3 ms·

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

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.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > 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. I think I would disagree with this specifically; at least I would disagree that blockchain ledgers are necessary or helpful in most situations. I'm not going to say that there's no applications that are useful that would rely on a blockchain, but they're extremely limited and the technology itself seemed to be mostly useful and mostly oriented towards turning plentiful resources into scarce ones. It's of course bad for Meta to be the arbiter of consensus. It doesn't necessarily follow that distributed (in some ways still very centralized, at least on a conceptual level) ledgers are a good alternative, particularly now that we're seeing that basing consensus around eventual consistency, fragmentation, etc... seems to be at least more promising than the alternatives, even if it isn't perfect. I'm very much in support of efforts like 3rd Room, Fediverse, Matrix -- seeing their success has given me very little reason to believe that distributed ledgers would be necessary, and has given me some reason to believe that in many instances they would be actively harmful. 3rd Room for example would (imo) absolutely be a worse project if it was economically/socially built around a distributed ledger. Not only is there no need for 3rd Room to have that kind of coordination around state in VR rooms, it would be actually harmful for 3rd Room to require all of its VR rooms to use a shared ledger/state. Consensus (distributed or not) isn't necessary for what they're trying to build.

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.

danShumway 3y ago
> 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. I think I would disagree with this specifically; at least I would disagree that blockchain ledgers are necessary or helpful in most situations. I'm not going to say that there's no applications that are useful that would rely on a blockchain, but they're extremely limited and the technology itself seemed to be mostly useful and mostly oriented towards turning plentiful resources into scarce ones. It's of course bad for Meta to be the arbiter of consensus. It doesn't necessarily follow that distributed (in some ways still very centralized, at least on a conceptual level) ledgers are a good alternative, particularly now that we're seeing that basing consensus around eventual consistency, fragmentation, etc... seems to be at least more promising than the alternatives, even if it isn't perfect. I'm very much in support of efforts like 3rd Room, Fediverse, Matrix -- seeing their success has given me very little reason to believe that distributed ledgers would be necessary, and has given me some reason to believe that in many instances they would be actively harmful. 3rd Room for example would (imo) absolutely be a worse project if it was economically/socially built around a distributed ledger. Not only is there no need for 3rd Room to have that kind of coordination around state in VR rooms, it would be actually harmful for 3rd Room to require all of its VR rooms to use a shared ledger/state. Consensus (distributed or not) isn't necessary for what they're trying to build.