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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. I’m not sure about dange

> 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.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Are they though? How many people do you know working on shitcoins? How many people do you know working on real things?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - sanderjd 4y ago
      For what it's worth, I do think this is (or was) a problem. For awhile late last year and early this year a large proportion of the people I saw leaving my big tech company were going into blockchain stuff. I suspect the current correction will put an end to that though, which I must say seems like a good thing.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      > How many people do you know working on real things? Pretty much everyone I know working in industry is working on imaginary things like increasing engagement and aggregating data. They are doing this because FAANG want them to, not because this is critical work that needs to be done for society.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        I anticipated this objection to my phrasing and I agree, but I couldn't think of another word to use :) Maybe "other" things would have sufficed.
    - lillecarl 4y ago
      I know exactly 0 people doing any kind of crypto work. I do know plenty that are in the ponzi scheme though.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? Very few engineers are working on web3 nonsense. > and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers They're really not. Like, if you're defining "interested in web3" as "they have occasionally said the word 'blockchain' in an attempt to get some press", yeah, sure. But not that many large companies are actually putting significant resources into this. Of the really big tech companies... maybe Facebook is putting substantial resources into it, or has in the past? Though surely not a significant part of their total resources. The others, not at all, really.
lucasverra 4y ago
Have you checked POAP (Proof of attendance Protocol)? poap.xyz 5M mint, one the most used protocol, everything is free. Look for it on twitter and you will go nuts. It's an ERC-721 compatible token, free to create, free to mint and collect POAP stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol — POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event — Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers — POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms
- pjc50 4y ago
  Who cares? (So that's not a dumb dismissal: no really, who cares? Who wants to do these things, what value are they deriving from it, why does the user want to bother with this overhead, and who pays for it?)
- spicybright 4y ago
  That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now. > POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event Save your ticket stub. Buy a t-shirt from the event. It's not even valid proof if the event organizer can hand them out to anyone. > Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers How does an NFT work better than emails/organizing website? > POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms Oh good, so instead of posting things on facebook, now facebook can just read the public chain to get that automatically. Brilliant.
  - kobasa 4y ago
    "That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now." I love the nft haters who think they're sounding smart but sound like absolute morons to anyone who's done at least a few hours of oBjEcTiVe research into the space. And normally I'd take the time to educate but with attitude like this and a made up mind, nah hfsp.
pjc50 4y ago
Great phrasing I saw: "In web2, the user is the product. In web3, the user is someone else's exit liquidity"
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  But haven’t we already been seeing that out of tech companies for the last, what? 15 years? So many companies are built from the ground up to be sold off once the user base crosses a certain threshold. Then it’s sold and either absorbed by a massive company or broken apart for its contents. So many founders build companies for the explicit purpose of build it -> sell it -> build next one. Staying power is barely a factor in that. It’s the buyer’s problem. You just need to convince them it can be done and it’s worth it. Companies like Reddit are the exception to the norm in many ways. They’re almost this weird experiment in “what happens when a built-to-sell startup decides to stick around?” Hell they sold to Condé Nast and lived there for years as just a part of the portfolio. They were in the red for roughly a full decade. That whole arc is weird now that I think about it haha
  - pjc50 4y ago
    A good point. You could call all those "end of our incredible journey" posts "rugpulls", except the investment isn't financial but the investment of your data on a platform which gets deleted. There are a few extra steps in "Vine sell out and now all your vines are gone", but the overall effect can be similar. Founders cash out, users lose out. Somehow it's difficult when people invest actual cash money, especially in large sums.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      Man you are too right about the data rug pulling.
Nursie 4y ago
> token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding. You just reminded me of EOS, which raised over 4 billion dollars and promised to run a 'world computer', that descended into a morass of speculation on everything up to and including RAM timeslot bookings on the system. I just looked it up, and a mere two years later the entity that had all the funds is doing something else, and the community announced the project a total failure. The blockchain space really is stunning to behold.
- exit 4y ago
  it's not a total failure if something was learnt in the process. web3 proposes radically restructuring the web and possibly the economy more broadly, it shouldn't surprise us if it isn't done right immediately.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    I imagine what was learned was along the lines of “don’t give 4 billion dollars to a company with vague promises about development but no concrete plans or legal obligations. Or it should have been, I see little evidence of learning in this space.

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.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Are they though? How many people do you know working on shitcoins? How many people do you know working on real things?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I do think this is (or was) a problem. For awhile late last year and early this year a large proportion of the people I saw leaving my big tech company were going into blockchain stuff. I suspect the current correction will put an end to that though, which I must say seems like a good thing.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > How many people do you know working on real things? Pretty much everyone I know working in industry is working on imaginary things like increasing engagement and aggregating data. They are doing this because FAANG want them to, not because this is critical work that needs to be done for society.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      I anticipated this objection to my phrasing and I agree, but I couldn't think of another word to use :) Maybe "other" things would have sufficed.
  - lillecarl 4y ago
    I know exactly 0 people doing any kind of crypto work. I do know plenty that are in the ponzi scheme though.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? Very few engineers are working on web3 nonsense. > and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers They're really not. Like, if you're defining "interested in web3" as "they have occasionally said the word 'blockchain' in an attempt to get some press", yeah, sure. But not that many large companies are actually putting significant resources into this. Of the really big tech companies... maybe Facebook is putting substantial resources into it, or has in the past? Though surely not a significant part of their total resources. The others, not at all, really.

lucasverra 4y ago

Have you checked POAP (Proof of attendance Protocol)? poap.xyz 5M mint, one the most used protocol, everything is free. Look for it on twitter and you will go nuts. It's an ERC-721 compatible token, free to create, free to mint and collect POAP stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol — POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event — Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers — POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

pjc50 4y ago
Who cares? (So that's not a dumb dismissal: no really, who cares? Who wants to do these things, what value are they deriving from it, why does the user want to bother with this overhead, and who pays for it?)
spicybright 4y ago
That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now. > POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event Save your ticket stub. Buy a t-shirt from the event. It's not even valid proof if the event organizer can hand them out to anyone. > Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers How does an NFT work better than emails/organizing website? > POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms Oh good, so instead of posting things on facebook, now facebook can just read the public chain to get that automatically. Brilliant.
- kobasa 4y ago
  "That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now." I love the nft haters who think they're sounding smart but sound like absolute morons to anyone who's done at least a few hours of oBjEcTiVe research into the space. And normally I'd take the time to educate but with attitude like this and a made up mind, nah hfsp.

pjc50 4y ago

Great phrasing I saw: "In web2, the user is the product. In web3, the user is someone else's exit liquidity"

Forgeties79 4y ago
But haven’t we already been seeing that out of tech companies for the last, what? 15 years? So many companies are built from the ground up to be sold off once the user base crosses a certain threshold. Then it’s sold and either absorbed by a massive company or broken apart for its contents. So many founders build companies for the explicit purpose of build it -> sell it -> build next one. Staying power is barely a factor in that. It’s the buyer’s problem. You just need to convince them it can be done and it’s worth it. Companies like Reddit are the exception to the norm in many ways. They’re almost this weird experiment in “what happens when a built-to-sell startup decides to stick around?” Hell they sold to Condé Nast and lived there for years as just a part of the portfolio. They were in the red for roughly a full decade. That whole arc is weird now that I think about it haha
- pjc50 4y ago
  A good point. You could call all those "end of our incredible journey" posts "rugpulls", except the investment isn't financial but the investment of your data on a platform which gets deleted. There are a few extra steps in "Vine sell out and now all your vines are gone", but the overall effect can be similar. Founders cash out, users lose out. Somehow it's difficult when people invest actual cash money, especially in large sums.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Man you are too right about the data rug pulling.

Nursie 4y ago

> token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding. You just reminded me of EOS, which raised over 4 billion dollars and promised to run a 'world computer', that descended into a morass of speculation on everything up to and including RAM timeslot bookings on the system. I just looked it up, and a mere two years later the entity that had all the funds is doing something else, and the community announced the project a total failure. The blockchain space really is stunning to behold.

exit 4y ago
it's not a total failure if something was learnt in the process. web3 proposes radically restructuring the web and possibly the economy more broadly, it shouldn't surprise us if it isn't done right immediately.
- Nursie 4y ago
  I imagine what was learned was along the lines of “don’t give 4 billion dollars to a company with vague promises about development but no concrete plans or legal obligations. Or it should have been, I see little evidence of learning in this space.