6 ms·

Web3's fake version of Web history

63 points by dmazin 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
Devil's advocate: Maybe the tech executives that lived through the earlier eras never actually understood what was going on as it happened. They're not now telling lies about history, as such, because they really have thought this way all along; they've never been particularly connected to any reality we share.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Is the outcome still the same? Yep. It's revisionist at best, devious at worst.
titzer 3y ago
It's so dumb to call it "Web 3.0". It's like "New York City 3.0". It's a big system with a lot of different things that evolve at different speeds. If you think you can characterize New York City by how things look from a couple different street corners and what's playing on Broadway right now, haha, no.
- aimor 3y ago
  I hate it too, it stretches the cute "Web 2.0" analogy (used to summarize the dramatic changes the web would undergo) much too far. I understand the appeal in co-opting "Web 3.0" -- every movement needs a catchy name -- but it's so acerbic to anyone with any taste at all, it reeks of showiness and empty promises. I hope the next movement of the web isn't going to be hoisted on us, I want it to be something that emerges organically from our collective effort much like the current web evolved. Fragmented Future (1999) https://web.archive.org/web/20111110143942/http://darcyd.com/fragmented_future.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20111110143942/http://darcyd.com...
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I rather feel that the current web was more foisted on us than organically emerged from our collective effort.
- jholman 3y ago
  It's also dumb because "Web 3.0" isn't web at all. I guess in a way that makes it like New York, which isn't a replacement for York.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Well, they did try going with "Dapp" as in decentralized app, and that went about as well as one would expect.
bdcravens 3y ago
> Web1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed The web during this time was marked by many commercial languages and app servers. (like ColdFusion, server products by Netscape and Sun, etc). A decent IDE was typically several hundred dollars. Corporate interests were trying to control the protocols and standards (Flash, ActiveX, Applets, etc). Even browsers were initially paid commercial products.
- anthk 3y ago
  It depends where. By 2002 you could get a nice KDE3 distro with KDEvelop and do magic. If not, you could use PHP, Perl, Apache. LAMP stacks were everywhere. Debian was the right choice, even from a GNU/FSF way. The end of the 90's with Mozilla being open changed the things a lot. Also, even in 2004 you could browse Slashdot with FreeBSD and Lynx under a 486 perfectly fine.
riogordo2go 3y ago
It's not fake, it's a perspective. I'm not sure if "web3" is going to solve it though. The incentives are the same, so why would the outcome be different this time.
thesausageking 3y ago
"When you look back on every decade in tech, there's one thing that really dominated. I think the Internet Computer will be the one this next decade." - Chris Dixon This was the a16z-backed "Internet Computer" which launched a token, ICP, that Chris promoted and was then dumped on retail investors as liquidity for insiders. Chris's version of the history of web was created to sell retail investors on this narrative. And a16z has made a pile of money doing it.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
  The "internet computer" is a description of a general category of things: blockchain computers that share state with verification, consensus, and guaranteed data availability as irrevocable properties of those systems. Although a16z did invest in "Internet Computer Protocol" (formerly known as Dfinity) years before, the term here is being used in the general sense, and Dfinity adopted the term later for marketing purposes.
  - preseinger 3y ago
    yeah but they're not actually irrevocable, right, because networks can fork you're always subject to some authority, trust always exists, it's just that in decentralized systems that authority is arbitrary, subject to an algorithm rather than an entity governed by law
- rchaud 3y ago
  Watching Andreessen of all people try to shoehorn in Web3 has made realize that "ICP" is in fact a fitting acronym for A16Z, assuming it stands for the name of a particular band.
its_ethan 3y ago
This bit really resonates with how I feel about how fast and non-substantive the ridiculous hype cycles have been the last 3-4 years: "It has always struck me that the rush to define the next chapter of the Internet (“Metaverse! Web3! AI! Oh my!”) has been driven by tech elites’ hunger to turn the page on the techlash years. They want to go back to being judged based on their ambitions, rather than their results."
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  I’ve lived through half a dozen of these hype cycles, all lasting 3-4 years before they go bust. I tried 3D printing. The results were subpar and the utility wasn’t much beyond a toy or a hammer. I tried VR/AR. VR just made me nauseous. AR was a cool tech demo that I would never use because I’m actually trying to reduce my screen time, not increase it. Tried web3.0. Got scammed. Currently trying AI. This somehow feels like the real deal. I’m at least using it every day, even maxing out my GPT-4 limits.
  - enjeyw 3y ago
    At least for the 3D printing case you may have just been too early, or the wrong market. I work at a hardware company and these days 3D printing is invaluable for prototyping and other similar work. Maybe in a couple of years the same will be true for the others.
Zaskoda 3y ago
Web 1: HTML Web 2: AJAX Web 3: DLT
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Dave Lee Travis? <checks> Oh, you mean what everyone else calls blockchain.
mbesto 3y ago
My favorite part of Web3 are the characteristics of decentralized and community governance. Yet, VC's are making huge USD bets on the "companies" supporting these projects. If these are truly decentralized and truly community driven, then a single source shouldn't be reaping financial rewards.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  Community governance where 2-3 rich people buy 50%+ of all voting power power and then do whatever they want, throwing under the bus thousands of poor fools who bought into creator's lies? That governance? Truly few understand.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Pretty much all governance is nominal. VCs and team members typically own the majority of the tokens and just swing all decisions their way.
barnabee 3y ago
Chris Dixon’s narrative feels more useful to me than the one presented by the author of this. In the internet’s early history, the commercial internet experience was very different and often about companies trying to make money with different rather than all powerful “big tech” platforms. And yes, of course many tried (and often failed) to commercialise it. However, the experience of being “very online” back then was completely different and existed outside all that. It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites. Yahoo vs Google was mostly irrelevant for people inhabiting this world, which was indeed much as Chris describes, at least from my perspective. Although it evolved over time and was clearly under threat towards the end, this version of the internet lasted well up to the mid-late 2000s. Summary: this post misses the point and does not paint a “more correct” narrative than Chris does in any meaningful way.
- Kye 3y ago
  I think the proliferation of narratives about the early web reflects the lack of centralization. Everyone had a different view of it. You could kind of see it as early memes made their way around forums with different people thinking their forum came up with it, only to have someone with a wider view point out it came from somewhere else. If someone was hanging out with the startup crowd back then, the narrative web3 people go for might be the most plausible version to them. There's an interesting modern case where a meme started on Mastodon, but then it popped up on Reddit and everyone seemed to have a different idea of which YouTuber/Twitter community/etc came up with it. https://mastodon.social/@picklemaddierix/100639571254871391 https://mastodon.social/@picklemaddierix/100639571254871391 https://old.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/bt9ww9/gender_is_a_scam_invented_by_bathroom_companies/ https://old.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/bt9ww9/gender_is... It might have been the first Mastodon meme to go viral on the wider internet.
- andybak 3y ago
  > It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites. I think you just described one of the "sub periods" covered in the article. That phase happened but it wasn't dominant for the whole 15 year era.
karaterobot 3y ago
It seems like a reasonable model, if you only care about business, or if you see all of history as an arc ending in decentralized, coin-based whatevers. On the other hand, if you don't care about business, but only care about development, you'd define different eras of the web in terms of what technologies were predominant. If you care about consumer devices, you'd define it in terms of what gadgets people used to get online. And so on. People who make up models on Twitter, or for blog posts, generally make them up to demonstrate a point. That's what Dixon did, that's what this author has done.
lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
The web1, web2, web3 model makes sense. And it captures three totally different network architectures, each of which have different economic consequences. web1 -> peer-to-peer decentralized networks without built-in consensus or economics; end up de facto centralized because of this web2 -> corporate owned networks; from iMessage to Tiktok to Reddit, this is most major networks today web3 -> networks whose decentralization is enforced by cryptography and economics; Ethereum being one such example of a programmable network If the terms were just marketing that would be one thing. But they actually describe real differences in properties that have significant consequences for those who build and rely on them.
- StefanWestfal 3y ago
  Don’t you think that web3 would also end up centralized? The underlying technology might be decentralized but the ownership is not. For web2 we have more or less working mechanisms like antitrust offices, on the blockchain we do not. In a proof of stacks scenario we would have the power distributed in a plutocratic fashion without mechanism for the many to counter balance the mighty few.
  - preseinger 3y ago
    100% delegating authority to an open and permissionless network of participants doesn't magically solve the problems of centralization, it mostly just subverts the progress we've made as a species towards mitigating those problems
- rchaud 3y ago
  But that's not what Web 2.0 is. It's commonly understood as the era of interactive web technologies, like: - AJAX (Google Maps, Gmail) - RSS (podcasts, blogs) - Bittorrent - jQuery (website interactivity) - Flash games - Flash video (early YouTube) - database driven server-side CMSes (Wordpress, Drupal) There is nothing about corporate ownership in these technologies in and of themselves.
- preseinger 3y ago
  basically, no web1 and web2 were equally "centralized", the only difference was the scope of their centralized actors web3 is "decentralized" in a way that is effectively meaningless, trust still exists, authorities still exist, the only difference is that those centralized actors are no longer bound by rules or regulations
rchaud 3y ago
A couple of things I'd add to the list of points the author makes: 1) AOL was the first centralized Internet service in America to offering a walled-garden Internet in the mid-90s. Back then, they'd package their 30-day trials floppies with games and magazines -- physical bloatware! You'd see things like "AOL Keyword" instead of 'search term'. 2) Jim Clark and Netscape. After the Netscape IPO, his next project was "Healtheon" a dotcom boom project that positioned Clark's company as the middleman between insurers and care providers. Decentralization this was not. The project ultimately failed, and it's only remaining trace today is the now-blogspam site WebMD.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Web 3.0 is the single most innovative thing to have happened in the world… …if you’re a scammer. The absolute ease with which crypto allows criminals to scam and cheap people is extraordinary. And web 3.0 is the perfect handy-wavy buzzword to cover the absolute shitshow that happens in cryptoland.

63 points by dmazin 3y ago

Devil's advocate: Maybe the tech executives that lived through the earlier eras never actually understood what was going on as it happened. They're not now telling lies about history, as such, because they really have thought this way all along; they've never been particularly connected to any reality we share.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Is the outcome still the same? Yep. It's revisionist at best, devious at worst.

titzer 3y ago

It's so dumb to call it "Web 3.0". It's like "New York City 3.0". It's a big system with a lot of different things that evolve at different speeds. If you think you can characterize New York City by how things look from a couple different street corners and what's playing on Broadway right now, haha, no.

aimor 3y ago
I hate it too, it stretches the cute "Web 2.0" analogy (used to summarize the dramatic changes the web would undergo) much too far. I understand the appeal in co-opting "Web 3.0" -- every movement needs a catchy name -- but it's so acerbic to anyone with any taste at all, it reeks of showiness and empty promises. I hope the next movement of the web isn't going to be hoisted on us, I want it to be something that emerges organically from our collective effort much like the current web evolved. Fragmented Future (1999) https://web.archive.org/web/20111110143942/http://darcyd.com/fragmented_future.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20111110143942/http://darcyd.com...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I rather feel that the current web was more foisted on us than organically emerged from our collective effort.
jholman 3y ago
It's also dumb because "Web 3.0" isn't web at all. I guess in a way that makes it like New York, which isn't a replacement for York.
rchaud 3y ago
Well, they did try going with "Dapp" as in decentralized app, and that went about as well as one would expect.

bdcravens 3y ago

> Web1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed The web during this time was marked by many commercial languages and app servers. (like ColdFusion, server products by Netscape and Sun, etc). A decent IDE was typically several hundred dollars. Corporate interests were trying to control the protocols and standards (Flash, ActiveX, Applets, etc). Even browsers were initially paid commercial products.

anthk 3y ago
It depends where. By 2002 you could get a nice KDE3 distro with KDEvelop and do magic. If not, you could use PHP, Perl, Apache. LAMP stacks were everywhere. Debian was the right choice, even from a GNU/FSF way. The end of the 90's with Mozilla being open changed the things a lot. Also, even in 2004 you could browse Slashdot with FreeBSD and Lynx under a 486 perfectly fine.

riogordo2go 3y ago

It's not fake, it's a perspective. I'm not sure if "web3" is going to solve it though. The incentives are the same, so why would the outcome be different this time.

thesausageking 3y ago

"When you look back on every decade in tech, there's one thing that really dominated. I think the Internet Computer will be the one this next decade." - Chris Dixon This was the a16z-backed "Internet Computer" which launched a token, ICP, that Chris promoted and was then dumped on retail investors as liquidity for insiders. Chris's version of the history of web was created to sell retail investors on this narrative. And a16z has made a pile of money doing it.

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
The "internet computer" is a description of a general category of things: blockchain computers that share state with verification, consensus, and guaranteed data availability as irrevocable properties of those systems. Although a16z did invest in "Internet Computer Protocol" (formerly known as Dfinity) years before, the term here is being used in the general sense, and Dfinity adopted the term later for marketing purposes.
- preseinger 3y ago
  yeah but they're not actually irrevocable, right, because networks can fork you're always subject to some authority, trust always exists, it's just that in decentralized systems that authority is arbitrary, subject to an algorithm rather than an entity governed by law
rchaud 3y ago
Watching Andreessen of all people try to shoehorn in Web3 has made realize that "ICP" is in fact a fitting acronym for A16Z, assuming it stands for the name of a particular band.

its_ethan 3y ago

This bit really resonates with how I feel about how fast and non-substantive the ridiculous hype cycles have been the last 3-4 years: "It has always struck me that the rush to define the next chapter of the Internet (“Metaverse! Web3! AI! Oh my!”) has been driven by tech elites’ hunger to turn the page on the techlash years. They want to go back to being judged based on their ambitions, rather than their results."

spaceman_2020 3y ago
I’ve lived through half a dozen of these hype cycles, all lasting 3-4 years before they go bust. I tried 3D printing. The results were subpar and the utility wasn’t much beyond a toy or a hammer. I tried VR/AR. VR just made me nauseous. AR was a cool tech demo that I would never use because I’m actually trying to reduce my screen time, not increase it. Tried web3.0. Got scammed. Currently trying AI. This somehow feels like the real deal. I’m at least using it every day, even maxing out my GPT-4 limits.
- enjeyw 3y ago
  At least for the 3D printing case you may have just been too early, or the wrong market. I work at a hardware company and these days 3D printing is invaluable for prototyping and other similar work. Maybe in a couple of years the same will be true for the others.

Zaskoda 3y ago

Web 1: HTML Web 2: AJAX Web 3: DLT

denton-scratch 3y ago
Dave Lee Travis? <checks> Oh, you mean what everyone else calls blockchain.

mbesto 3y ago

My favorite part of Web3 are the characteristics of decentralized and community governance. Yet, VC's are making huge USD bets on the "companies" supporting these projects. If these are truly decentralized and truly community driven, then a single source shouldn't be reaping financial rewards.

Yizahi 3y ago
Community governance where 2-3 rich people buy 50%+ of all voting power power and then do whatever they want, throwing under the bus thousands of poor fools who bought into creator's lies? That governance? Truly few understand.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Pretty much all governance is nominal. VCs and team members typically own the majority of the tokens and just swing all decisions their way.

barnabee 3y ago

Chris Dixon’s narrative feels more useful to me than the one presented by the author of this. In the internet’s early history, the commercial internet experience was very different and often about companies trying to make money with different rather than all powerful “big tech” platforms. And yes, of course many tried (and often failed) to commercialise it. However, the experience of being “very online” back then was completely different and existed outside all that. It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites. Yahoo vs Google was mostly irrelevant for people inhabiting this world, which was indeed much as Chris describes, at least from my perspective. Although it evolved over time and was clearly under threat towards the end, this version of the internet lasted well up to the mid-late 2000s. Summary: this post misses the point and does not paint a “more correct” narrative than Chris does in any meaningful way.

Kye 3y ago
I think the proliferation of narratives about the early web reflects the lack of centralization. Everyone had a different view of it. You could kind of see it as early memes made their way around forums with different people thinking their forum came up with it, only to have someone with a wider view point out it came from somewhere else. If someone was hanging out with the startup crowd back then, the narrative web3 people go for might be the most plausible version to them. There's an interesting modern case where a meme started on Mastodon, but then it popped up on Reddit and everyone seemed to have a different idea of which YouTuber/Twitter community/etc came up with it. https://mastodon.social/@picklemaddierix/100639571254871391 https://mastodon.social/@picklemaddierix/100639571254871391 https://old.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/bt9ww9/gender_is_a_scam_invented_by_bathroom_companies/ https://old.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/bt9ww9/gender_is... It might have been the first Mastodon meme to go viral on the wider internet.
andybak 3y ago
> It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites. I think you just described one of the "sub periods" covered in the article. That phase happened but it wasn't dominant for the whole 15 year era.

karaterobot 3y ago

It seems like a reasonable model, if you only care about business, or if you see all of history as an arc ending in decentralized, coin-based whatevers. On the other hand, if you don't care about business, but only care about development, you'd define different eras of the web in terms of what technologies were predominant. If you care about consumer devices, you'd define it in terms of what gadgets people used to get online. And so on. People who make up models on Twitter, or for blog posts, generally make them up to demonstrate a point. That's what Dixon did, that's what this author has done.

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago

The web1, web2, web3 model makes sense. And it captures three totally different network architectures, each of which have different economic consequences. web1 -> peer-to-peer decentralized networks without built-in consensus or economics; end up de facto centralized because of this web2 -> corporate owned networks; from iMessage to Tiktok to Reddit, this is most major networks today web3 -> networks whose decentralization is enforced by cryptography and economics; Ethereum being one such example of a programmable network If the terms were just marketing that would be one thing. But they actually describe real differences in properties that have significant consequences for those who build and rely on them.

StefanWestfal 3y ago
Don’t you think that web3 would also end up centralized? The underlying technology might be decentralized but the ownership is not. For web2 we have more or less working mechanisms like antitrust offices, on the blockchain we do not. In a proof of stacks scenario we would have the power distributed in a plutocratic fashion without mechanism for the many to counter balance the mighty few.
- preseinger 3y ago
  100% delegating authority to an open and permissionless network of participants doesn't magically solve the problems of centralization, it mostly just subverts the progress we've made as a species towards mitigating those problems
rchaud 3y ago
But that's not what Web 2.0 is. It's commonly understood as the era of interactive web technologies, like: - AJAX (Google Maps, Gmail) - RSS (podcasts, blogs) - Bittorrent - jQuery (website interactivity) - Flash games - Flash video (early YouTube) - database driven server-side CMSes (Wordpress, Drupal) There is nothing about corporate ownership in these technologies in and of themselves.
preseinger 3y ago
basically, no web1 and web2 were equally "centralized", the only difference was the scope of their centralized actors web3 is "decentralized" in a way that is effectively meaningless, trust still exists, authorities still exist, the only difference is that those centralized actors are no longer bound by rules or regulations

rchaud 3y ago

A couple of things I'd add to the list of points the author makes: 1) AOL was the first centralized Internet service in America to offering a walled-garden Internet in the mid-90s. Back then, they'd package their 30-day trials floppies with games and magazines -- physical bloatware! You'd see things like "AOL Keyword" instead of 'search term'. 2) Jim Clark and Netscape. After the Netscape IPO, his next project was "Healtheon" a dotcom boom project that positioned Clark's company as the middleman between insurers and care providers. Decentralization this was not. The project ultimately failed, and it's only remaining trace today is the now-blogspam site WebMD.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Web 3.0 is the single most innovative thing to have happened in the world… …if you’re a scammer. The absolute ease with which crypto allows criminals to scam and cheap people is extraordinary. And web 3.0 is the perfect handy-wavy buzzword to cover the absolute shitshow that happens in cryptoland.