13 ms·

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

thiago_fm 2y ago
I can't wait for this time to arrive, sick of big companies controlling everybody's attention
nicbou 2y ago
As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.
- QuarterReptile 2y ago
  If the web progresses in a bad enough direction, it will happen.
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  That's a function of technology. It would absolutely be possible to integrate something like Nextcloud into operating systems or devices. It will never happen, because every party in a position to do such an integration is also in a position to become a middleman and extract money, which is much more profitable.
  - komali2 2y ago
    I'm curious what an integration would look like. Are you thinking Google Play Services but Nextcloud Services instead?
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      Opera, before it got Chrome-ified, had a built in web server. I used it to share files with my buddies. Super simple. Didn't support scripts IIRC but with webassembly it doesn't have to be too difficult to support something like NextCloud I'd think.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >That's a function of technology No, it's a function of economics. Division of labour still works. It is not more profitable to run your own cloud and pay for your own traffic when you're specialized in producing content. It makes financial sense to pay someone to do that for you. The middleman is cheaper, that's why they exist. The internet looks like it does for only one reason, in any system of increasing complexity there are increased returns to specialization and trade.
- n_ary 2y ago
  I was part of some social computing facilities and burnt my own and friends’ money to offer basic stuff for people to publish basic html pages, small twitter like service, one nextcloud and one invidious instance. Within weeks, nextcloud was filled with pirated content sharing, html pages were hosting fake bank login phishing pages and moderation became horror. Our colo provider sent us some written warnings to sort this out immediately. While I still inspire to launch a twitter 1.0 plain old less featured version, but the thought of moderation kills my motivation immediately. :( There are still public computing facilities here, like sdfeu, envs.net etc, am not sure how they handle the moderation of spam and pirated content attack.
  - zoul 2y ago
    As a positive example, Mastodon seems to work fine.
    - bragr 2y ago
      Mastodon effectively democratizes the moderation to the huge group of server admins - who do a massive amount of unpaid labor. It definitely keeps some people away, and burns others out.
      - DANmode 2y ago
        I'm still focused on the "effectively" part, since the other part has always been endemic to the Internet (and communities!).
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >the other part has always been endemic to the Internet (and communities!). Indeed. But unlike machines (and AI, in the future), humans don't scale well. managing a potential audience of 10000 user with a few hundred commenters focused in a few countrie is an order of magnitude different from the millions of users with thousands of commenters and a very well established malicious actors with no respect for community. It's more work, for more people, for less appreciation. It's also harder than ever to pay for labor as a small community, unless you are very well off.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I feel like making it easy to how your own website is something that can be solved with an ingress service (Tailscale funnel?) + DNS management and a small box that someone buys and leaves in their living room. It doesn't have to require any technical expertise, you just need to build a lot of things to make it that way.
  - idontwantthis 2y ago
    I’ve thought about making my own homepage to replace my instagram/fb and share my life with my friends, but how would anyone find it? I guess I could email everyone and tell them. I’ve wondered if there is a way I could easily get that to the top of Google for my name, but there are a few famous people with my name.
    - packetlost 2y ago
      I feel like Fediverse/Mastodon and/or Bluesky sort of solve this problem though. Fediverse in particular has a pretty rich ecosystem with niches for Twitter-like, Instagram-like, Reddit-like, and (I think) even Facebook-like. There's also RSS feeds
      - TylerE 2y ago
        I look at those Fediverse things and they just feel like toys. Horrible, confusing UX. Very limited feature sets. Mediocre performance, at best. if that's supposed to be the future, call me a luddite I guess.
    - nytesky 2y ago
      You could get the URL out. I would like to have it require some authentication, and I don’t see too many easy ways to add authentication. I use Google Workspace for hosting and I guess it would default to Google IDs? Does SquareSpace provide access control for low cost accounts?
    - volkk 2y ago
      does it make sense to have a "social" network that in essence is _only_ a directory? looking up someone works well, and links to some external site. full stop
- tivert 2y ago
  >> The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks. > As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. > The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Maybe Web 1.0 won't return as the "dominant culture," but I wonder if something like it could return as a subculture. > Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills. Maybe we just need an new MS Frontpage for the new millennium?
  - rovr138 2y ago
    I know someone that just has a folder with word docs and exports them to html With so many static site generators, I wonder how hard it’d be. Not that it’s simple, just thinking that an opinionated structure, a gui, and gluing it all together.
  - manuelmoreale 2y ago
    > Maybe Web 1.0 won't return as the "dominant culture," but I wonder if something like it could return as a subculture. I’m shamelessly link to this thing I’m running[0] because I personally believe that subculture is already (still?) there and I’m doing what I can to help other people discover this fact. Just recently I added a guestbook to my site and I’m having fun seeing other people doing the same. Webrings are also doing a comeback. I have hope for a return of a more personal web, even as just a small subset of the whole web. [0] https://peopleandblogs.com/ https://peopleandblogs.com/
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    there's nothing technological stopping a subculture. It's just that network effects are extremely strong. That and financial incentives. Substacks seems to be the most successful "web 1" implemenation in the past decade, but that still monetizes the idea (anthetical to a web 1 era).
- KuriousCat 2y ago
  How hard is it come up with community run maker spaces supported by the city for putting such things together? Not every thing has to be owned by large private companies.
  - jadtz 2y ago
    Libraries are a good starting point for your idea, but they are already being defunded.
  - mtnGoat 2y ago
    As someone who works with a non profit who does this… don’t ask the city, they rarely care about thing’s like this. They will talk about support, but it’s talk. Most are too involved with crazy politics, campaigning, etc. Better to seek out other non-profits and community services to work with.
- iFreilicht 2y ago
  I have been dreaming of creating a mixed hardware/cloud service that would make this possible again in today's internet. Basically, you can open an account and get your own domain and nextcloud + mastodon + wordpress instance. You pay based on how much storage you use. If you want, you can get your entire cloud shipped to your home, attach it to a router there, and then you only pay for my service to be the gateway to the server you have at home. All the data is at home, you have full control. Of course, the defaults would have to be basically zero-management. But people would be able to choose how much control over their own data they want versus how convenient they want it to be. Right now, it's pretty much all or nothing.
xyst 2y ago
I'm already self hosting an e-mail server with no problems in deliverability or receiving. No limitations on aliases. No more artificial limits. Cyrus-imap + postfix. If I need to scale up, can migrate from sqlite to postgres.
- itslennysfault 2y ago
  I did this for about a decade (ending about a decade ago), and eventually gave up and went to gmail. I agree that it is a really easy thing to do and maintain, BUT when it did (rarely) break it was always at the worst possible time. The day a client was sending an important document. While I was on vacation. Etc. I probably only had to drop everything to fix my email server a handful of times, but that handful of times was painful enough to make me just let google worry about it.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    I currently use google but am thinking seriously about self hosting. For those few times could the clients send it to you via WhatsApp?
    - mynameisvlad 2y ago
      “Please send me that critical requirements document over WhatsApp, my email isn’t working” is a terrible thing to hear from a vendor/partner/etc.
      - cjbgkagh 2y ago
        I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the ones asking to send it via WhatsApp. It would make sense to me to have a non-email contingency for email.
pavlov 2y ago
"Web3" was hijacked by cryptocurrency promoters as the marketing term for various get-rich-quick token schemes. (Generally what made them "web3" was simply that some venture capitalist had bought a bunch of the tokens early and would get to dump them on Coinbase.) If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...
- rchaud 2y ago
  It's a good thing that the average person doesn't think of the web in terms of historical eras with arbitrary date cutoffs. Web3 was never part of the Internet in the public consciousness. Nothing that requires logging in with a crypto wallet ever was.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  I propose “Web 95”
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    Web X. Wait, shit--
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Web++ would get my nod
    - saalweachter 2y ago
      Web#, since it's going to be full of octothorpes anyway.
  - darknavi 2y ago
    I'm partial to Web ME my self.
- vincnetas 2y ago
  tangential. when i was learning to program BASIC, one of advices that i got is to number your lines with 10 increment. 10, 20, 30 etc, so later you don't need to rewrite a lot when you need to insert some line. Yes you had to number your lines. I didn't question why though.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dheera 2y ago
Publicly-held companies aren't any better. The only companies that care about customers are those where founders and employees hold most of the stock. As soon as it is owned mostly by investors, everything becomes about shareholder value.
qeternity 2y ago
I'm not really sure I follow this logic. What connection are you drawing between PE and Web 3.0? People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.
- arrosenberg 2y ago
  People hate on PE for good reason - they often make money by destroying good businesses. They sell off the valuable parts for profit, load the debts on what is left, and declare bankruptcy, leaving employees and customers holding the bag. PE is good business for the raiders, bad business for the raided.
  - devcpp 2y ago
    Unless the company has a very negative outlook with outstanding debts (which Squarespace is not AFAIK), the price they have to pay to take over is much lower than the value of their assets. And even with a negative outlook and debts (i.e. liquidation), extracting value without making bigger issues is not at all simple.
    - arrosenberg 2y ago
      And yet, they do.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    That’s a strange cartoony impression that people here have but not generally what they do, even in the case of LBOs which I assume is what you’re referencing but only a small part of what PE firms do. They generally buy businesses that are managed poorly, manage them well, and fix them. And when they part one out like you are referencing, it’s usually a bad business. While what Eddie Lampert did to Sears/K-Mart was criminal, or at least should be, they were not a good business and hadn’t been in a very long time. A good business is rarely worth more parted out than whole. It’s most often good business for the “raided” too because they are failing and the alternative is bankruptcy. A company that survives after laying off 25% of its staff still employs more people than one that dies entirely. This is why they prefer companies with high revenue and low profits. That’s nearly always the sign of a business that has been mismanaged and can be fixed. I have come to the conclusion that people in tech are as largely ignorant of finance as people in finance are of tech.
jmyeet 2y ago
I agree about private equity: it's merely the latest incarnation of rent-seeking or enclosure-building. The playbook is the same: cut costs, jack up prices, load up with exploding debt, go public or resell before the debt explodes. There is absolutely no value being created here. We saw the same thing with the corporate raiders of the 1980s (who bought companies below book value and scrapped them for parts). But I do not agree that Web 3.0 will rise from the ashes. IMHO that's pure hopium. And you hear the same thing whenever people talk about federation. Web 3.0 (and federation) offers nothing users actually care about. It complicates everything and makes everything more expensive. Centalized services won for a reason. Companies like things like Web 3.0 and NFTs because they simply want to restrict or profit of secondary sales of digital goods. That's it. You don't own your identity or your data. You can just as easily be cut off from the related services. We've seen it with games and NFTs. Financial transactions are generally reversible. That's a feature not a bug. A Web 3.0, just like with crypto wallets, will generally result in irrecoverable identities (ie wallets). Trying to build that into the contract through a consensus method of trusted contacts is just another potential vulnerability. I really wish we, as tech-savvy people, were more cognizant of user benefits here rather than having some idealistic utopic view of a federated world.
Aaronstotle 2y ago
Until Web 3.0 is disconnected from blockchains, I don't see this happening
caycep 2y ago
but w/ exponentially much higher compute requirements since they insist on that crypto/blockchain whizbangery
zackmorris 2y ago
Ya for me it's been over for quite some time, almost a quarter century since the Dot Bomb around 2000/2001. What happened was that the original web architects, loosely people like Jimmy Wales, had a different vision of the future than the one we're living in now: 1) The web was supposed to make nearly all information freely accessible with sites like Wikipedia and infrastructure like Coral CDN and BitTorrent. 2) The next step was to make computing freely accessible with stuff like One Laptop Per Child and distributed computing with SETI@home, BOINC, and something like a p2p Docker cluster running on idle CPU time, presented as virtual CPUs on your computer to run any platform code you want, perhaps 1000 to 1 million times faster than today, which hasn't been invented yet. 3) The final step IMHO was to make money/resources/time freely accessible with a p2p UBI system similar to Bitcoin, where joining it would start depositing money into a wallet by virtue of need (potential) instead of ability (productivity), like Patreon on steroids. Instead the powers that be chose greed around 2007 after a long politically regressive period which undid much of the social progress of the 1990s, ending Moore's law and starting the transition to walled gardens and surveillance capitalism. My life experience has basically felt like living in the alternate timeline in Star Trek TNG when the Enterprise went through the temporal rift and Tasha Yar was still alive. Not only did we NOT get #2 or #3 above, but even #1 has been steadily eroded to the point that search engines have started to not work anymore. It's not just that nobody is able to get real work done because they're working too hard to make rent, but that rent is increasing exponentially faster than wages. And that any forward progress is eclipsed by transnational moneyed interests who can use regulatory capture to control the US Supreme Court for example, cementing corporate money in politics, preventing the breakup of any monopoly/duopoly and defunding the IRS/criminal justice system to prevent enforcement of even the most basic fraud/antitrust laws on financial elites. Which brings us back to what you said: just like every other time in history, it will be volunteers working in obscurity without financial support who bring us the next revolutionary tech. I really wanted to be one of them. But after so many failed ventures, I'm realizing that I could have made more money delivering pizza and gambling on the stock market. I'll probably have to get a regular job soon to cover expenses for my aging self and family, then be too tired to work on interesting projects. So nothing much will change - the cavalry never arrives. If someone really wants to change the world, open source something that eliminates a whole market. 3D printed hand-wound cell phone charger cases, I don't know. Something that liberates someone from suffering and removes all profit so it can't be ruined by subscription spyware.
tim333 2y ago
Where is this Web 3.0 that I can move to? Do you have a link?
Alifatisk 2y ago
I’d love this to happen but the average person is not skilled enough
bjhess 2y ago
I sure hope so! I missed the serendipity of web 1.0 and then in the past couple of years I realized it’s all still there! In fact, there or more sites than ever behind the sheen of these giant companies. I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network. We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/ https://pika.page/

thiago_fm 2y ago

I can't wait for this time to arrive, sick of big companies controlling everybody's attention

nicbou 2y ago

As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.

QuarterReptile 2y ago
If the web progresses in a bad enough direction, it will happen.
smallmancontrov 2y ago
That's a function of technology. It would absolutely be possible to integrate something like Nextcloud into operating systems or devices. It will never happen, because every party in a position to do such an integration is also in a position to become a middleman and extract money, which is much more profitable.
- komali2 2y ago
  I'm curious what an integration would look like. Are you thinking Google Play Services but Nextcloud Services instead?
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    Opera, before it got Chrome-ified, had a built in web server. I used it to share files with my buddies. Super simple. Didn't support scripts IIRC but with webassembly it doesn't have to be too difficult to support something like NextCloud I'd think.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >That's a function of technology No, it's a function of economics. Division of labour still works. It is not more profitable to run your own cloud and pay for your own traffic when you're specialized in producing content. It makes financial sense to pay someone to do that for you. The middleman is cheaper, that's why they exist. The internet looks like it does for only one reason, in any system of increasing complexity there are increased returns to specialization and trade.
n_ary 2y ago
I was part of some social computing facilities and burnt my own and friends’ money to offer basic stuff for people to publish basic html pages, small twitter like service, one nextcloud and one invidious instance. Within weeks, nextcloud was filled with pirated content sharing, html pages were hosting fake bank login phishing pages and moderation became horror. Our colo provider sent us some written warnings to sort this out immediately. While I still inspire to launch a twitter 1.0 plain old less featured version, but the thought of moderation kills my motivation immediately. :( There are still public computing facilities here, like sdfeu, envs.net etc, am not sure how they handle the moderation of spam and pirated content attack.
- zoul 2y ago
  As a positive example, Mastodon seems to work fine.
  - bragr 2y ago
    Mastodon effectively democratizes the moderation to the huge group of server admins - who do a massive amount of unpaid labor. It definitely keeps some people away, and burns others out.
    - DANmode 2y ago
      I'm still focused on the "effectively" part, since the other part has always been endemic to the Internet (and communities!).
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >the other part has always been endemic to the Internet (and communities!). Indeed. But unlike machines (and AI, in the future), humans don't scale well. managing a potential audience of 10000 user with a few hundred commenters focused in a few countrie is an order of magnitude different from the millions of users with thousands of commenters and a very well established malicious actors with no respect for community. It's more work, for more people, for less appreciation. It's also harder than ever to pay for labor as a small community, unless you are very well off.
packetlost 2y ago
I feel like making it easy to how your own website is something that can be solved with an ingress service (Tailscale funnel?) + DNS management and a small box that someone buys and leaves in their living room. It doesn't have to require any technical expertise, you just need to build a lot of things to make it that way.
- idontwantthis 2y ago
  I’ve thought about making my own homepage to replace my instagram/fb and share my life with my friends, but how would anyone find it? I guess I could email everyone and tell them. I’ve wondered if there is a way I could easily get that to the top of Google for my name, but there are a few famous people with my name.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    I feel like Fediverse/Mastodon and/or Bluesky sort of solve this problem though. Fediverse in particular has a pretty rich ecosystem with niches for Twitter-like, Instagram-like, Reddit-like, and (I think) even Facebook-like. There's also RSS feeds
    - TylerE 2y ago
      I look at those Fediverse things and they just feel like toys. Horrible, confusing UX. Very limited feature sets. Mediocre performance, at best. if that's supposed to be the future, call me a luddite I guess.
  - nytesky 2y ago
    You could get the URL out. I would like to have it require some authentication, and I don’t see too many easy ways to add authentication. I use Google Workspace for hosting and I guess it would default to Google IDs? Does SquareSpace provide access control for low cost accounts?
  - volkk 2y ago
    does it make sense to have a "social" network that in essence is _only_ a directory? looking up someone works well, and links to some external site. full stop
tivert 2y ago
>> The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks. > As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. > The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Maybe Web 1.0 won't return as the "dominant culture," but I wonder if something like it could return as a subculture. > Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills. Maybe we just need an new MS Frontpage for the new millennium?
- rovr138 2y ago
  I know someone that just has a folder with word docs and exports them to html With so many static site generators, I wonder how hard it’d be. Not that it’s simple, just thinking that an opinionated structure, a gui, and gluing it all together.
- manuelmoreale 2y ago
  > Maybe Web 1.0 won't return as the "dominant culture," but I wonder if something like it could return as a subculture. I’m shamelessly link to this thing I’m running[0] because I personally believe that subculture is already (still?) there and I’m doing what I can to help other people discover this fact. Just recently I added a guestbook to my site and I’m having fun seeing other people doing the same. Webrings are also doing a comeback. I have hope for a return of a more personal web, even as just a small subset of the whole web. [0] https://peopleandblogs.com/ https://peopleandblogs.com/
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  there's nothing technological stopping a subculture. It's just that network effects are extremely strong. That and financial incentives. Substacks seems to be the most successful "web 1" implemenation in the past decade, but that still monetizes the idea (anthetical to a web 1 era).
KuriousCat 2y ago
How hard is it come up with community run maker spaces supported by the city for putting such things together? Not every thing has to be owned by large private companies.
- jadtz 2y ago
  Libraries are a good starting point for your idea, but they are already being defunded.
- mtnGoat 2y ago
  As someone who works with a non profit who does this… don’t ask the city, they rarely care about thing’s like this. They will talk about support, but it’s talk. Most are too involved with crazy politics, campaigning, etc. Better to seek out other non-profits and community services to work with.
iFreilicht 2y ago
I have been dreaming of creating a mixed hardware/cloud service that would make this possible again in today's internet. Basically, you can open an account and get your own domain and nextcloud + mastodon + wordpress instance. You pay based on how much storage you use. If you want, you can get your entire cloud shipped to your home, attach it to a router there, and then you only pay for my service to be the gateway to the server you have at home. All the data is at home, you have full control. Of course, the defaults would have to be basically zero-management. But people would be able to choose how much control over their own data they want versus how convenient they want it to be. Right now, it's pretty much all or nothing.

xyst 2y ago

I'm already self hosting an e-mail server with no problems in deliverability or receiving. No limitations on aliases. No more artificial limits. Cyrus-imap + postfix. If I need to scale up, can migrate from sqlite to postgres.

itslennysfault 2y ago
I did this for about a decade (ending about a decade ago), and eventually gave up and went to gmail. I agree that it is a really easy thing to do and maintain, BUT when it did (rarely) break it was always at the worst possible time. The day a client was sending an important document. While I was on vacation. Etc. I probably only had to drop everything to fix my email server a handful of times, but that handful of times was painful enough to make me just let google worry about it.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  I currently use google but am thinking seriously about self hosting. For those few times could the clients send it to you via WhatsApp?
  - mynameisvlad 2y ago
    “Please send me that critical requirements document over WhatsApp, my email isn’t working” is a terrible thing to hear from a vendor/partner/etc.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the ones asking to send it via WhatsApp. It would make sense to me to have a non-email contingency for email.

pavlov 2y ago

"Web3" was hijacked by cryptocurrency promoters as the marketing term for various get-rich-quick token schemes. (Generally what made them "web3" was simply that some venture capitalist had bought a bunch of the tokens early and would get to dump them on Coinbase.) If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...

rchaud 2y ago
It's a good thing that the average person doesn't think of the web in terms of historical eras with arbitrary date cutoffs. Web3 was never part of the Internet in the public consciousness. Nothing that requires logging in with a crypto wallet ever was.
skrebbel 2y ago
I propose “Web 95”
- saalweachter 2y ago
  Web X. Wait, shit--
- dylan604 2y ago
  Web++ would get my nod
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    Web#, since it's going to be full of octothorpes anyway.
- darknavi 2y ago
  I'm partial to Web ME my self.
vincnetas 2y ago
tangential. when i was learning to program BASIC, one of advices that i got is to number your lines with 10 increment. 10, 20, 30 etc, so later you don't need to rewrite a lot when you need to insert some line. Yes you had to number your lines. I didn't question why though.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dheera 2y ago

Publicly-held companies aren't any better. The only companies that care about customers are those where founders and employees hold most of the stock. As soon as it is owned mostly by investors, everything becomes about shareholder value.

qeternity 2y ago

I'm not really sure I follow this logic. What connection are you drawing between PE and Web 3.0? People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.

arrosenberg 2y ago
People hate on PE for good reason - they often make money by destroying good businesses. They sell off the valuable parts for profit, load the debts on what is left, and declare bankruptcy, leaving employees and customers holding the bag. PE is good business for the raiders, bad business for the raided.
- devcpp 2y ago
  Unless the company has a very negative outlook with outstanding debts (which Squarespace is not AFAIK), the price they have to pay to take over is much lower than the value of their assets. And even with a negative outlook and debts (i.e. liquidation), extracting value without making bigger issues is not at all simple.
  - arrosenberg 2y ago
    And yet, they do.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  That’s a strange cartoony impression that people here have but not generally what they do, even in the case of LBOs which I assume is what you’re referencing but only a small part of what PE firms do. They generally buy businesses that are managed poorly, manage them well, and fix them. And when they part one out like you are referencing, it’s usually a bad business. While what Eddie Lampert did to Sears/K-Mart was criminal, or at least should be, they were not a good business and hadn’t been in a very long time. A good business is rarely worth more parted out than whole. It’s most often good business for the “raided” too because they are failing and the alternative is bankruptcy. A company that survives after laying off 25% of its staff still employs more people than one that dies entirely. This is why they prefer companies with high revenue and low profits. That’s nearly always the sign of a business that has been mismanaged and can be fixed. I have come to the conclusion that people in tech are as largely ignorant of finance as people in finance are of tech.

jmyeet 2y ago

I agree about private equity: it's merely the latest incarnation of rent-seeking or enclosure-building. The playbook is the same: cut costs, jack up prices, load up with exploding debt, go public or resell before the debt explodes. There is absolutely no value being created here. We saw the same thing with the corporate raiders of the 1980s (who bought companies below book value and scrapped them for parts). But I do not agree that Web 3.0 will rise from the ashes. IMHO that's pure hopium. And you hear the same thing whenever people talk about federation. Web 3.0 (and federation) offers nothing users actually care about. It complicates everything and makes everything more expensive. Centalized services won for a reason. Companies like things like Web 3.0 and NFTs because they simply want to restrict or profit of secondary sales of digital goods. That's it. You don't own your identity or your data. You can just as easily be cut off from the related services. We've seen it with games and NFTs. Financial transactions are generally reversible. That's a feature not a bug. A Web 3.0, just like with crypto wallets, will generally result in irrecoverable identities (ie wallets). Trying to build that into the contract through a consensus method of trusted contacts is just another potential vulnerability. I really wish we, as tech-savvy people, were more cognizant of user benefits here rather than having some idealistic utopic view of a federated world.

Aaronstotle 2y ago

Until Web 3.0 is disconnected from blockchains, I don't see this happening

caycep 2y ago

but w/ exponentially much higher compute requirements since they insist on that crypto/blockchain whizbangery

zackmorris 2y ago

Ya for me it's been over for quite some time, almost a quarter century since the Dot Bomb around 2000/2001. What happened was that the original web architects, loosely people like Jimmy Wales, had a different vision of the future than the one we're living in now: 1) The web was supposed to make nearly all information freely accessible with sites like Wikipedia and infrastructure like Coral CDN and BitTorrent. 2) The next step was to make computing freely accessible with stuff like One Laptop Per Child and distributed computing with SETI@home, BOINC, and something like a p2p Docker cluster running on idle CPU time, presented as virtual CPUs on your computer to run any platform code you want, perhaps 1000 to 1 million times faster than today, which hasn't been invented yet. 3) The final step IMHO was to make money/resources/time freely accessible with a p2p UBI system similar to Bitcoin, where joining it would start depositing money into a wallet by virtue of need (potential) instead of ability (productivity), like Patreon on steroids. Instead the powers that be chose greed around 2007 after a long politically regressive period which undid much of the social progress of the 1990s, ending Moore's law and starting the transition to walled gardens and surveillance capitalism. My life experience has basically felt like living in the alternate timeline in Star Trek TNG when the Enterprise went through the temporal rift and Tasha Yar was still alive. Not only did we NOT get #2 or #3 above, but even #1 has been steadily eroded to the point that search engines have started to not work anymore. It's not just that nobody is able to get real work done because they're working too hard to make rent, but that rent is increasing exponentially faster than wages. And that any forward progress is eclipsed by transnational moneyed interests who can use regulatory capture to control the US Supreme Court for example, cementing corporate money in politics, preventing the breakup of any monopoly/duopoly and defunding the IRS/criminal justice system to prevent enforcement of even the most basic fraud/antitrust laws on financial elites. Which brings us back to what you said: just like every other time in history, it will be volunteers working in obscurity without financial support who bring us the next revolutionary tech. I really wanted to be one of them. But after so many failed ventures, I'm realizing that I could have made more money delivering pizza and gambling on the stock market. I'll probably have to get a regular job soon to cover expenses for my aging self and family, then be too tired to work on interesting projects. So nothing much will change - the cavalry never arrives. If someone really wants to change the world, open source something that eliminates a whole market. 3D printed hand-wound cell phone charger cases, I don't know. Something that liberates someone from suffering and removes all profit so it can't be ruined by subscription spyware.

tim333 2y ago

Where is this Web 3.0 that I can move to? Do you have a link?

Alifatisk 2y ago

I’d love this to happen but the average person is not skilled enough

bjhess 2y ago

I sure hope so! I missed the serendipity of web 1.0 and then in the past couple of years I realized it’s all still there! In fact, there or more sites than ever behind the sheen of these giant companies. I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network. We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/ https://pika.page/