3 ms·

I believe we'll have more of these oh s** moments soon when people will finally realise why we need web3. Yes the whole space was full of scammers, charlatans b

I believe we'll have more of these oh s** moments soon when people will finally realise why we need web3. Yes the whole space was full of scammers, charlatans but the technology and point was to create a substrate for networks on the internet. The idea that these networks and communities need to run on centralised servers is archaic. The technology exists where people should be able to own their own network (followers, subs, following, posts).

acdha 3y ago
web3 failed because it was a rebranding exercise by cryptocurrency holders trying to create new demand for their random numbers. Centralized servers aren’t archaic, they’re a natural outcome of how social systems work: finding communities is hard; people want to contribute their ideas, not play sysadmin; spammers and AI researchers will create enormous costs for you; etc. If you federate, you will have more time dealing with those issues than a single focused competitor and you are unlikely to see free contributions which outweigh those costs. Everything you mentioned is available now on Mastodon, and it’s really interesting to see how that works. Some people love having a small network of their friends, but a lot of people have trouble finding people they want to follow. Instances can have their own rules but dealing with abuse is now a multiparty process and since a lot of instances are run by volunteers that can be slow, unreliable, and inconsistent. Some small servers get hammered by storage and bandwidth demand but there’s no great path to monetization unless you have a ton of users willing to pay more than most people are used to paying for internet services. In general, these are social problems and there is only so much technology can do to improve them.
- pc_edwin 3y ago
  I tend to agree but where we diverge is in the thinking that these problems cannot be solved with technology, I believe the opposite. The point of web3 is to abstract away things like sysadmin by commoditising consensus. Once a blockchain gains mass & momentum it opens up a whole new world of possibilities to hack/reinvent social media. You could use multiple different types of social media and still maintain a single identity (auth). This means you could find friends and friendlies everywhere you go. The key is the consensus layer and the ability to store & and read critical metadata. I'll give a personal example: I've been helping a friend to create a combination of Netflix and DVDs. We package the movie licenses into NFTs (MovieKeys) so when the user signs in with their wallet they can stream all the movies in they own. There are so many possibilities with this but lets focus on the social part. In theory, a social media service could scan their users wallet for MovieKeys and create a social graph based on that. Heck you could create entire forums just out of the people who owns a certain moviekey. I wont go further because we go a lot of things cooking atm. The general point is, the technology and the UX to make these things possible is just an arms length away. The entire space got ravaged by scam artists instead of trying to build real magical experiences people actually want.
  - acdha 3y ago
    > I've been helping a friend to create a combination of Netflix and DVDs. We package the movie licenses into NFTs (MovieKeys) so when the user signs in with their wallet they can stream all the movies in they own. How do you plan to deal with piracy? I can't see many rights-holders going for a system which doesn't allow them to revoke keys.
    - pc_edwin 3y ago
      There is where the Netflix side of the equation comes in. You can sell or gift your MovieKey like a DVD but at the end of the day its a license to stream on our platform. All content is DRM protected and we'll ban your account from the platform if you pirate or clone your keys ad infinitum. I'm personally not a fan of this solution but the technology is just not here yet to do this without a centralised control system. So I get where my friend is coming from, no artist will want to have anything to do with us if people can just pirate the stuff or clone their keys ad infinitum.
sumtechguy 3y ago
I got burned on this sort of thing for cddb. Hundreds of discs entered in. Suddenly that data was someone elses and they charged for it.
- pc_edwin 3y ago
  Yeh most of decentralised cloud companies are very silly.
danShumway 3y ago
Let's be honest though, the primary thing that attracted most powerful people to web3 wasn't decentralization, it was reintroduction of artificial scarcity into digital spaces. Web3 billed itself as empowering users, but it always had an undercurrent of commodification and gatekeeping. And that's exactly why (ignoring the scammers or pump-and-dump businesses) it saw such heavy investment from VC/tech types. The promise they were interested in wasn't democratization even if that's what they told their users -- what they were interested in was taking a plentiful resource (digital bits) and building a scarce asset that they could use to further entrench exclusivity, status, and monopolistic control over what that asset represented. Read back over every sales pitch for web3 games. At some point they always devolve into talking about how ordinary users will be able to rent seek: to "license" characters/weapons/gear and passively earn income from other players, or to hoard exclusive tokens/releases in the game and speculate on their future value. Web3 looked at infinite digital spaces and its response was, "infinity is a problem that we need to solve." And it's revealing to look at most web3 branded metaverse attempts and see just how quickly they reintroduced real-world concepts like housing/space scarcity (why on earth would we want a housing market in a digital space with no physical constraints?), and how quickly they leaned into cosmetics and customization as a monetization strategy rather than a user right to free expression. In general, if a technological "paradigm" is primarily associated with and primarily popular with VC firms, it's probably not being developed with the user in mind. On the other hand: federation, interoperability, mobile identities, and legal efforts to build a right to data export existed independently of web3 and have shown a lot more promise when it comes to actually increasing user agency.
- pc_edwin 3y ago
  Again I'm in agreement with everything you are saying here including the part with "other efforts". I just think we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because the space got ravaged by zero interest rates, VC's, scammers, charlatans, snake oil salesman and even worse, it doesn't mean the technology and the premise was wrong. Having a ledger that is secured by decentralised consensus is not only useful but will be a necessity for the digital first future we are heading towards. We are reaching the limits of the current paradigm. We see companies like Meta having to be the arbiter of consensus. We've seen platforms showing their true faces and commoditising peoples data and network which wasn't really theirs to begin with.
jjav 3y ago
> I believe we'll have more of these oh s* moments soon when people will finally realise why we need web3. Well no, what we need is web0, the original premise of the Internet. Every protocol was documented in open RFCs, everything is decentralized and everyone is free to use any client and server (or write their own) and everything interoperates. Nobody can own it, there's no "it" to own. That's the only solution to eliminate the otherwise neverending cycle of proprietary platforms followed by their inevitable "oh s* moment".
- pc_edwin 3y ago
  The world we live in today is very different the world web0 was created for, its older than me. Don't get me wrong, standardised protocols play a very important role in the current world and it will play a bigger role in the future of the internet (Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Matrix..). Its just not enough, we need a decentralised way to provide consensus on the internet. People wont set up their own servers, companies that provide these services will always look like a Pareto distribution (FAANG or MAMAA). In other words, FAANG or what ever the next incarnation of these companies are always incentivised to get rid of interoperability. Selfish reasons aside, after a certain point interop will directly stand in the way of providing better user experiences. This is why web3 is such an elegant system. It provides a substrate that directly incentivises interoperability. Auth and payments is taken care off, the only thing remaining is custom features but that gets rapidly commoditised, then the only frontier remaining is interoperability. A good example of this is the NFT marketplaces: Auth is just connecting your wallet. Payments are taken care off. Then you build cool features but everybody else copies you and you copy them so thats a stalemate. Then you have to be interoperable, like OpenSea going multi chain or Magic Eden supporting Eth. The key here is, the moment someone else supports interoperability, if you dont you are put at a large disadvantage. The same kind of dynamics will happen to decentralised social media platforms.

acdha 3y ago

web3 failed because it was a rebranding exercise by cryptocurrency holders trying to create new demand for their random numbers. Centralized servers aren’t archaic, they’re a natural outcome of how social systems work: finding communities is hard; people want to contribute their ideas, not play sysadmin; spammers and AI researchers will create enormous costs for you; etc. If you federate, you will have more time dealing with those issues than a single focused competitor and you are unlikely to see free contributions which outweigh those costs. Everything you mentioned is available now on Mastodon, and it’s really interesting to see how that works. Some people love having a small network of their friends, but a lot of people have trouble finding people they want to follow. Instances can have their own rules but dealing with abuse is now a multiparty process and since a lot of instances are run by volunteers that can be slow, unreliable, and inconsistent. Some small servers get hammered by storage and bandwidth demand but there’s no great path to monetization unless you have a ton of users willing to pay more than most people are used to paying for internet services. In general, these are social problems and there is only so much technology can do to improve them.

pc_edwin 3y ago
I tend to agree but where we diverge is in the thinking that these problems cannot be solved with technology, I believe the opposite. The point of web3 is to abstract away things like sysadmin by commoditising consensus. Once a blockchain gains mass & momentum it opens up a whole new world of possibilities to hack/reinvent social media. You could use multiple different types of social media and still maintain a single identity (auth). This means you could find friends and friendlies everywhere you go. The key is the consensus layer and the ability to store & and read critical metadata. I'll give a personal example: I've been helping a friend to create a combination of Netflix and DVDs. We package the movie licenses into NFTs (MovieKeys) so when the user signs in with their wallet they can stream all the movies in they own. There are so many possibilities with this but lets focus on the social part. In theory, a social media service could scan their users wallet for MovieKeys and create a social graph based on that. Heck you could create entire forums just out of the people who owns a certain moviekey. I wont go further because we go a lot of things cooking atm. The general point is, the technology and the UX to make these things possible is just an arms length away. The entire space got ravaged by scam artists instead of trying to build real magical experiences people actually want.
- acdha 3y ago
  > I've been helping a friend to create a combination of Netflix and DVDs. We package the movie licenses into NFTs (MovieKeys) so when the user signs in with their wallet they can stream all the movies in they own. How do you plan to deal with piracy? I can't see many rights-holders going for a system which doesn't allow them to revoke keys.
  - pc_edwin 3y ago
    There is where the Netflix side of the equation comes in. You can sell or gift your MovieKey like a DVD but at the end of the day its a license to stream on our platform. All content is DRM protected and we'll ban your account from the platform if you pirate or clone your keys ad infinitum. I'm personally not a fan of this solution but the technology is just not here yet to do this without a centralised control system. So I get where my friend is coming from, no artist will want to have anything to do with us if people can just pirate the stuff or clone their keys ad infinitum.

sumtechguy 3y ago

I got burned on this sort of thing for cddb. Hundreds of discs entered in. Suddenly that data was someone elses and they charged for it.

pc_edwin 3y ago
Yeh most of decentralised cloud companies are very silly.

danShumway 3y ago

Let's be honest though, the primary thing that attracted most powerful people to web3 wasn't decentralization, it was reintroduction of artificial scarcity into digital spaces. Web3 billed itself as empowering users, but it always had an undercurrent of commodification and gatekeeping. And that's exactly why (ignoring the scammers or pump-and-dump businesses) it saw such heavy investment from VC/tech types. The promise they were interested in wasn't democratization even if that's what they told their users -- what they were interested in was taking a plentiful resource (digital bits) and building a scarce asset that they could use to further entrench exclusivity, status, and monopolistic control over what that asset represented. Read back over every sales pitch for web3 games. At some point they always devolve into talking about how ordinary users will be able to rent seek: to "license" characters/weapons/gear and passively earn income from other players, or to hoard exclusive tokens/releases in the game and speculate on their future value. Web3 looked at infinite digital spaces and its response was, "infinity is a problem that we need to solve." And it's revealing to look at most web3 branded metaverse attempts and see just how quickly they reintroduced real-world concepts like housing/space scarcity (why on earth would we want a housing market in a digital space with no physical constraints?), and how quickly they leaned into cosmetics and customization as a monetization strategy rather than a user right to free expression. In general, if a technological "paradigm" is primarily associated with and primarily popular with VC firms, it's probably not being developed with the user in mind. On the other hand: federation, interoperability, mobile identities, and legal efforts to build a right to data export existed independently of web3 and have shown a lot more promise when it comes to actually increasing user agency.

pc_edwin 3y ago
Again I'm in agreement with everything you are saying here including the part with "other efforts". I just think we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because the space got ravaged by zero interest rates, VC's, scammers, charlatans, snake oil salesman and even worse, it doesn't mean the technology and the premise was wrong. Having a ledger that is secured by decentralised consensus is not only useful but will be a necessity for the digital first future we are heading towards. We are reaching the limits of the current paradigm. We see companies like Meta having to be the arbiter of consensus. We've seen platforms showing their true faces and commoditising peoples data and network which wasn't really theirs to begin with.

jjav 3y ago

> I believe we'll have more of these oh s* moments soon when people will finally realise why we need web3. Well no, what we need is web0, the original premise of the Internet. Every protocol was documented in open RFCs, everything is decentralized and everyone is free to use any client and server (or write their own) and everything interoperates. Nobody can own it, there's no "it" to own. That's the only solution to eliminate the otherwise neverending cycle of proprietary platforms followed by their inevitable "oh s* moment".

pc_edwin 3y ago
The world we live in today is very different the world web0 was created for, its older than me. Don't get me wrong, standardised protocols play a very important role in the current world and it will play a bigger role in the future of the internet (Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Matrix..). Its just not enough, we need a decentralised way to provide consensus on the internet. People wont set up their own servers, companies that provide these services will always look like a Pareto distribution (FAANG or MAMAA). In other words, FAANG or what ever the next incarnation of these companies are always incentivised to get rid of interoperability. Selfish reasons aside, after a certain point interop will directly stand in the way of providing better user experiences. This is why web3 is such an elegant system. It provides a substrate that directly incentivises interoperability. Auth and payments is taken care off, the only thing remaining is custom features but that gets rapidly commoditised, then the only frontier remaining is interoperability. A good example of this is the NFT marketplaces: Auth is just connecting your wallet. Payments are taken care off. Then you build cool features but everybody else copies you and you copy them so thats a stalemate. Then you have to be interoperable, like OpenSea going multi chain or Magic Eden supporting Eth. The key here is, the moment someone else supports interoperability, if you dont you are put at a large disadvantage. The same kind of dynamics will happen to decentralised social media platforms.