postman (of whom I'm a big fan, to put my cards on the table) wrote very helpfully about the concept of "filters" (that may not be his word) in Technopoly, and I've been thinking about the concept a lot ever since. Certain things are inadmissable in court, and that is true because otherwise you'll just have bedlam. The analogy doesn't hold perfectly, but the same thing is true of other situations where people gather together to communicate, whether in person or online. The other thing that's required to avoid total chaos is authority, and I think it's a common trait to be dismissive of the value and purpose of authority in this context. People have been dismissive about authority since, uh, forever, but I think there's something about the promise of the internet that makes people think we have finally arrived at the point where it is unnecessary. (Think blockchains and crypto, for instance.) But it's not. The sooner we see that authority isn't a bug but a feature and begin to build for it in our tech tools, the better.
- indigochill 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm generally of this conviction as well. Particularly looking at the Tildeverse (basically multi-user shell environments that usually loosely network with each other), there are definitely sysadmins in that environment but there are a couple things they do better than, say, Facebook: 1. They personally vet the people they let in to maintain the style of community they're going for. 2. If someone's a problem, it falls to the sysadmin or the people they chose as moderators to kick the person. 3. Anyone can start a tilde and network with the others, but this is done at a human level, meaning people need to actually -want- to network with you. 4. The size of the communities are kept human-scale. It happens that a tilde "fills up" and that people who want in just need to start their own, which is how the whole "tildeverse" arose: from tilde.club reaching capacity and enough other people liking the idea they decided to copy it. I'm a big believer in this sort of federation approach to the internet in general. The clue is in the name: the "internet" is a network of networks, and IMO we shouldn't expose everything to the rest of the world, but only carefully curated gateways behind which the trusted network with admins who the curated community believes in can operate with less fear of bad actors (at some level we all know this already because this is how Instagram users behave, just at a social level instead of a technical level).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hnbad 4y ago
Web3 as it is is impotent and useless. Yeah, that makes it harmless, but the idea behind it isn't. The idea behind web3 is that everything lives "on chain" (the same way the idea of the Internet to some was that everything is "online"). This is not just a whimsical dream but a vital necessity for most of its promises to even function. Listen to crypto enthusiasts and you'll hear many scenarios which only work if this is already the case. "Smart contracts" are useless for anything "off chain" because they can only interact within the chain. You can set up a smart contract to grant royalties off the trade of an NFT, sure, but if you mint an NFT of your book to do that you can literally still sell copies of that book "off chain" without triggering the contract (so you still need the entire legal apparatus of the centralized state dealing in fiat currency, which NFTs and crypto and smart contracts were supposed to replace). You can see this play out in the (poor and thus cheap to invest in) African countries crypto enthusiasts have been trying to use as lab rats: universities issue their degrees "on chain", land ownership is tracked "on chain", and so on. If all legal documents and claims are replaced by tokens and smart contracts, you can circumvent laws because what's the point of having a legal claim if you can't enforce it because everything runs on the chain and the chain disagrees with your claim? Even the enthusiasts of course forget to talk about how this makes every person incredibly transparent (no need to "dox" strangers, you can just track their transaction history and literally inspect their wallet to find out everything there is to know about them) and how it turns identity theft from an annoyance to something irreversible (because to the chain, every owner is the rightful owner) that can happen to you as easily as accidentally leaking your Facebook password. Yes, I know about tumblers but if you have to resort to money laundering tools to recreate any semblence of privacy I hope I don't need to spell out how this seems to be more about money laundering than privacy. And this doesn't even go into how all the fabulous claims about NFTs in games are little more than microtransactions, lootboxes and DLC, how "play to earn" just replaces game mechanics with grind (or at best encourages literal ponzi schemes of renting out your account to allow other people to fight over scraps until the currency becomes worthless) and how none of the technologies involved are "new" or offer any interesting solutions to problems that actually exist outside crypto itself. Oh, and of course on top of that every single crypto project is either a ponzi scheme (or pyramid scheme, or any of the dozens of variants of scams that are legally neither of those because of technical details but still function the exact same way) or a "rugpull" waiting to happen.
thelittleone 4y ago
For me, the biggest suck to web experience since I first started using it back when MSN came out (90s) is every page prompting GDPR.
- lentil_soup 4y ago
  While the prompt is annoying the true culprit of ruining the web experience are websites trying to gather as much data as possible
  - exit 4y ago
    which is due to the centralised framework which incentivises the web now.
- bogomipz 4y ago
  Which is often immediately followed by a pop-up asking me to subscribe to get email updates. Curiously this prompt seems to occur before you've had time to read the first sentence of content.
  - Snowworm 4y ago
    Yes, it's pretty stupid. I don't know why anyone would subscribe to a newsletter before even knowing what it's about, they should do it once you've read the entire article.
- BoxOfRain 4y ago
  I have uBlock filters to bin off these cookie popups, I'm amazed those irritating things ever became law without someone pointing out how completely futile alarm fatigue makes them. Now if the GDPR could realistically do something about the tidal wave of spam I've got from pubs in random parts of England and Wales I happened to visit once while waiting for a train back when they were insisting on doing everything through an app that would be nice! I'm fairly sure most apps don't need to be apps at all, they could be websites if companies weren't desperate to inject analytics and yet another vector for spammy marketing into every interaction with them.
schroeding 4y ago
Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without many users). YouTube killed almost all competitors. Facebook killed the smaller social networks and many websites of small companies. Most survivors of these "consolidations" were only protected by some kind of cultural or language barrier, like VKontakte or NicoNico. Or do you mean balkanization by apps, replacing the web? I wholeheartedly agree with the rest, though.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without any users)." Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet.
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet. Also, what killed Usenet was mainly the byzantine process of creating newsgroups (i.e., artificial barriers to entry), and how those who found themselves in charge of popular newsgroups tendes to be heavy-handed in how they viewed the role of censorship as beneficial (i.e., more artificial barriers to entry). Now comes web3 and the only technical benefit that's being pushed is it's ability to impose artificial barriers to entry at a deeper architectural level.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET. See Russ Allbery's legendary rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
      - arinlen 4y ago
        > Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET. Spam was a nuisance, but not a relevant or even significant one at a technical standpoint. Client-side spam filters and the flimsiest of moderation solved that problem. Claiming that spam killed Usenet makes as much sense as claiming that spam killed email.
jsemrau 4y ago
I am interested in Web3 if, and only if, it allows for people with specialized knowledge to benefit economically from it. For example, currently people are posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit some insights. Who benefits from it? Microsoft (who owns LinkedIn), Meta, and Reddit. The profit margins are insane. If the same people, who usually don't care about becoming influencers could earn some extra bucks for posting good content, I am all in.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats. I’m not sure about dangerous or threatening, but virtually every “web3” product so far has come with a blockchain and token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding. Look at any web3 style project from distributed file storage to virtual land sales and you’ll find the majority of participants in the ecosystem aren’t actually interested in using the platform. They’re interested in getting there early and scooping up as many tokens or coins as possible so they can flip them to someone else in the future. Actually using any of the NFT based systems can be shockingly expensive ($10-$100 in fees just to modify an ENS entry, for example) or involve a lot of weird financial quirks like a price that effectively varies wildly from month to month depending on blockchain congestion and speculative forces.
- vkou 4y ago
  I agree with your description of the situation, but that is actually a good thing (for the internet). [1] The reason everyone is doing speculative bullshit in Web3 is exactly why it isn't a threat to the internet. There is nothing useful that it has created. There is no reason for anyone who isn't trying to fleece bigger fools to buy into it. There is nothing that ecosystem does that's at all better than what we have today. Web3 isn't going to replace the internet - all it has replaced is the penny stock scam. [1] it's a bad thing for the participants in these schemes.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? I know it’s not a zero sum game but at the same time we only have limited resources, and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers, at a scale where whatever FAANG is doing, the rest of the world is keen on doing. I guess what I’m saying is web3 being terrible, scammy, and useless don’t strike me as reasons why it won’t supplant the web as it exists today. It could just win through attrition, as everyone interested in keeping the current web going retires and dies, as there’s no money in maintaining old systems; while those making fortunes off web3 scams are massively incentivized to keep the scam money flowing.
cnity 4y ago
This is a political problem seeking a technological solution. There are wires connecting my computer to yours, it's just a question of who owns them. Any technologically incompetent government can institute bad laws that damage the ability to use those wires in an empowering way.
doomleika 4y ago
If anything "web3" is a privacy nightmare. Before platforms have to incentive you to use SSO and cookies to draw you in. now people are tagging NFTs with their address and act as SSO, reasonably anyone can pinpoint you with a few tech skills if such is the future. Whatever you think the bad thing in "web2"(I hate this term) will happen and 100x in so called "web3" future.

version_five 4y ago

Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. So far there is no evidence of that.

Agamus 4y ago
Also agreed - I don't think it would be a threat to the freedom of the internet. Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. For many of them, there are alternatives (email), and for the worst offenders, abstaining is easy, and the only option (social media). The old-school internet and web will always be available, ready to use, and superior in almost every way to the dumpster fire of modern websites. Did anyone else experience a palpable feeling of euphoria when visiting OP's website? For me, it was blissful and uncanny. Here is a webpage with design pulled non-ironically straight out of 1999, which also somehow feels like it was made in 1999. Not a hipster's prerequisite "indie-web" presence, not an emulation or demonstration built in a framework -- a simple, flat-file webpage that speaks to the defense of the original web, and in the native tongue. Perhaps we should encourage web3. After all, it is by virtue of this crisis that so many more people are realizing why even web 2.0 was mostly just a commercialization of web, and has changed us for the worse.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >> Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. <Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't. I may be misunderstanding your point (if so, my apologies), but if someone is a friend, an actual, real friend, not an online acquaintance, there are many, many ways to stay in touch and maintain those relationships that have nothing to do with online social media sites. I'd posit that if someone is unwilling to interact with you because you don't wish to use the same social media site, they're not really your "friend," just an acquaintance on (or a shill for) some social media site(s).
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      People say this but that's not my experience. People just don't keep up by other means and some people just don't even have or use other means at all. In some places, Facebook is the entire Internet, for example. I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps. This has no bearing on whether we have deep friendships (and sometimes more) or not.
      - nobody9999 4y ago
        >I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps. Then those folks aren't your friends. Feel free to disagree (as I'm sure you do), but if such folks actually gave a rat's ass about you, they'd use one or more of the dozen or so other ways to stay in touch should you leave such social media sites. I can't (and wouldn't pretend to) speak for anyone else, but I want to be around folks who want to be around me. And not all of those. tl;dr: If someone's "friendship" is contingent on the use of a particular website/app, then they're not really your friend.
twox2 4y ago
But a lot of people do use it?
arinlen 4y ago
> Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. That does not change the fact that Web3's main selling point is it's ability to eliminate their user's basic freedoms.

sacul 4y ago

I'm not sure we can have it both ways. In other words, I'm growing in my conviction that freedom and privacy on the web require increased balkanization. Neil Postman (of whom I'm a big fan, to put my cards on the table) wrote very helpfully about the concept of "filters" (that may not be his word) in Technopoly, and I've been thinking about the concept a lot ever since. Certain things are inadmissable in court, and that is true because otherwise you'll just have bedlam. The analogy doesn't hold perfectly, but the same thing is true of other situations where people gather together to communicate, whether in person or online. The other thing that's required to avoid total chaos is authority, and I think it's a common trait to be dismissive of the value and purpose of authority in this context. People have been dismissive about authority since, uh, forever, but I think there's something about the promise of the internet that makes people think we have finally arrived at the point where it is unnecessary. (Think blockchains and crypto, for instance.) But it's not. The sooner we see that authority isn't a bug but a feature and begin to build for it in our tech tools, the better.

indigochill 4y ago
Yeah, I'm generally of this conviction as well. Particularly looking at the Tildeverse (basically multi-user shell environments that usually loosely network with each other), there are definitely sysadmins in that environment but there are a couple things they do better than, say, Facebook: 1. They personally vet the people they let in to maintain the style of community they're going for. 2. If someone's a problem, it falls to the sysadmin or the people they chose as moderators to kick the person. 3. Anyone can start a tilde and network with the others, but this is done at a human level, meaning people need to actually -want- to network with you. 4. The size of the communities are kept human-scale. It happens that a tilde "fills up" and that people who want in just need to start their own, which is how the whole "tildeverse" arose: from tilde.club reaching capacity and enough other people liking the idea they decided to copy it. I'm a big believer in this sort of federation approach to the internet in general. The clue is in the name: the "internet" is a network of networks, and IMO we shouldn't expose everything to the rest of the world, but only carefully curated gateways behind which the trusted network with admins who the curated community believes in can operate with less fear of bad actors (at some level we all know this already because this is how Instagram users behave, just at a social level instead of a technical level).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hnbad 4y ago

Web3 as it is is impotent and useless. Yeah, that makes it harmless, but the idea behind it isn't. The idea behind web3 is that everything lives "on chain" (the same way the idea of the Internet to some was that everything is "online"). This is not just a whimsical dream but a vital necessity for most of its promises to even function. Listen to crypto enthusiasts and you'll hear many scenarios which only work if this is already the case. "Smart contracts" are useless for anything "off chain" because they can only interact within the chain. You can set up a smart contract to grant royalties off the trade of an NFT, sure, but if you mint an NFT of your book to do that you can literally still sell copies of that book "off chain" without triggering the contract (so you still need the entire legal apparatus of the centralized state dealing in fiat currency, which NFTs and crypto and smart contracts were supposed to replace). You can see this play out in the (poor and thus cheap to invest in) African countries crypto enthusiasts have been trying to use as lab rats: universities issue their degrees "on chain", land ownership is tracked "on chain", and so on. If all legal documents and claims are replaced by tokens and smart contracts, you can circumvent laws because what's the point of having a legal claim if you can't enforce it because everything runs on the chain and the chain disagrees with your claim? Even the enthusiasts of course forget to talk about how this makes every person incredibly transparent (no need to "dox" strangers, you can just track their transaction history and literally inspect their wallet to find out everything there is to know about them) and how it turns identity theft from an annoyance to something irreversible (because to the chain, every owner is the rightful owner) that can happen to you as easily as accidentally leaking your Facebook password. Yes, I know about tumblers but if you have to resort to money laundering tools to recreate any semblence of privacy I hope I don't need to spell out how this seems to be more about money laundering than privacy. And this doesn't even go into how all the fabulous claims about NFTs in games are little more than microtransactions, lootboxes and DLC, how "play to earn" just replaces game mechanics with grind (or at best encourages literal ponzi schemes of renting out your account to allow other people to fight over scraps until the currency becomes worthless) and how none of the technologies involved are "new" or offer any interesting solutions to problems that actually exist outside crypto itself. Oh, and of course on top of that every single crypto project is either a ponzi scheme (or pyramid scheme, or any of the dozens of variants of scams that are legally neither of those because of technical details but still function the exact same way) or a "rugpull" waiting to happen.

thelittleone 4y ago

For me, the biggest suck to web experience since I first started using it back when MSN came out (90s) is every page prompting GDPR.

lentil_soup 4y ago
While the prompt is annoying the true culprit of ruining the web experience are websites trying to gather as much data as possible
- exit 4y ago
  which is due to the centralised framework which incentivises the web now.
bogomipz 4y ago
Which is often immediately followed by a pop-up asking me to subscribe to get email updates. Curiously this prompt seems to occur before you've had time to read the first sentence of content.
- Snowworm 4y ago
  Yes, it's pretty stupid. I don't know why anyone would subscribe to a newsletter before even knowing what it's about, they should do it once you've read the entire article.
BoxOfRain 4y ago
I have uBlock filters to bin off these cookie popups, I'm amazed those irritating things ever became law without someone pointing out how completely futile alarm fatigue makes them. Now if the GDPR could realistically do something about the tidal wave of spam I've got from pubs in random parts of England and Wales I happened to visit once while waiting for a train back when they were insisting on doing everything through an app that would be nice! I'm fairly sure most apps don't need to be apps at all, they could be websites if companies weren't desperate to inject analytics and yet another vector for spammy marketing into every interaction with them.

schroeding 4y ago

Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without many users). YouTube killed almost all competitors. Facebook killed the smaller social networks and many websites of small companies. Most survivors of these "consolidations" were only protected by some kind of cultural or language barrier, like VKontakte or NicoNico. Or do you mean balkanization by apps, replacing the web? I wholeheartedly agree with the rest, though.

pmoriarty 4y ago
"Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without any users)." Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet. Also, what killed Usenet was mainly the byzantine process of creating newsgroups (i.e., artificial barriers to entry), and how those who found themselves in charge of popular newsgroups tendes to be heavy-handed in how they viewed the role of censorship as beneficial (i.e., more artificial barriers to entry). Now comes web3 and the only technical benefit that's being pushed is it's ability to impose artificial barriers to entry at a deeper architectural level.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET. See Russ Allbery's legendary rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
    - arinlen 4y ago
      > Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET. Spam was a nuisance, but not a relevant or even significant one at a technical standpoint. Client-side spam filters and the flimsiest of moderation solved that problem. Claiming that spam killed Usenet makes as much sense as claiming that spam killed email.

jsemrau 4y ago

I am interested in Web3 if, and only if, it allows for people with specialized knowledge to benefit economically from it. For example, currently people are posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit some insights. Who benefits from it? Microsoft (who owns LinkedIn), Meta, and Reddit. The profit margins are insane. If the same people, who usually don't care about becoming influencers could earn some extra bucks for posting good content, I am all in.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats. I’m not sure about dangerous or threatening, but virtually every “web3” product so far has come with a blockchain and token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding. Look at any web3 style project from distributed file storage to virtual land sales and you’ll find the majority of participants in the ecosystem aren’t actually interested in using the platform. They’re interested in getting there early and scooping up as many tokens or coins as possible so they can flip them to someone else in the future. Actually using any of the NFT based systems can be shockingly expensive ($10-$100 in fees just to modify an ENS entry, for example) or involve a lot of weird financial quirks like a price that effectively varies wildly from month to month depending on blockchain congestion and speculative forces.

vkou 4y ago
I agree with your description of the situation, but that is actually a good thing (for the internet). [1] The reason everyone is doing speculative bullshit in Web3 is exactly why it isn't a threat to the internet. There is nothing useful that it has created. There is no reason for anyone who isn't trying to fleece bigger fools to buy into it. There is nothing that ecosystem does that's at all better than what we have today. Web3 isn't going to replace the internet - all it has replaced is the penny stock scam. [1] it's a bad thing for the participants in these schemes.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? I know it’s not a zero sum game but at the same time we only have limited resources, and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers, at a scale where whatever FAANG is doing, the rest of the world is keen on doing. I guess what I’m saying is web3 being terrible, scammy, and useless don’t strike me as reasons why it won’t supplant the web as it exists today. It could just win through attrition, as everyone interested in keeping the current web going retires and dies, as there’s no money in maintaining old systems; while those making fortunes off web3 scams are massively incentivized to keep the scam money flowing.

cnity 4y ago

This is a political problem seeking a technological solution. There are wires connecting my computer to yours, it's just a question of who owns them. Any technologically incompetent government can institute bad laws that damage the ability to use those wires in an empowering way.

doomleika 4y ago

If anything "web3" is a privacy nightmare. Before platforms have to incentive you to use SSO and cookies to draw you in. now people are tagging NFTs with their address and act as SSO, reasonably anyone can pinpoint you with a few tech skills if such is the future. Whatever you think the bad thing in "web2"(I hate this term) will happen and 100x in so called "web3" future.