Setting aside the arbitrary fuzziness of the "WebN" labels, Web 2.0 addressed two clear shortcomings of the WWW stack: (1) no protocols for persistent user iden

Setting aside the arbitrary fuzziness of the "WebN" labels, Web 2.0 addressed two clear shortcomings of the WWW stack: (1) no protocols for persistent user identity, and (2) no protocols for value transfer. The trade-off of the 2.0 era was (is): solving those required out-sourcing to private, pseudo-feudal institutions: Google/Facebook/etc in the first case, PayPal/Venmo/etc in the second. (One could argue that WWW did in fact have affordances to make this possible, in the form of cookies and SSL; but the point is, those affordances were insufficient on their own, requiring integration with centralized "cloud" providers, and in the case of value transfer, central banks as well.) The alleged intent of "web3" is to address these shortcomings in a user-sovereign, platform-native way. No doubt, a huge number of projects operating in the space are glorified rug-pulls and Ponzi schemes; I don't blame skeptics at all, considering the history of moral hazards, perverse incentives, and blatant scams in crypto-economics. All the same, I wouldn't write off the category wholesale; there are some fascinating things happening in non-blockchain FOSS projects [0], voluntary creation of public goods [1], and community revivification of the Commons [2]. [0] https://taler.net/en/index.html https://taler.net/en/index.html [1] https://commonsstack.org/ https://commonsstack.org/ [2] https://commonsengine.org/ https://commonsengine.org/