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It makes me very happy to know that all of these websites exist. It also makes me sad to see unnecessary hostility towards crypto. I get it: most NFTs are hype

It makes me very happy to know that all of these websites exist. It also makes me sad to see unnecessary hostility towards crypto. I get it: most NFTs are hyper commercialized trash, and they're in direct opposition to the values outlined in this article. But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.

meowkit 4y ago
Reading the yesterweb criticism page of crypto/web3 that is linked to by the OP makes me think this movement is not going to gain much momentum. The criticism is somewhat accurate, but extremely shallow and makes no attempt to steel man potential benefits. Not that I expect this to land well with the HN crowd, but web3/crypto has the tyrannical effects of capitalism/growth on its side as a force for the “future of the web”. Going up against that with the non-profit model seems… quaint.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Yesterweb asks a simple question, "Can't we have one thing, one measly crumb-of-a-thing, not tainted by capitalism?" And the resounding response is "NO."
  - scyclow 4y ago
    I'm looking forward to the NFT bear market where Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake, and people realize that unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them.
    - Fargoan 4y ago
      We already do that on Tezos
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      > unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them. There's no such thing as a "unique digital asset". Networked computers are good at sharing copies. Any developments against this nature are manufactured, artificial scarcity, for the gains of the controlling party, at the expense of everyone else; and probably in the name of security. If you like them so much I can roll a die and tell only you which number I got, but that wouldn't affect the world in any way unless we're gambling, nor make it any less "unique" than crypto - it's just more bits/dice.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > Yesterweb asks a simple question, "Can't we have one thing, one measly crumb-of-a-thing, not tainted by capitalism?" And the resounding response is "NO." The answer is "Yes, but at a cost". One must subsidise the parasitic nature of digital capitalism. Many of the comments here are about the style or mechanisms of the web, but don't talk much about the values - which are sharing. The object is to give some value to the world, sharing a little of the creation you do. I've set up websites with HOWTO essays, code examples, mp3 files of sound effects I collected, interesting images etc. In the early days it was popular and well regarded amongst a music coding community, but within 10 years it was inoperable. Bots crawling all over it constantly sucked the life out of the server, and literally tens of thousands of parasitic links from commercial entities, spamdexers and SEO trash attached themselves. My site was like a ship dragged down by barnacles and weeds. When I shut down the site I got angry emails from entitled assholes who had embedded sound effects in their applications by linking to my site as if it were an infinite free resource. This story has been told a million times by people who set up websites for fun in the 90s and 00s, and pulled them down after realising the cost (often in time spent reading logs, defending, blocking, banning, rate-limiting etc) What is to be done? In the digital world capitalism does not create value but extracts or appropriates it from creators. To be a digital creator means paying a constant tax to support those who want to make money from you. While cryptocurrency type Web3.0 seems to offer a solution it only fights fire with fire, wrapping the web in a framework of mutual extraction and appropriation. Ultimately I think that only plays into the hands of the extractors who will use it to find ever more effective ways to thrive as parasites.
giantrobot 4y ago
> But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers. Bullshit. Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. This is 180° from the "old web". End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. They didn't have to prop up some asshole's upline to check out the Unofficial X-Files Fan Page.
- scyclow 4y ago
  > So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. I can say the same about anything else on the internet. Keeping the servers running costs money > Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. You can actually access most web3 content without spending Geoffrey dollars, or US Dollars. If we're talking about public blockchains like Ethereum, it's all out in the open. By definition, it's a public ledger. IPFS data (which has nothing to do with crypto) is also very public. > End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. I guess some web3 websites require you to connect with a wallet, but downloading a browser extension doesn't seem very prohibitive.
  - DebtDeflation 4y ago
    What problem is web3 even trying to solve? As it stands today I can conduct commerce over the web, pay for access to content directly, or have free content that is advertising supported. Having to connect with a wallet and spend some specialized cryptocurrency to access a website provides what benefit? It seems like a solution chasing a problem like literally everything else crypto related.
    - scyclow 4y ago
      I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees. So in the context of the Web Revivalist movement, how do you build stateful applications? It's great when individuals host their own DIY servers, but that doesn't really give you much stability. And in aggregate, it's even more difficult to build rich, stateful ecosystems of applications. How do you handle servers going down and APIs changing? Link rot for stateless websites is a hard enough as it is.
MrAwesome 4y ago
I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything (from my understanding, this is sorta by definition, but maybe I'm missing something). Do you have any examples?
- voldacar 4y ago
  Monero isn't commercialized. It's just a currency that people actually use for transactions, not a product.
  - MrAwesome 4y ago
    A currency is generally intended mainly for commercial purposes, isn't it? I think the word commercialized isn't quite right for what I mean then. So more specifically, I mean: "not for the purpose of creating or transferring monetary value, and not requiring the expenditure of money to create/send the amount of data necessary to host a simple plaintext/html page"
    - voldacar 4y ago
      I was assuming you meant things like NFTs or smart contracts, i.e. commercial products that live on a blockchain
- scyclow 4y ago
  The Worm is a really fun one. The idea is that you transfer the worm NFT from wallet to wallet (it's "trying to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain"), and it leaves a non-transferrable token wherever it's been. To my knowledge, it's been transferred about 750 times without anyone selling it. https://theworm.wtf/ https://theworm.wtf/ Another cool one is minting amulets. You write a poem, and if the hash of that poem has an amulet in it (four or more consecutive 8s), then you can mint it as a token for your collection. But you can't mint the same hashed poem twice https://text.bargains/collection/ https://text.bargains/collection/ I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.
civilized 4y ago
Crypto is about making sure the supply of something stays limited. Seems pretty contradictory to the spirit of free creative expression the Web Revival is going for.
- scyclow 4y ago
  I think they solve different problems. I love independent websites, and the web is an amazing medium for serving stateless content. But I think web3 compliments it really well when you want to do something that hooks into a larger, stateful ecosystem.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I'm sure you can think of a much simpler way of doing stateful things with networked computers than crypto.
    - scyclow 4y ago
      I think it really depends on what you want to do. If you want build a comment system for your website, then web3 is totally the wrong tool for the job. If you want to write an application that coordinates data across multiple websites, and you're worried about servers going down or APIs changing, then it's a little trickier to think of a simpler way.
- tjstebbing 4y ago
  Except for instance something like Dogecoin that is the direct opposite of what you're saying?
  - civilized 4y ago
    The supply of dogecoins is increasing but still strictly limited at any given time. They're not like artwork that can be copied and shared by anyone.
jancsika 4y ago
Most importantly-- it shares the foundational feature of having such a small publishing cost that it creates a paradigm shift in how we are able to self-organize. That's one thing that bothered and confused the cranks with burgeoning Wikipedia. Why does the Pokemon article have a longer page than one on the Vietnam War? The priorities are out of wack, they thought, without realizing that the lack of scarcity in a web page (well, technically a scroll) and low friction of revisions ends up changing the process of editing an encyclopedia for length. It's similar for Bitcoin. Cranks on HN always want to to downplay it's 3-orders-of-magnitude superior transaction speed to Visa/Mastercard by pointing out the much smaller value being transacted. One million microtransactions for a grand total of $1000, they say, without realizing that it's the types of transactions these (often automated) payments support which simply aren't possible using the old payment paradigm. Without the scale and speed of microtransactions Bitcoin makes possible, you don't just end up with a less effective National Association of Independent Investigative Units. Games in Geocities 2 don't just get a little bit laggy. FOSSmobiles don't just take a little longer to update their FOSStertainment panels. You simply end up with a world where none of that stuff exists. Oh wait I forgot Bitcoin doesn't work like that. Still, we've got Sci-hub donations and that one ransomware that apparently donates to charities. So not so different, really.
- Fargoan 4y ago
  You can do that with Lightning Network

meowkit 4y ago

Reading the yesterweb criticism page of crypto/web3 that is linked to by the OP makes me think this movement is not going to gain much momentum. The criticism is somewhat accurate, but extremely shallow and makes no attempt to steel man potential benefits. Not that I expect this to land well with the HN crowd, but web3/crypto has the tyrannical effects of capitalism/growth on its side as a force for the “future of the web”. Going up against that with the non-profit model seems… quaint.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Yesterweb asks a simple question, "Can't we have one thing, one measly crumb-of-a-thing, not tainted by capitalism?" And the resounding response is "NO."
- scyclow 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to the NFT bear market where Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake, and people realize that unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them.
  - Fargoan 4y ago
    We already do that on Tezos
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    > unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them. There's no such thing as a "unique digital asset". Networked computers are good at sharing copies. Any developments against this nature are manufactured, artificial scarcity, for the gains of the controlling party, at the expense of everyone else; and probably in the name of security. If you like them so much I can roll a die and tell only you which number I got, but that wouldn't affect the world in any way unless we're gambling, nor make it any less "unique" than crypto - it's just more bits/dice.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Yesterweb asks a simple question, "Can't we have one thing, one measly crumb-of-a-thing, not tainted by capitalism?" And the resounding response is "NO." The answer is "Yes, but at a cost". One must subsidise the parasitic nature of digital capitalism. Many of the comments here are about the style or mechanisms of the web, but don't talk much about the values - which are sharing. The object is to give some value to the world, sharing a little of the creation you do. I've set up websites with HOWTO essays, code examples, mp3 files of sound effects I collected, interesting images etc. In the early days it was popular and well regarded amongst a music coding community, but within 10 years it was inoperable. Bots crawling all over it constantly sucked the life out of the server, and literally tens of thousands of parasitic links from commercial entities, spamdexers and SEO trash attached themselves. My site was like a ship dragged down by barnacles and weeds. When I shut down the site I got angry emails from entitled assholes who had embedded sound effects in their applications by linking to my site as if it were an infinite free resource. This story has been told a million times by people who set up websites for fun in the 90s and 00s, and pulled them down after realising the cost (often in time spent reading logs, defending, blocking, banning, rate-limiting etc) What is to be done? In the digital world capitalism does not create value but extracts or appropriates it from creators. To be a digital creator means paying a constant tax to support those who want to make money from you. While cryptocurrency type Web3.0 seems to offer a solution it only fights fire with fire, wrapping the web in a framework of mutual extraction and appropriation. Ultimately I think that only plays into the hands of the extractors who will use it to find ever more effective ways to thrive as parasites.

giantrobot 4y ago

> But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers. Bullshit. Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. This is 180° from the "old web". End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. They didn't have to prop up some asshole's upline to check out the Unofficial X-Files Fan Page.

scyclow 4y ago
> So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. I can say the same about anything else on the internet. Keeping the servers running costs money > Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. You can actually access most web3 content without spending Geoffrey dollars, or US Dollars. If we're talking about public blockchains like Ethereum, it's all out in the open. By definition, it's a public ledger. IPFS data (which has nothing to do with crypto) is also very public. > End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. I guess some web3 websites require you to connect with a wallet, but downloading a browser extension doesn't seem very prohibitive.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  What problem is web3 even trying to solve? As it stands today I can conduct commerce over the web, pay for access to content directly, or have free content that is advertising supported. Having to connect with a wallet and spend some specialized cryptocurrency to access a website provides what benefit? It seems like a solution chasing a problem like literally everything else crypto related.
  - scyclow 4y ago
    I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees. So in the context of the Web Revivalist movement, how do you build stateful applications? It's great when individuals host their own DIY servers, but that doesn't really give you much stability. And in aggregate, it's even more difficult to build rich, stateful ecosystems of applications. How do you handle servers going down and APIs changing? Link rot for stateless websites is a hard enough as it is.

MrAwesome 4y ago

I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything (from my understanding, this is sorta by definition, but maybe I'm missing something). Do you have any examples?

voldacar 4y ago
Monero isn't commercialized. It's just a currency that people actually use for transactions, not a product.
- MrAwesome 4y ago
  A currency is generally intended mainly for commercial purposes, isn't it? I think the word commercialized isn't quite right for what I mean then. So more specifically, I mean: "not for the purpose of creating or transferring monetary value, and not requiring the expenditure of money to create/send the amount of data necessary to host a simple plaintext/html page"
  - voldacar 4y ago
    I was assuming you meant things like NFTs or smart contracts, i.e. commercial products that live on a blockchain
scyclow 4y ago
The Worm is a really fun one. The idea is that you transfer the worm NFT from wallet to wallet (it's "trying to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain"), and it leaves a non-transferrable token wherever it's been. To my knowledge, it's been transferred about 750 times without anyone selling it. https://theworm.wtf/ https://theworm.wtf/ Another cool one is minting amulets. You write a poem, and if the hash of that poem has an amulet in it (four or more consecutive 8s), then you can mint it as a token for your collection. But you can't mint the same hashed poem twice https://text.bargains/collection/ https://text.bargains/collection/ I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.

civilized 4y ago

Crypto is about making sure the supply of something stays limited. Seems pretty contradictory to the spirit of free creative expression the Web Revival is going for.

scyclow 4y ago
I think they solve different problems. I love independent websites, and the web is an amazing medium for serving stateless content. But I think web3 compliments it really well when you want to do something that hooks into a larger, stateful ecosystem.
- civilized 4y ago
  I'm sure you can think of a much simpler way of doing stateful things with networked computers than crypto.
  - scyclow 4y ago
    I think it really depends on what you want to do. If you want build a comment system for your website, then web3 is totally the wrong tool for the job. If you want to write an application that coordinates data across multiple websites, and you're worried about servers going down or APIs changing, then it's a little trickier to think of a simpler way.
tjstebbing 4y ago
Except for instance something like Dogecoin that is the direct opposite of what you're saying?
- civilized 4y ago
  The supply of dogecoins is increasing but still strictly limited at any given time. They're not like artwork that can be copied and shared by anyone.

jancsika 4y ago

Most importantly-- it shares the foundational feature of having such a small publishing cost that it creates a paradigm shift in how we are able to self-organize. That's one thing that bothered and confused the cranks with burgeoning Wikipedia. Why does the Pokemon article have a longer page than one on the Vietnam War? The priorities are out of wack, they thought, without realizing that the lack of scarcity in a web page (well, technically a scroll) and low friction of revisions ends up changing the process of editing an encyclopedia for length. It's similar for Bitcoin. Cranks on HN always want to to downplay it's 3-orders-of-magnitude superior transaction speed to Visa/Mastercard by pointing out the much smaller value being transacted. One million microtransactions for a grand total of $1000, they say, without realizing that it's the types of transactions these (often automated) payments support which simply aren't possible using the old payment paradigm. Without the scale and speed of microtransactions Bitcoin makes possible, you don't just end up with a less effective National Association of Independent Investigative Units. Games in Geocities 2 don't just get a little bit laggy. FOSSmobiles don't just take a little longer to update their FOSStertainment panels. You simply end up with a world where none of that stuff exists. Oh wait I forgot Bitcoin doesn't work like that. Still, we've got Sci-hub donations and that one ransomware that apparently donates to charities. So not so different, really.

Fargoan 4y ago
You can do that with Lightning Network