13 ms·

Is Web3 Bullshit? (Transcript)

124 points by pferde 4y ago

medo-bear 4y ago
web3 is kind of like playing The Game - ie if you are consciously making web3, you lost the game
- antics9 4y ago
  so like being a hipster?
  - medo-bear 4y ago
    whats a hipster?
    - antics9 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subculture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subcultu...
      - medo-bear 4y ago
        is it something like this ? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4n6OVoyYQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4n6OVoyYQ
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gargs 4y ago
Is Web2 Bullshit?
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Well no, because it exists and people use it for everything. Web3 on the other hand is the exclusive domain of a few die-hard anarchocapitalist libertarians and a few promoters pumping their bags. [edit] It creates a perverse model where every app is expected to create its own little Ponzi scheme to entice people with. Then, your job is to market the token not the service. Any service that actually invests in building a product people want can deliver that product faster, simpler and more efficient without the token.
  - mateuszf 4y ago
    > Web3 on the other hand is the exclusive domain of a few die-hard anarchocapitalist libertarians Not really. Libertarian anachocapitalists usually lean toward Bitcon/Monero, and not Web3 programmable hipster altcoins pumped by corporations.
  - camjw 4y ago
    > because it exists and people use it for everything I'm going to remember this line, it's so good and true.
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  "Is Web2 bullshit?", he asked on Web2.
mritzmann 4y ago
Yes.
- shellac 4y ago
  "Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct?"
  - Jorengarenar 4y ago
    Well yes, but actually no
  - tempodox 4y ago
    Mostly yes, but not in this case. It's also not a hard law, but more of a rule of thumb.
thdespou 4y ago
Web3 is Dead. Long live Web4
- bombcar 4y ago
  I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups.
3327 4y ago
Herbstluft 4y ago
"Web3 is more of a vibe" is always the answer one eventually arrives at when asking proper questions about web3. Also a lot of goals that rely on artificially created problems to gain the ability of presenting solutions to those problems, as mentioned in the article.
- pferde 4y ago
  Indeed. I like this article/transcript, because it has a lot of criticism about the horrible state this whole "web3" thing is, while remaining cautiously optimistic about its future.
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    I hate the Ponzenomics of most projects in the area. Also for me Play2earn sounds great on paper until you realize that this makes it work. As someone who has build videogames for a living games are fun to play, but not to make (mostly) Also most of these "games" are made from people that never made a game in their lives. Hence they focus on the Web3 component and making the game fun.
    - pferde 4y ago
      Oh absolutely. "Play2earn" is a terrible, predatory idea, preying on overly dedicated game fans and the OCD player crowd.
antics9 4y ago
What web3 is missing is social manual labour. What made the early web magic was the manual labour you had to put into the social dynamics of the spaces you created. Algorithms and blockchains may help to facilitate the creation of new spaces but they won't solve the social dynamics that create real human connections, virtual or otherwise.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  Hey this is me. Or what I am building. I noticed that common social media don't actually facilitate connections and knowledge. If you look at Stack Overflow or Lunchclub, these sites create a much deeper exchange. Why is that? Because these sites are not driven by "influencers" getting followers. Yes, there are people that are Karma maxis on StackOverflow. But usually these powerusers make these sites work. With finclout, I am working on carving out a niche for investment knowledge. Where people can really connect and surface information that is actually useful. The Web3 components comes in that we actually pay users for moderating / curating / syndicating content on the platform. The lessons learned from our time with DeSo was that adding a payments layer to traditional social media interaction brings out only the worst in people.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
This is a rather personal take on any versioning on the web. Web 2.0 was "cool" because it was a change to something beautifully different. I have heard others say terms such as "industry 4.0", "agtech 5.0", etc. My reaction is the usual WTF! It is no longer "cool" to say anything after v2.0. It is not about the version number but rather a differentiator. After v2.0, you are just forcing it and it is something like people who keep talking about what great things they did in the past while distancing themselves from the present. Here is something, HTML stopped versioning after v5.0, and I love that. It is just plain HTML for all of us (even if the specifications have internal versions). So, no, anything after v2.0 is just cheesy. I was lucky to be amongst those developers who participated in spearheading the Web 2.0 thingy. I developed a whole lot of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) powered by the Flash Player, and then went on to do a whole lot of Ajax, Web 2.0 without it too.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  Web3 will only succeed if it adds this layer of awe and excitement that the Web had in the 90s and the launch of the iPhone. We are still far away from that point. What makes this even worse are all these opportunistic cash-grab projects that just exploit users. On that note, I am glad that most large crypto businesses are imploding right now.
- brmgb 4y ago
  > This is a rather personal take on any versioning on the web. Web 2.0 was "cool" because it was a change to something beautifully different. Having been though the whole v2.0 shebang, it was widely uncool and most derided it as a pure marketing play. I mean the term was coined to sell tickets to a conference. No one could agree at the time about what v2.0 actually was in a way which is not dissimilar to how web3 is currently being pushed. For exemple, you think that RIA applications in Flash are part of Web 2.0. I would definitely say it's not.
  - enneff 4y ago
    Web 2.0 was just XMLHTTPRequest.
parham 4y ago
yes (saved you a click)
beardyw 4y ago
Only in the way (spoiler alert) unicorns are bullshit. Can something imaginary be be bullshit?
strangescript 4y ago
As a concept no, as practically implemented (currently) yes. We are trying to get our first contentful paints down to 50ms as web2 devs. Meanwhile web3 services struggle to stay up at any kind of load, let alone be anywhere comparable to performance.
mikl 4y ago
Yeah, web3 is just the crypto-currency crowd trying to hijack the web2.0 branding to make their crypto-whatever sound better.
visarga 4y ago
> Democratization. Decentralization. Censorship-resistance I think StableDiffusion is a good example of Web 3 because it decentralises the use of generative AI. If you have your own models you can interact with them to solve various tasks instead of using the web or external APIs, and getting tracked and censured in the process. AI creates a new private safe space for expression (A Room of One's Own).
- pornel 4y ago
  StableDiffusion is amazing, but it has little to do with the Web, especially the cryprobro one.
  - stoobs 4y ago
    Exactly, SD is basically a pile of python scripts talking to Cuda via pytorch, it can be completely disconnected from the network and run via a commandline, sure, there are web frontends available for it, but there's bugger all web 3.0 about it.
    - visarga 4y ago
      It has "Democratization. Decentralization. Censorship-resistance". It's more web3 than crypto.
      - pornel 4y ago
        That's just using a wishy-washy slogan to take credit for other people's work. None of the technologies that associate themselves with web3 had anything to do with stable diffusion. For SD, web3 has been worse than useless, because machine learning has been hindered by the miners hoarding GPUs.
ano88888 4y ago
is web3 the same as blockchain? and it is just a marketing term to make it sound cool?
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  It's a buzzword used to disguise the fact that blockchain has completely failed to live up to any of its promises. In 2017 everyone was saying that "blockchain" was the future of everything and you'd be a fool not to invest. Sure, it hasn't proven itself yet, but it's still early! Imagine if you could invest in the Internet in 1994! This line doesn't work anymore, because it's been five years and blockchain still hasn't proven itself, and no-one's come up for a use for blockchain except currency speculation, money laundering and scams. It's hard to convince people that we're still only in the early days when you've been saying the same thing for years with no progress. So now, blockchain has been rebranded to "web3", and we can go through the whole hype cycle again and hope no-one notices that nothing's changed. Web3 is the future! It might not have proven itself yet, but it's still early days! Imagine if you could invest in the internet in 1994! Thankfully the noise seems to have mostly died out since the big crash earlier this year. I except that the next time there's a bull market we'll go through the same old bullshit with another new buzzword. It'll be early days, like the Internet in 1994!
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I use blockchain currency (Monero) for just one thing: buying recreational drugs. It's better than cash; hanging out on street corners in the dark with shifty street-dealers, while carrying a pocketful of cash, is a risky activity. I don't invest. I bought some Bitcoin as a try-out way back when it launched; just a few dollars-worth. They'd be worth a fortune now. But even then, transaction speeds were very slow. I've never been much into investing, and I don't have a taste for risky, volatile assets.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  It's the general name for the "new" but not really new rent extraction economy for the whole world. The basic idea is "what if we could extract rent from every single interaction on the web - pay for view, pay for read, pay to rent, pay to play - but not like today, when it's optional and often fringe or really expensive stuff. But from everything, from 100% of everything.". And to it have working company scrip will be used, printed without oversight by a few new billionaires in non-extradition offshores. Actual blockchain is really detrimental to this new order scheme, because tokens on blockchain are harder to print, that's why real beneficiaries are moving to the stabletokens, which are practically CDBC, but issued not by shady banks but by actual criminals, some already convicted on the previous financial crises, like dotcom bust etc.
quickthrower2 4y ago
web3 was stolen by cryptos. But the real web3 for me is stuff like: computing on the edge; local storage; service workers; PWAs; widely available and cheap CDNs, JAMStack type apps, and so on.
bovermyer 4y ago
My personal take is that almost everything related to cryptocurrency is not just bullshit but actively harmful. What makes it worse is that the cryptobros co-opted Web 3.0 (the semantic web) for their branding. Granted, it was probably out of ignorance rather than malice, but it still rankles.
- athrowaway3z 4y ago
  Crypto "web3" is to VC's what Semantic "web3" is to universities.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I'd suspect Marc Andreesen (creator of the first graphical web browser) wasn't doing it out of ignorance
input_sh 4y ago
For context, Molly is behind https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/. Stories from that site were posted on HN 72 times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fweb3isgoinggreat.com%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fweb3isgoinggreat.com...
- doogerdog 4y ago
  I love Molly's work on web3isgoingjustgreat. I like following this slow moving train wreck, but just don't have the time or energy to read all the news reports on these projects. There is a lot of lazy "reporting" on crypto/web3 that seems to be lifted from marketing materials. Good critical analysis is out there but you have to hunt it down. Molly's succinct write-ups are interesting to read. They are critical of the industry but never unfair. I drop by every few days to catch up. If a topic bears additional investigation I can dig deeper. Molly's work helps me easily sort through an entire class of news that I would probably just ignore. I hope she keeps up the good work.
  - johanneskanybal 4y ago
    her "work"?? I simply won't believe this isn't a bot reply by the same one posting the content on this site every day in the first place.
    - doogerdog 4y ago
      I am not sure what you mean calling me a bot and implying that Molly does not work. It takes effort to keep up with all this stuff and post those summaries. I hope she keeps it going a couple more years. Sorry about the delayed reply. I have busy schedule today.
    - ismokedoinks 4y ago
      Don't be paranoid. She does great work. Give me a captcha I'll do it right now.
      - 4y ago
Yizahi 4y ago
Depending on the point of view and a person's definition of bullshit. Web-not-really-3 (because that was semantic web) is an ultra-capitalism and ultra-centralisation of finance and power movement, modeled of the free for all feudalism. Great dystopia, but I prefer to read about such worlds, not live inside them :)
stareatgoats 4y ago
The web is a big place, with a multitude of different uses and trajectories. Trying to rope in everything into one or two terms is hubristic. The article paints a pretty accurate picture of what happens when you try: scams and hoaxes will lurk therein. The author might not be free from agendas of her own however, a will to shoehorn the web into something according to her own fancy. That too will fail.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
happymellon 4y ago
What I don't get is that the big point about web3 is decentralisation and democratic access to data. Don't we have this with the Fediverse?
- Yizahi 4y ago
  Actually it's all about centralisation of content and money and locking down everything beyond paywalls. So, real decentralisation movements are the opposite of the tokenbro dystopia.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  Don't we have this with the World Wide Web, since its beginning?
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Nope. The kiwi farms situation demonstrated that the whole internet is under the control of a very slim number of individuals.
    - Zanfa 4y ago
      This sounds exactly like the crypto universe, which seems to be mostly controlled/manipulated by a small number of (crypto) billionaires and their shadowy corporations.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        That’s true. I’m very disappointed that crypto has misdirected decentralised systems in to becoming useless hype scams resulting in almost no progress in the last decade. We have a bunch of hype tech like IPFS but I’m still yet to see a single website using it. Tor onion sites are still the most useful tool there is for censorship proof hosting.
    - pornel 4y ago
      Or maybe it's controlled by many different individuals and organizations, but very few of them want to cooperate with fascist tormentors. https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
zeroq 4y ago
Is water wet?
baxtr 4y ago
Greed is a very basic motivator for most people. Smarter ones have realized that using big opaque tech trends can be used to create a lot of FoMo to drive more and more dumb asses into a spiral that will make them richer. A classic Ponzi scheme. The other side of web3 has not gotten that much attention. Simply because it's hackers motivated curiosity much more than greed.
mjburgess 4y ago
Will blockchain work for money? No Will blockchain work as a store of value? No Will blockchain work for art? No Will blockchain work for the web? No Web3 is just another problem domain people up the pyramid chain are looking to expand their MLM into. Since blockchain (as with herbal life, etc.) isn't effective at almost anything, this will pass. It's so laughably ineffective that I think we dont even really have to argue much with it. "Blockchain technology" takes the computing power of an apple watch and realises it with a data centre. It's so bad its self-exposing to most non-gullible people. I think we can wait for Web3 to pass, as with NFTs. Next it'll be HousesOntheBlock, MedicalRecordsOnChain, etc. this will all cycle out over the next decade until gov's start to see the massive crypto losses, and as with the opiod pandemic, step in. One would hope most govs would regulate it into oblivion soon. As soon as the pyramid scheme around crypto is broken 99% of its fanatics won't be desperately searching to find a use case. Remember, with crypto, people's lives are actually invested in it. This ain't Rust. It's Rust but each keyword was $50,000 you need.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  You don't think some things will stick? Key revocation certificates come to mind as a good case for a public blockchain. NFT's for domain ownership makes a lot more sense than paying monthly. The whole trustless thing means users can provide compute for each other rather than tolerating an ad-riddled central point of failure. You know, the stuff that doesn't need hype and is just the right engineering call.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Ownership is an interpretation of the blockchain and therefore still requires someone to interpret it. I'm not sure what you're thinking about domain ownership (I'm open if you can explain), but my sense is that contracts of ownership arent suitable for blockchains -- nor indeed, for any presently imaginable computable system. Rights are fundamentally modal, ie., "what ifs". The exercise of a right changes depending on context, and that context includes how a given society inteprets its meaning at any given time. Hence lawyers, judges, etc. Algorithms are fundamentally non-modal constructs, ie., "always if". And whilst "perhaps" (but probably not) reality can be described by an algorithm, it isnt any that is "always if" at the level of social phenomena. Ie., maybe atoms are simply deterministic, but their aggregates (eg., people) are not. And so it is unlikey any finite computable representation of social life will ever, eg., account for "a change of taste in the law". Blockchains are distributed immutable logs which impose massive computation costs on appending to them. They're a niche technology that, does actually, model money. That's about the best use-case as a model for money. But they're terrible at implementing money. Beaten by a simple piece of paper at every turn.
roenxi 4y ago
Speaking as a gold bug, while Web3 is bullshit - so are most other systems. Gold is absurd (shiny rocks are expensive? what are we, children?). The US dollar is absurd (we think this system is good, unlike every other fiat system that collapses due to irresponsible oversight? The US is already in print-like-crazy mode, the end is nigh). Every system of finance lurches on the verge of collapse at all times - there is a recession like clockwork every 10 years and a whole bunch of people go broke with similar regularity - turns out there are a lot of crooks. So while web3 might be doomed, this crypto thing is not going to die a natural death. At this point, the evidence seems to favour a crypto-heavy future. It isn't inferior to gold in terms of having a niche. Much less likely to get confiscated too.
- jleask 4y ago
  Gold does have utility beyond being shiny and for now has actual scarcity. Fiat currencies have utility in that I can pay my taxes in the local one, my government pays for things using it, it is pretty much universally accepted etc. I see a future for electronic currencies just not necessarily the crypto technologies we see today. The "much less likely to get confiscated" is potentially a negative too e.g. confiscation of the profits of crime benefits society. Whether it is more positive or more negative depends upon home much you trust your government to be benevolent.
djaouen 4y ago
Edit: The following is not investment advice. Please do your own research before investing in anything in this post, please! Practically, right now? Yes. Theoretically, in the future? Who knows. Personally, I have taken an interest in things like Consensus and Voting DApps on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Solana in particular runs its DApps on Rust, and Ethereum can (potentially) too in the future once they create their new virtual machine. So I think it is still too early to tell if Blockchain will become the revolution it is promised to be. I think some crypto (in ETH and SOL) can be kept as a diversification tool, but beyond that, I would not invest (for example) my whole net worth into anything Web3 currently.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
These anti-crypto articles by people who have made it their whole career to give anti-crypto talks are just as BS as the crypto scams. I've read many of the articles from her site, but I cannot take anyone seriously who can't give nuanced takes on an industry, be it social media, crypto, AI or whatever. Not everything is black and white, unless you are journalist that's hired to say it is. I don't want to defend crypto because I also believe it's mostly scams, but saying that all of a ~$1T industry is a scam and absolutely useless just means that you're either ignorant or have political incentives.
- rvz 4y ago
  Both the crypto maximalists and the anti-crypto folks are the ones who are speaking the loudest as soon as crypto pumps or crashes. On either event, this is where both of them start capitalising on their grift. You will rarely see them together having a normal discussion about the issues and possibilities or even see either of them compromising on their ideas. Do not listen to the extreme of either side. Especially those like [0] and ones that have a rushed a book on Amazon to sell you on the subject on how all of it will 'die in a fire'. [1] [0] https://twitter.com/saylor https://twitter.com/saylor [1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl https://twitter.com/smdiehl
  - LeafGuild 4y ago
    Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books? I'm not selling any books, and I'll tell you that all of crypto is a giant fraud. The technology is fundamentally useless and the economics are just ponzi scams on top of ponzi scams. There's no reason to try to "both sides" this. All crypto is a negative sum game by design, where the HODLers are expected to absorb all losses while the miners take a cut in fees. It's mathematically impossible for it to be a good investment. There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.
rvz 4y ago
Spoiler: Cryptocurrencies are here to stay (for another decade) and not all cryptocurrencies will survive the next phase: Regulations. Crypto bros and Web3 critics will continue to grift for more attention, books, Patreons, etc on the boom and bust of the crypto market lifecycle. > As technologists, our duty is to develop responsibly, and we should be striving for more in the web, pushing to evolve it into whatever web3 may turn out to be, and chasing those ideals that could make the web truly wonderful. Wonderful? The free software movement would like to have a word with you. The same technologists that hijacked the point of open-source and free-software and grifted on that until it meant 'Thanks for your free work', are the same ones using it for their spyware products at surveillance tech companies, further creating the dystopia that crypto is already making worse. Of course, like the free-software movement has failed in their goals in stopping the proliferation of spyware on the web thanks to these 'technologists', they will also fail at totally destroying crypto and have already accepted that it is here to stay with regulatory intervention. Once again, that will come at a cost to only some crypto projects surviving.
- aww_dang 4y ago
  A regulated cryptosphere is mostly toothless. If people wanted that kind of regulatory overhead they could just use PayPal or bank transfers denominated in central bank currencies. For all of the problems in the cryptosphere, traditional LizardFi isn't doing especially well either. My view is that the regulated cryptosphere will feature the worst of both worlds. CBDC is lurking somewhere nearby in this scenario. There will always be a market for open frontiers. Gatekeepers will always seek to fence and capture these areas. New technologies will emerge as the old areas are locked down. Pioneering individuals will always find a way.
blippage 4y ago
Kim Kardashian was talking about NFTs before I even heard of them, which tells you all you need to know.
- ptha 4y ago
  I'm sure you already know: Kim Kardashian will pay a fine of $1.26 million for not disclosing to her Instagram followers that she was financially compensated for promoting EthereumMax https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/10/03/kim-kardashian-fined-for-cryptocurrency-promotion-heres-what-it-means-for-crypto/?sh=3b83d2013935 https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/10/03/kim-kardashian-f...
  - blippage 4y ago
    "The SEC published a video urging the public to think twice before taking investment advice from celebrities and influencers. " So what we're saying is that Kim Kardashian is not necessarily the best source of financial wisdom? Oh how we laughed.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  She was paid millions to do so; her social media accounts are marketing outlets up for sale to the highest bidder, and the cryptobros have a lot of money.
stephc_int13 4y ago
"Dig deep. Ask the hard questions. Criticize the flaws. And cut through the bullshit" This. This is what we should expect from journalists.
psychphysic 4y ago
The issue with Web3 is that what slays in one narrow niche is not worth expanding into other areas. Cryptos, tor, etc have their uses. Those uses are basically buying illicit products and services remotely. They don't make much sense elsewhere and ironically the constant speculation on price (I'm guilty of this) is killing it's original use case!
togaen 4y ago
Yes. Obviously.
aww_dang 4y ago
>Play-to-earn games introduced a rentier class of managers who oversaw low-wage workers in countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Venezuela and took a cut of their earning in exchange for just letting them play the game in the first place. What is the argument here? Players shouldn't profit, developers should not profit or nobody should profit? If you start from a Marxist perspective, of course you are going to have a problem with a market based system.
- pornel 4y ago
  To have profits, you first need to create something of value. The game creates nothing of value, and it even fails to provide entertainment value (otherwise playing would be a reward itself, not a chore to outsource). It's just another financial scam promising to create money out of thin air, and it even reinvented sweatshops as a side effect.
  - aww_dang 4y ago
    All cryptogames create nothing of value? This is a wild generalization. Even if you do not personally value it, it does not follow that others do not value it. Entertainment is subjective as is the perception of value generally. Apply your principles to a sports tournament or poker series. The stakes create excitement for players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
T3RMINATED 4y ago

124 points by pferde 4y ago

medo-bear 4y ago

web3 is kind of like playing The Game - ie if you are consciously making web3, you lost the game

antics9 4y ago
so like being a hipster?
- medo-bear 4y ago
  whats a hipster?
  - antics9 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subculture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subcultu...
    - medo-bear 4y ago
      is it something like this ? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4n6OVoyYQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4n6OVoyYQ

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gargs 4y ago

Is Web2 Bullshit?

arcticbull 4y ago
Well no, because it exists and people use it for everything. Web3 on the other hand is the exclusive domain of a few die-hard anarchocapitalist libertarians and a few promoters pumping their bags. [edit] It creates a perverse model where every app is expected to create its own little Ponzi scheme to entice people with. Then, your job is to market the token not the service. Any service that actually invests in building a product people want can deliver that product faster, simpler and more efficient without the token.
- mateuszf 4y ago
  > Web3 on the other hand is the exclusive domain of a few die-hard anarchocapitalist libertarians Not really. Libertarian anachocapitalists usually lean toward Bitcon/Monero, and not Web3 programmable hipster altcoins pumped by corporations.
- camjw 4y ago
  > because it exists and people use it for everything I'm going to remember this line, it's so good and true.
whoooooo123 4y ago
"Is Web2 bullshit?", he asked on Web2.

mritzmann 4y ago

Yes.

shellac 4y ago
"Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct?"
- Jorengarenar 4y ago
  Well yes, but actually no
- tempodox 4y ago
  Mostly yes, but not in this case. It's also not a hard law, but more of a rule of thumb.

thdespou 4y ago

Web3 is Dead. Long live Web4

bombcar 4y ago
I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups.

3327 4y ago

Herbstluft 4y ago

"Web3 is more of a vibe" is always the answer one eventually arrives at when asking proper questions about web3. Also a lot of goals that rely on artificially created problems to gain the ability of presenting solutions to those problems, as mentioned in the article.

pferde 4y ago
Indeed. I like this article/transcript, because it has a lot of criticism about the horrible state this whole "web3" thing is, while remaining cautiously optimistic about its future.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  I hate the Ponzenomics of most projects in the area. Also for me Play2earn sounds great on paper until you realize that this makes it work. As someone who has build videogames for a living games are fun to play, but not to make (mostly) Also most of these "games" are made from people that never made a game in their lives. Hence they focus on the Web3 component and making the game fun.
  - pferde 4y ago
    Oh absolutely. "Play2earn" is a terrible, predatory idea, preying on overly dedicated game fans and the OCD player crowd.

antics9 4y ago

What web3 is missing is social manual labour. What made the early web magic was the manual labour you had to put into the social dynamics of the spaces you created. Algorithms and blockchains may help to facilitate the creation of new spaces but they won't solve the social dynamics that create real human connections, virtual or otherwise.

jsemrau 4y ago
Hey this is me. Or what I am building. I noticed that common social media don't actually facilitate connections and knowledge. If you look at Stack Overflow or Lunchclub, these sites create a much deeper exchange. Why is that? Because these sites are not driven by "influencers" getting followers. Yes, there are people that are Karma maxis on StackOverflow. But usually these powerusers make these sites work. With finclout, I am working on carving out a niche for investment knowledge. Where people can really connect and surface information that is actually useful. The Web3 components comes in that we actually pay users for moderating / curating / syndicating content on the platform. The lessons learned from our time with DeSo was that adding a payments layer to traditional social media interaction brings out only the worst in people.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

This is a rather personal take on any versioning on the web. Web 2.0 was "cool" because it was a change to something beautifully different. I have heard others say terms such as "industry 4.0", "agtech 5.0", etc. My reaction is the usual WTF! It is no longer "cool" to say anything after v2.0. It is not about the version number but rather a differentiator. After v2.0, you are just forcing it and it is something like people who keep talking about what great things they did in the past while distancing themselves from the present. Here is something, HTML stopped versioning after v5.0, and I love that. It is just plain HTML for all of us (even if the specifications have internal versions). So, no, anything after v2.0 is just cheesy. I was lucky to be amongst those developers who participated in spearheading the Web 2.0 thingy. I developed a whole lot of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) powered by the Flash Player, and then went on to do a whole lot of Ajax, Web 2.0 without it too.

jsemrau 4y ago
Web3 will only succeed if it adds this layer of awe and excitement that the Web had in the 90s and the launch of the iPhone. We are still far away from that point. What makes this even worse are all these opportunistic cash-grab projects that just exploit users. On that note, I am glad that most large crypto businesses are imploding right now.
brmgb 4y ago
> This is a rather personal take on any versioning on the web. Web 2.0 was "cool" because it was a change to something beautifully different. Having been though the whole v2.0 shebang, it was widely uncool and most derided it as a pure marketing play. I mean the term was coined to sell tickets to a conference. No one could agree at the time about what v2.0 actually was in a way which is not dissimilar to how web3 is currently being pushed. For exemple, you think that RIA applications in Flash are part of Web 2.0. I would definitely say it's not.
- enneff 4y ago
  Web 2.0 was just XMLHTTPRequest.

parham 4y ago

yes (saved you a click)

beardyw 4y ago

Only in the way (spoiler alert) unicorns are bullshit. Can something imaginary be be bullshit?

strangescript 4y ago

As a concept no, as practically implemented (currently) yes. We are trying to get our first contentful paints down to 50ms as web2 devs. Meanwhile web3 services struggle to stay up at any kind of load, let alone be anywhere comparable to performance.

mikl 4y ago

Yeah, web3 is just the crypto-currency crowd trying to hijack the web2.0 branding to make their crypto-whatever sound better.

visarga 4y ago

> Democratization. Decentralization. Censorship-resistance I think StableDiffusion is a good example of Web 3 because it decentralises the use of generative AI. If you have your own models you can interact with them to solve various tasks instead of using the web or external APIs, and getting tracked and censured in the process. AI creates a new private safe space for expression (A Room of One's Own).

pornel 4y ago
StableDiffusion is amazing, but it has little to do with the Web, especially the cryprobro one.
- stoobs 4y ago
  Exactly, SD is basically a pile of python scripts talking to Cuda via pytorch, it can be completely disconnected from the network and run via a commandline, sure, there are web frontends available for it, but there's bugger all web 3.0 about it.
  - visarga 4y ago
    It has "Democratization. Decentralization. Censorship-resistance". It's more web3 than crypto.
    - pornel 4y ago
      That's just using a wishy-washy slogan to take credit for other people's work. None of the technologies that associate themselves with web3 had anything to do with stable diffusion. For SD, web3 has been worse than useless, because machine learning has been hindered by the miners hoarding GPUs.

ano88888 4y ago

is web3 the same as blockchain? and it is just a marketing term to make it sound cool?

whoooooo123 4y ago
It's a buzzword used to disguise the fact that blockchain has completely failed to live up to any of its promises. In 2017 everyone was saying that "blockchain" was the future of everything and you'd be a fool not to invest. Sure, it hasn't proven itself yet, but it's still early! Imagine if you could invest in the Internet in 1994! This line doesn't work anymore, because it's been five years and blockchain still hasn't proven itself, and no-one's come up for a use for blockchain except currency speculation, money laundering and scams. It's hard to convince people that we're still only in the early days when you've been saying the same thing for years with no progress. So now, blockchain has been rebranded to "web3", and we can go through the whole hype cycle again and hope no-one notices that nothing's changed. Web3 is the future! It might not have proven itself yet, but it's still early days! Imagine if you could invest in the internet in 1994! Thankfully the noise seems to have mostly died out since the big crash earlier this year. I except that the next time there's a bull market we'll go through the same old bullshit with another new buzzword. It'll be early days, like the Internet in 1994!
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I use blockchain currency (Monero) for just one thing: buying recreational drugs. It's better than cash; hanging out on street corners in the dark with shifty street-dealers, while carrying a pocketful of cash, is a risky activity. I don't invest. I bought some Bitcoin as a try-out way back when it launched; just a few dollars-worth. They'd be worth a fortune now. But even then, transaction speeds were very slow. I've never been much into investing, and I don't have a taste for risky, volatile assets.
Yizahi 4y ago
It's the general name for the "new" but not really new rent extraction economy for the whole world. The basic idea is "what if we could extract rent from every single interaction on the web - pay for view, pay for read, pay to rent, pay to play - but not like today, when it's optional and often fringe or really expensive stuff. But from everything, from 100% of everything.". And to it have working company scrip will be used, printed without oversight by a few new billionaires in non-extradition offshores. Actual blockchain is really detrimental to this new order scheme, because tokens on blockchain are harder to print, that's why real beneficiaries are moving to the stabletokens, which are practically CDBC, but issued not by shady banks but by actual criminals, some already convicted on the previous financial crises, like dotcom bust etc.

quickthrower2 4y ago

web3 was stolen by cryptos. But the real web3 for me is stuff like: computing on the edge; local storage; service workers; PWAs; widely available and cheap CDNs, JAMStack type apps, and so on.

bovermyer 4y ago

My personal take is that almost everything related to cryptocurrency is not just bullshit but actively harmful. What makes it worse is that the cryptobros co-opted Web 3.0 (the semantic web) for their branding. Granted, it was probably out of ignorance rather than malice, but it still rankles.

athrowaway3z 4y ago
Crypto "web3" is to VC's what Semantic "web3" is to universities.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
I'd suspect Marc Andreesen (creator of the first graphical web browser) wasn't doing it out of ignorance

input_sh 4y ago

For context, Molly is behind https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/. Stories from that site were posted on HN 72 times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fweb3isgoinggreat.com%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fweb3isgoinggreat.com...

doogerdog 4y ago
I love Molly's work on web3isgoingjustgreat. I like following this slow moving train wreck, but just don't have the time or energy to read all the news reports on these projects. There is a lot of lazy "reporting" on crypto/web3 that seems to be lifted from marketing materials. Good critical analysis is out there but you have to hunt it down. Molly's succinct write-ups are interesting to read. They are critical of the industry but never unfair. I drop by every few days to catch up. If a topic bears additional investigation I can dig deeper. Molly's work helps me easily sort through an entire class of news that I would probably just ignore. I hope she keeps up the good work.
- johanneskanybal 4y ago
  her "work"?? I simply won't believe this isn't a bot reply by the same one posting the content on this site every day in the first place.
  - doogerdog 4y ago
    I am not sure what you mean calling me a bot and implying that Molly does not work. It takes effort to keep up with all this stuff and post those summaries. I hope she keeps it going a couple more years. Sorry about the delayed reply. I have busy schedule today.
  - ismokedoinks 4y ago
    Don't be paranoid. She does great work. Give me a captcha I'll do it right now.
    - 4y ago

Yizahi 4y ago

Depending on the point of view and a person's definition of bullshit. Web-not-really-3 (because that was semantic web) is an ultra-capitalism and ultra-centralisation of finance and power movement, modeled of the free for all feudalism. Great dystopia, but I prefer to read about such worlds, not live inside them :)

stareatgoats 4y ago

The web is a big place, with a multitude of different uses and trajectories. Trying to rope in everything into one or two terms is hubristic. The article paints a pretty accurate picture of what happens when you try: scams and hoaxes will lurk therein. The author might not be free from agendas of her own however, a will to shoehorn the web into something according to her own fancy. That too will fail.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

happymellon 4y ago

What I don't get is that the big point about web3 is decentralisation and democratic access to data. Don't we have this with the Fediverse?

Yizahi 4y ago
Actually it's all about centralisation of content and money and locking down everything beyond paywalls. So, real decentralisation movements are the opposite of the tokenbro dystopia.
Scarblac 4y ago
Don't we have this with the World Wide Web, since its beginning?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Nope. The kiwi farms situation demonstrated that the whole internet is under the control of a very slim number of individuals.
  - Zanfa 4y ago
    This sounds exactly like the crypto universe, which seems to be mostly controlled/manipulated by a small number of (crypto) billionaires and their shadowy corporations.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      That’s true. I’m very disappointed that crypto has misdirected decentralised systems in to becoming useless hype scams resulting in almost no progress in the last decade. We have a bunch of hype tech like IPFS but I’m still yet to see a single website using it. Tor onion sites are still the most useful tool there is for censorship proof hosting.
  - pornel 4y ago
    Or maybe it's controlled by many different individuals and organizations, but very few of them want to cooperate with fascist tormentors. https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/

zeroq 4y ago

Is water wet?

baxtr 4y ago

Greed is a very basic motivator for most people. Smarter ones have realized that using big opaque tech trends can be used to create a lot of FoMo to drive more and more dumb asses into a spiral that will make them richer. A classic Ponzi scheme. The other side of web3 has not gotten that much attention. Simply because it's hackers motivated curiosity much more than greed.

mjburgess 4y ago

Will blockchain work for money? No Will blockchain work as a store of value? No Will blockchain work for art? No Will blockchain work for the web? No Web3 is just another problem domain people up the pyramid chain are looking to expand their MLM into. Since blockchain (as with herbal life, etc.) isn't effective at almost anything, this will pass. It's so laughably ineffective that I think we dont even really have to argue much with it. "Blockchain technology" takes the computing power of an apple watch and realises it with a data centre. It's so bad its self-exposing to most non-gullible people. I think we can wait for Web3 to pass, as with NFTs. Next it'll be HousesOntheBlock, MedicalRecordsOnChain, etc. this will all cycle out over the next decade until gov's start to see the massive crypto losses, and as with the opiod pandemic, step in. One would hope most govs would regulate it into oblivion soon. As soon as the pyramid scheme around crypto is broken 99% of its fanatics won't be desperately searching to find a use case. Remember, with crypto, people's lives are actually invested in it. This ain't Rust. It's Rust but each keyword was $50,000 you need.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
You don't think some things will stick? Key revocation certificates come to mind as a good case for a public blockchain. NFT's for domain ownership makes a lot more sense than paying monthly. The whole trustless thing means users can provide compute for each other rather than tolerating an ad-riddled central point of failure. You know, the stuff that doesn't need hype and is just the right engineering call.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Ownership is an interpretation of the blockchain and therefore still requires someone to interpret it. I'm not sure what you're thinking about domain ownership (I'm open if you can explain), but my sense is that contracts of ownership arent suitable for blockchains -- nor indeed, for any presently imaginable computable system. Rights are fundamentally modal, ie., "what ifs". The exercise of a right changes depending on context, and that context includes how a given society inteprets its meaning at any given time. Hence lawyers, judges, etc. Algorithms are fundamentally non-modal constructs, ie., "always if". And whilst "perhaps" (but probably not) reality can be described by an algorithm, it isnt any that is "always if" at the level of social phenomena. Ie., maybe atoms are simply deterministic, but their aggregates (eg., people) are not. And so it is unlikey any finite computable representation of social life will ever, eg., account for "a change of taste in the law". Blockchains are distributed immutable logs which impose massive computation costs on appending to them. They're a niche technology that, does actually, model money. That's about the best use-case as a model for money. But they're terrible at implementing money. Beaten by a simple piece of paper at every turn.

roenxi 4y ago

Speaking as a gold bug, while Web3 is bullshit - so are most other systems. Gold is absurd (shiny rocks are expensive? what are we, children?). The US dollar is absurd (we think this system is good, unlike every other fiat system that collapses due to irresponsible oversight? The US is already in print-like-crazy mode, the end is nigh). Every system of finance lurches on the verge of collapse at all times - there is a recession like clockwork every 10 years and a whole bunch of people go broke with similar regularity - turns out there are a lot of crooks. So while web3 might be doomed, this crypto thing is not going to die a natural death. At this point, the evidence seems to favour a crypto-heavy future. It isn't inferior to gold in terms of having a niche. Much less likely to get confiscated too.

jleask 4y ago
Gold does have utility beyond being shiny and for now has actual scarcity. Fiat currencies have utility in that I can pay my taxes in the local one, my government pays for things using it, it is pretty much universally accepted etc. I see a future for electronic currencies just not necessarily the crypto technologies we see today. The "much less likely to get confiscated" is potentially a negative too e.g. confiscation of the profits of crime benefits society. Whether it is more positive or more negative depends upon home much you trust your government to be benevolent.

djaouen 4y ago

Edit: The following is not investment advice. Please do your own research before investing in anything in this post, please! Practically, right now? Yes. Theoretically, in the future? Who knows. Personally, I have taken an interest in things like Consensus and Voting DApps on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Solana in particular runs its DApps on Rust, and Ethereum can (potentially) too in the future once they create their new virtual machine. So I think it is still too early to tell if Blockchain will become the revolution it is promised to be. I think some crypto (in ETH and SOL) can be kept as a diversification tool, but beyond that, I would not invest (for example) my whole net worth into anything Web3 currently.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

These anti-crypto articles by people who have made it their whole career to give anti-crypto talks are just as BS as the crypto scams. I've read many of the articles from her site, but I cannot take anyone seriously who can't give nuanced takes on an industry, be it social media, crypto, AI or whatever. Not everything is black and white, unless you are journalist that's hired to say it is. I don't want to defend crypto because I also believe it's mostly scams, but saying that all of a ~$1T industry is a scam and absolutely useless just means that you're either ignorant or have political incentives.

rvz 4y ago
Both the crypto maximalists and the anti-crypto folks are the ones who are speaking the loudest as soon as crypto pumps or crashes. On either event, this is where both of them start capitalising on their grift. You will rarely see them together having a normal discussion about the issues and possibilities or even see either of them compromising on their ideas. Do not listen to the extreme of either side. Especially those like [0] and ones that have a rushed a book on Amazon to sell you on the subject on how all of it will 'die in a fire'. [1] [0] https://twitter.com/saylor https://twitter.com/saylor [1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl https://twitter.com/smdiehl
- LeafGuild 4y ago
  Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books? I'm not selling any books, and I'll tell you that all of crypto is a giant fraud. The technology is fundamentally useless and the economics are just ponzi scams on top of ponzi scams. There's no reason to try to "both sides" this. All crypto is a negative sum game by design, where the HODLers are expected to absorb all losses while the miners take a cut in fees. It's mathematically impossible for it to be a good investment. There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.

rvz 4y ago

Spoiler: Cryptocurrencies are here to stay (for another decade) and not all cryptocurrencies will survive the next phase: Regulations. Crypto bros and Web3 critics will continue to grift for more attention, books, Patreons, etc on the boom and bust of the crypto market lifecycle. > As technologists, our duty is to develop responsibly, and we should be striving for more in the web, pushing to evolve it into whatever web3 may turn out to be, and chasing those ideals that could make the web truly wonderful. Wonderful? The free software movement would like to have a word with you. The same technologists that hijacked the point of open-source and free-software and grifted on that until it meant 'Thanks for your free work', are the same ones using it for their spyware products at surveillance tech companies, further creating the dystopia that crypto is already making worse. Of course, like the free-software movement has failed in their goals in stopping the proliferation of spyware on the web thanks to these 'technologists', they will also fail at totally destroying crypto and have already accepted that it is here to stay with regulatory intervention. Once again, that will come at a cost to only some crypto projects surviving.

aww_dang 4y ago
A regulated cryptosphere is mostly toothless. If people wanted that kind of regulatory overhead they could just use PayPal or bank transfers denominated in central bank currencies. For all of the problems in the cryptosphere, traditional LizardFi isn't doing especially well either. My view is that the regulated cryptosphere will feature the worst of both worlds. CBDC is lurking somewhere nearby in this scenario. There will always be a market for open frontiers. Gatekeepers will always seek to fence and capture these areas. New technologies will emerge as the old areas are locked down. Pioneering individuals will always find a way.

blippage 4y ago

Kim Kardashian was talking about NFTs before I even heard of them, which tells you all you need to know.

ptha 4y ago
I'm sure you already know: Kim Kardashian will pay a fine of $1.26 million for not disclosing to her Instagram followers that she was financially compensated for promoting EthereumMax https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/10/03/kim-kardashian-fined-for-cryptocurrency-promotion-heres-what-it-means-for-crypto/?sh=3b83d2013935 https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/10/03/kim-kardashian-f...
- blippage 4y ago
  "The SEC published a video urging the public to think twice before taking investment advice from celebrities and influencers. " So what we're saying is that Kim Kardashian is not necessarily the best source of financial wisdom? Oh how we laughed.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
She was paid millions to do so; her social media accounts are marketing outlets up for sale to the highest bidder, and the cryptobros have a lot of money.

stephc_int13 4y ago

"Dig deep. Ask the hard questions. Criticize the flaws. And cut through the bullshit" This. This is what we should expect from journalists.

psychphysic 4y ago

The issue with Web3 is that what slays in one narrow niche is not worth expanding into other areas. Cryptos, tor, etc have their uses. Those uses are basically buying illicit products and services remotely. They don't make much sense elsewhere and ironically the constant speculation on price (I'm guilty of this) is killing it's original use case!

togaen 4y ago

Yes. Obviously.

aww_dang 4y ago

>Play-to-earn games introduced a rentier class of managers who oversaw low-wage workers in countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Venezuela and took a cut of their earning in exchange for just letting them play the game in the first place. What is the argument here? Players shouldn't profit, developers should not profit or nobody should profit? If you start from a Marxist perspective, of course you are going to have a problem with a market based system.

pornel 4y ago
To have profits, you first need to create something of value. The game creates nothing of value, and it even fails to provide entertainment value (otherwise playing would be a reward itself, not a chore to outsource). It's just another financial scam promising to create money out of thin air, and it even reinvented sweatshops as a side effect.
- aww_dang 4y ago
  All cryptogames create nothing of value? This is a wild generalization. Even if you do not personally value it, it does not follow that others do not value it. Entertainment is subjective as is the perception of value generally. Apply your principles to a sports tournament or poker series. The stakes create excitement for players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

T3RMINATED 4y ago