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A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going

169 points by warrenm 1y ago

tolerance 1y ago
Ahh! It says a lot about the state of “Web 3.0” that I forgot that it was even a thing. I was hoping that IEEE Spectrum would cover the actual Web re: the efforts to un-silo it that I reckon will result in more silos with just less volume than before.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  Isn't "more silos" the desired outcome, more or less? Has the web been anything but many silos? Of course it might have been different when everyone who wanted to have a presence on it was expected to build their own homepage. Now billions are online, courtesy of their phone, and don't even know what a computer is. So they naturally fall into silos where they and their friends are welcome.
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    There was a point where "the web" was literally a web, and it was literally "linked" together by...get this: hyperlinks! I think that what killed that is that hyperlinks work great for browsing & discovery, but as the web matures, a lot of people want to use it for task-oriented things. And all of the Big Tech companies that came afterwards succeeded because they built a task-oriented interface that co-opted the links that were there before and turned them into ways to accomplish the task. Google took hyperlinks, used them to compute PageRank, and then used that to create a better way to solve the task of finding specific information. Facebook took user activity, aggregated it, presented it in a feed, and used it to improve the task of killing time. Amazon took product pages and direct links and used them as lead-gen to increase the ease with which you can buy things. Stripe took embedded Javascript and used it to make paying for things easier; Uber and Lyft took mobile phones and used it to make transportation easier; AirBnB took these large Internet markets and used it to make vacation rentals easier. Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?"
    - tolerance 1y ago
      > Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?” Nice observation and can speak to why anyone intent on selling you content writes a “user story” to outline the tasks that lead to a purchase or engagement.
    - stahorn 1y ago
      I've become a bit cynic, and I think it will take time until it becomes better. Eventually though, there will be large protests that turn into law that change the dynamics of the now very centralized web. London was known for having so thick fog from burning coal, and in 1952 it was such a bad event that 4k people died and 100k got badly affected from it. It is was started the Clean Air Act of 1956, that eventually led to clean (cleaner?) air in London. Another one is Amsterdam. It was a car-centric city up until the 70s, where they started to rebuild it to be a walkable and cyclable city. This started because people protested the dangerous roads, which culminated with the "Stop de Kindermoord" protest. Maybe if we live long enough, we get to experience a decentralized web again. Next time will come when it's supported by laws, that in turn stand atop a large understanding in the population of why those laws are good and needed.
    - bigbuppo 1y ago
      The cult of marketing ruined it. They're still fantasizing about personalisation, which in marketing speak means optimizing a mattress sale opportunity for Ted Waciznski of 932 West Moreland Ave in Walla Walla, Washington next Tuesday at 3:54pm as he reads CNN.com as he has every morning between 11:19am and 11:26am from a mobile device in the same spot every weekday for the past seven years, rather than, you know, "here's a cool thing you asked us to show you." The only links that matter are to an adtech/martech firm, and presumably the company that wants you to buy something.
  - tolerance 1y ago
    Yes, I think so. I agree with you actually. But it doesn’t always seem like that’s the desired outcome for some people when they mention “decentralization”. I have a particular interest group in mind here, who lament the current state of the Web to an extent unique to our time. It seems like they’re upset with their loss of agency/authority online. When a free, ad-less *.blogspot.com or LiveJournal presence could net you some clout you’d be precluded from otherwise in the real world. Take for example any evidence of disapproval you may find from the proponents of ActivityPub toward the development of the AT Protocol in parallel. Also notice how moderation features on these federated platforms essentially centralize them and their respective enclaves. The desire for interoperability between social media platforms conflicts with the imminent re-siloing being examined. Or is it just the same ends with new wiry means attached? “Decentralization” in this context seems more like separating from the whole with the hopes of replacing it. And I’m not confident that these many new “wholes” can resist jockeying one after the other for political influence.
  - atoav 1y ago
    A big chunk of my favorite websites to this day are hosted by motivated individuals in their spare time. And that hasn't changed. Maybe I am an exception as I find social media nearly worthless by this point, but hey: Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it is not there.
AfterHIA 1y ago
The real Web 3.0 is the Ted Nelson internet we never got.
- deleted 1y ago
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- fluoridation 1y ago
  Wasn't Project Xanadu just HTML with backlinks? I was just thinking about it in the shower yesterday and realized I had no idea how it could have possibly worked for cross-site links, unless the web was either fully centralized, or fully distributed.
  - AfterHIA 1y ago
    It was/is an pipe dream. The whole schtick was that links were visualized so you could, "trace" what you were researching visually without having to rely on jump links. In theory (more pipe dream) the whole topographical link structure of the internet would be capable of pretty easily being visualized by a person.
Analemma_ 1y ago
What a load of nonsense. The dream isn't "dying", it was never alive: crypto and "Web3" were never about anything other than "number go up" speculation and gambling; anyone who thinks otherwise is either profoundly dumb or in on the con and trying to leave you with the bag. Very disappointing to see IEEE cover this as though it's an actual thing, would they cover the "dying dream" of Amway knives?
- ramesh31 1y ago
  >crypto and "Web3" were never about anything other than "number go up" speculation and gambling You forgot organized crime
coldtea 1y ago
It's not just the dream that it's dying - I mean, it's not like it's just external circumstances that are killing the dream. Where are the dreamers? Back in the day tech nerds, coders, and hackers were far more vocal in favor of open standards and decentralized web.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  They are disillusioned. They watched big tech clobber the internet. They watched network effects cause irreversible centralization. They watched Cambridge Analytica and "openness" get abused. They watched toddlers being given iPads to watch YouTube by their parents. They watched kids have mental health issues from online participation. They watched teens start strangling each other after watching porn. They watched robots become 40% of internet traffic, and that was before AI. They watched crypto go from decentralized payments into a get-rich-quick scheme. And they questioned whether it's worth standing behind this.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    Damn right. I don't hate tech, I fucking love it and I always have. I have a career because of tech. I have tons of friends I met online and continue talking to via tech. I hate tech companies because of what they did to tech.
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      But this is where the disillusionment of this idol continues: Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook? Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough? There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again. In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless; we started decentralized and became centralized; a re-decentralization moment just causes the same economic forces to pull everything together again.
      - 1y ago
verdverm 1y ago
We're reimagining what web 3 means in atprotocol, without the blockchain and probably avoiding the term "web 3"
- evbogue 1y ago
  a colleague of mine recently insisted that bittorrent be included in web3 techs since it uses hashing. if we toss torrents under the title of web3 then it's been a huge success. atproto, however, could learn a lot from torrents and all of the other protos since then. for example, their recent push to centralize bookmarks.
  - verdverm 1y ago
    Yea, the bookmarks thing is interesting, and wearing my conspiracy theory hat (it's not the red one), I wonder if it's not an experiment to see what the people will tolerate or how they will respond. It could equally be attributed to an early win for the new product manager, finally delivering a long requested feature in a POC form factor, while private data gets figured out. I'm highly involved in the private data work and we'll have a better bookmarks in the long run I like that atprotocol sits in the middle of web 2 & 3, ideas from both without being beholden to either
    - evbogue 1y ago
      agreed! we should continue this discussion over on atproto
    - verdverm 1y ago
      one thing I would like in atproto is some form of smart contracts (transactional semantics over accounts and xrpc calls)
    - pfraze 1y ago
      I'm pretty sure the private data model is going to be clearly defined by EOY, between the community group work and bluesky internal work. We also made sure that bookmarks will migrate cleanly to protocol private data when it lands, so no need for the tinfoil hat. Your other explanation is pretty close to the mark. EDIT: also fwiw, I got my start in 2012 working on ssb and then in 2013 on dat, both of which were conceptualized as bittorrent variants. Atproto has a pretty clear lineage from that p2p work. You just can't do large scale social computing on user devices.
musha68k 1y ago
Missed opportunities over decades, in EU especially. Which areas support community‑owned or open‑access networks that enable multi‑ISP competition and affordable symmetric service (aka "true internet")?
paulsutter 1y ago
Little known fact: Starlink should be a pure orbital internet backbone to communicate anywhere in the world, right? Because of the laser links between satellites? Not so much. All the traffic from the US must transit through an earthbound surveillance hub, so the latency advantages are lost. Same with other countries. (Please anyone correct me if I'm wrong about this, I was gravely disappointed to hear it and would love to hear that I'm wrong)
- pragma_x 1y ago
  Gotta keep in mind that PRISM (or maybe something like it) is still a thing. If US traffic isn't sniffed by Starlink itself, then it's happening at the next hop in the nearest terrestrial network provider.
vannevar 1y ago
As goes capital, so goes the web. Capital is becoming more concentrated, and so power over the internet becomes more concentrated. Because at the end of the day, the web serves capital, not individuals. And AI represents the ultimate centralization of information and power.
Prunkton 1y ago
>The term Web3 was originally coined by Etherium ... Sure, mistakes happen, but it's hard to take an article seriously when such fundamentals are messed up 8 words into the article...
- deleted 1y ago
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- Terr_ 1y ago
  Tangentially relevant: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
- delichon 1y ago
  The term "web3" was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, and the idea gained interest in 2021 from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies, and venture capital firms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
  - noman-land 1y ago
    I also responded this way until I realized this original comment was talking about the misspelling of Ethereum as Etherium.
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      i don't get it. is the fact that somebody misspelled a recently-coined nonsense-word product name/trademark an indication that the broader points are invalid?
k__ 1y ago
I think, the Permaweb is on a good way. They have decentralised storage (Arweave), decentralized HTTP gateways (ar.io), and decentralised name service (ArNS).
- Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  What's some content on Arweave that's good to follow?
minimaxir 1y ago
The failure of Mastodon to break into the mainstream especially in the wake of Twitter/X's debacles is a good example on how decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practice. It turns out that a) people will just join the largest instance/community possible for network effects b) internet discourse is bifuricated enough that preemtively banning instances just in case makes discourse even more bifuricated and c) maintaining and moderating said instances is expensive and time-consuming. Even though Bluesky did break through to the mainstream with ATProto, it's unclear how ATProto is either a functional or competitive benefit, or if its users even know about it.
- deleted 1y ago
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- snarf21 1y ago
  I agree completely. This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. As long as posts are gamified with likes and notifications, decentralization will never win. Even HN isn't immune and it has carved out a pretty specific niche of text based and no ads social network focused largely on tech. I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers.
  - krapp 1y ago
    >This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. Yes it is. It literally is. If we want to do that we can just do that. The internet is not a zero-sum game. We don't have to play to "win." >I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers. The only reason HN is popular is its connections to Silicon Valley and startup culture. It didn't really carve out a niche so much as succesfully create and market an image. Without that it isn't anything remarkable, and there are already tons of technically-focused communities on the fediverse.
throwmeaway222 1y ago
The real challenge is network effects. You can't fight it. If the top dog has a considerable percentage of the population trapped in their platform, then it is already too late. The only way to get people off the platform is to literally get hired and "trip over the cord" on purpose.. which at this point is likely going to involve very elevated permissions, and a really high chance of jail time.
- ysofunny 1y ago
  I'm starting to imagine that diferent currencies, like money are converging with their platforms each platform having your its own currency? well that's simply one nation. a federal government, registered at the UN. this translates the UN into Etherum, register your currency and be a part of what exactly?
- CM30 1y ago
  I have to admit, I've always wondered what would happen if say, the old Twitter staff had just completely wiped the servers before they left. Would they even try to bring the site back, or just write off the whole company? But seriously, a network effect isn't necessarily the end of the industry. Lots of sites and services make major screw ups that drive away a lot of users to an alternative in some way or another, or outcompete a huge incumbent. Like what happened with Digg and Reddit.
  - throwmeaway222 1y ago
    Digg was sold to someone that didn't understand the internet, and it was not social, so it was just like HN - not a place to put your "page" down and have your friends follow you there. Reddit is a bit different - but as far as the data is concerned it has not once dropped in usage and is about double what it was a couple years ago.
AlienRobot 1y ago
Oh, this is about crypto. I thought it was about the decentralized web for a moment.
Yeul 1y ago
How much of the world's traffic goes through Cloudflare? Won't be surprised if in 75 years we all learn it was a NSA front lol.
mips_avatar 1y ago
I think a different type of decentralized web is growing. It's in Hetzner datacenters but it's a lot more "free". We're at an age where besides GPU inference an indie can afford to create cutting edge web services. There's still players that could really harm this new ecosystem (looking at you cloudflare) but the fact that the majors like Google and Facebook tried to kill it and failed to kill it proves something.
K0nserv 1y ago
The core tenets of web3; privacy, data sovereignty, encryption, open source, open protocols, and peer-to-peer networking are all good. The problem is the movement was never truly about this, and, even to the degree it was, it was taken over by crypto grifters. The ultimate indictment of web3 is that the old school nerds weren't interested, they are the perfect audience, and yet...
pseudocomposer 1y ago
Web3 and blockchain are not the only form of decentralization. Email is a decentralized protocol that has stood the test of time. The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  Can you really say that email is a decentralised protocol that has stood the test of time? It’s more centralised than the web that you complain is dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. What proportion of mail isn’t sent or received by Google or Microsoft?
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    Yes. There's thousands and thousands of independent email servers online. You just haven't heard of them. Mine is 15 years old soon.
    - pcthrowaway 1y ago
      Even if there are 1 million independent email servers, if Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple send, receive, or pass along 98-99% of emails, there's still a fair bit of centralization in the network which should be acknowledged, though this is admittedly not the same as the protocol being inherently centralized.
      - atoav 1y ago
        How do you messure this? Every university in my country has thousands of mail accounts that are constantly used and having worked at an university IT department I have never heard of any numbers collection coming by to ask us how many mails our users sent to each other. I wouldn't be surprised if that percentage was made up by the big ones to give you the feeling that self hosting mailservers is useless.
non_aligned 1y ago
The simplest way to answer this is to ask "whose dream?". We have billions of data points conclusively showing that users don't care about nerd fantasies. No one cares if it's decentralized or not, if it's open source or not, if it's patent-encumbered or not. Maybe there are good philosophical reasons why people should care, but they don't. So you can keep digging your hole, or you can build products that are simply good and happen to embrace your philosophy without that getting in the way of usability. In this particular case, the dream the article is talking to was tainted even for the nerd audiences because of the sleaziness of a lot of what was happening under the banner of web 3.0.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  > users don't care From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, on a similar dilemma between pursuing the (journalistic) public-good versus satisfying the immediate desire of the average public: > "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?" > "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week [...] This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are." > [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?" ____ Our civilization is filled with uncountable things that were once "nerd fantasies" that the average person doesn't even remotely care about... Until it all goes tragically wrong.
  - fluoridation 1y ago
    If I'm being honest, your quote makes the first character sound like an out-of-touch loonie. It doesn't make the point you're trying to make. Maybe in its original context it did, but the way you've presented it, it's like going to an AA meeting with a large binder, intending to expose corruption in the senate. There is such a thing as time and place.
koolala 1y ago
If only we had an totally open universal way to signal between two WebRTC clients. It wouldn't be perfect but it would go a very long way.
- halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
  868mhz/902mhz ISM bands
  - koolala 1y ago
    That would be pretty cool if everyday computers could do that. I'm wishing for something that would work in a browser like with HTTP.
- jckahn 1y ago
  https://github.com/dmotz/trystero https://github.com/dmotz/trystero is the closest we currently have.
  - koolala 1y ago
    I wish one of these networks could be the go-to clear default choice. Options are good, but it would be great to have a best option for a large discoverable community. Actually, their default choice Nostr sounds pretty awesome https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/
- corysama 1y ago
  I never see mention of https://holepunch.to/ https://holepunch.to/ I think it would be great if we had more serverless apps.
  - koolala 1y ago
    I'm trying to understand its github if holepunch itself open-source or not. Hypercore is but is holepunch different?
    - 1y ago
CM30 1y ago
I'm still not a fan of how 'web3' has become a buzzword for crypto. The name seems like it should describe a much more interesting and general concept, not just "it's a service, except you can make money/sell NFTs/whatever". But I'm not sure I'd write the decentralised web off yet. A lot of the issues it's faced are UX and design problems more than fundamental issues, and the way the world is going makes it seem like a comeback could be inevitable at some point. After all, a good federated or decentralised system could be resistant to the age gating laws in places like the UK and Australia at the moment, and be a lot more tolerant of content that's critical of those in power than Twitter or Reddit would be (like with criticism of Israel and the goings on in Gaza, criticism of Trump and his administration, protests against authoritarian regimes worldwide, etc). Large social media services are very willing to bend the knee to those with power (both political and corporate), while a more decentralised service may very well not be, especially if either the people using it are hard to identify or the infrastructure is spread across the world/in places with much more lax laws.
oytis 1y ago
The problem with web3 is that it's a solution in search of a problem. People have decided they should build something around blockchain instead of starting with what they want to build and why
- atoav 1y ago
  This is the main issue with it yes. Instead of having a compelling user- and/or howter-centric vision of how Web 3.0 could look and why, it was basically just like: like web but with blockchain and yet somehow more centralized and with changes, because we want to make a new thing. That isn't how you elegantly solve problems and get people to use your solutions.
naet 1y ago
To me "Web3" frequently feels more centralized than just the regular web. I love that on the regular old internet I can stand up different websites, host them myself, and have anyone with a web connection be able to pull it up on their computer and see whatever it is I'm putting out there. There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do. That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I can put whatever I want, you can put whatever you want, anyone can access it. Buying into some more distributed web3 type hosting feels more centralized at least in the way that I personally feel. I have to buy into a specific blockchain or platform, host in a specific way, hope that it gets picked up by other distributors, deal with hashing and immutability, etc. Maybe it's a difference in understanding of the word decentralized, or a different emphasis on certain parts of the definition.
- pixl97 1y ago
  >That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I mean that is how the internet used to work. >I can put whatever I want. Then I make a series of false reports and copyright claims and your ISP boots you. >anyone can access it. Anyone can DDOS it, forcing you behind a centralized system like cloudflare. The internet has turned into a dark forest. Standing out and saying something controversial will ensure something shows up to eat you.
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    No, it hasn't. The small web is quite healthy to this day. I haven't heard anyone who actually runs services like this complain about any of the problems you suggest. Those problems only happen to large entities. There's simply nothing to gain from DDoSing frankshobbytrainsandflowers.com other than sheer malice, and then it only lasts for as long as you care to spend resources. Frank won't care and likely won't notice if his website is unreachable for any length of time. Conflating the small web with enterprise problems is an extremely ignorant take. Besides, the single biggest threat today is not some motivated attacker trying to deprive you of your three visitors a week, the threat is gigacorps exploiting the public commons with reckless abandon. The only thing small web admins are actually concerned about is LLM scrapers. You should try actually talking to small web admins before spouting off nonsense like this.
1970-01-01 1y ago
Article title was either changed or wasn't correct to begin with! I'm 100% OK with "Web3" dying a slow death. Garbage in, garbage out.
lexx 1y ago
Is it possible for any tech to become mainstream without monetization being the fuel? Especially social media
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  Possible. Very, very unlikely.
righthand 1y ago
I was just browsing Neocities yesterday and having fun online for the first time in a long long long long long time.
OhMeadhbh 1y ago
meh. "cryptographer" usually means someone who practices "cryptography," [or "cryptology" if you live near Baltimore] not someone who participates in "cryptocurrency" transactions.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  "cryptogrifter"
dotcoma 1y ago
> “Hey, this is a technology that has something to do with blockchains.” This.
nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
In my somewhat educated opinion, David Chaum is the OG inventor of crypto currency aka digital cash (eCash), back all the way in 1982. He was last seen pitching family offices in the UAE pitching AstroCool, a concept involving spraying moon dust in orbit around the earth to block some of the sun light. You won't see this referenced anywhere. I was told about it by the person who introduced him to family offices over there. Weirdly enough, in 2008, I was so pissed about the financial crisis, I went online to promote the idea of an absolute-valued energy-exchange-based currency called the Joule Token. It had no cryptographic component (was a centralized immutable store that is co-owned and co-administered by the community) The banner I promoted it under was "P2P Programmable Currency" and I kind of spammed Michel Bowen's P2P Research mailing list and wrote a giant post on the P2P Foundation Wiki titled the P2P Energy Economy. The idea was to decouple profit/interest from exchange, so you can value things based on the energy it took to create them and transport them, and instead of profit as an incentive it was about fulfilling the need for energy: you sold things because you needed to recoup the energy and you created the good that you sold because you could, no other reason. Obviously, it was a thought experiment, not an actual implementation or anything meant to becoone real. However, after I was kicked off the list for spamming (or rather for list etiquette -- Hi Bryan! if you still frequent HN lol), Satoshi@gmx.de replied to my emails 4 times between early 2009 and late 2010, so I literally ghosted him, but without knowing. I didn't know until Bryan Bishop, who was behind my banning, I think, told me here on HN 3 years later, in 2013, if I recall correctly. Here is what ChatGPT knows about those times (I asked it to tell me what it knew without searching online) https://chatgpt.com/share/6893129d-1a20-8002-a08b-acd66bf91bac https://chatgpt.com/share/6893129d-1a20-8002-a08b-acd66bf91b... If you remember me from those days, I moved from Evolving Trends on Wordpress to Substack https://understoryai.substack.com/ https://understoryai.substack.com/ Good times. They're back again. (sarcasm)
neilv 1y ago
Is the title a nod to Molly White's skepticism? https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/about https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/about
- leptons 1y ago
  Came here looking for this. Love that site. "web3" is almost a blast from the past though, simpler times. Seeing it mentioned on HN now, I just had to take a look at https://www.aiisgoinggreat.com https://www.aiisgoinggreat.com to see if it was available, it is not. Nothing there, but I'd love a similar site about AI debacles.
  - stephen_g 1y ago
    Pivot to AI probably fits the bill pretty well? https://pivot-to-ai.com/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/
floppiplopp 1y ago
Is Web3 just regular internet with ponzi schemes bolted onto it?
ahartmetz 1y ago
>Web3 Why the humility? If I'm ever going to create a payment system, I will call it "Universe v2".
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Or slightly less grandiose on a mere planetary scale, "World[coin]" :p
TrevorFSmith 1y ago
I would really love for new projects to find their own name instead of calling themselves the next version of something they don't like. "Web3" has never been a new version of the web, just a way to inject undeserved clout into a (IMHO fundamentally flawed) experiment. There are so many great unused names! Please pick one.
teleforce 1y ago
Please check the new Braid HTTP, it's shaping up the as the killer feature of the Web 3 to enable killer web based local-first application [1],[2]: [1] A Synchronous Web of State: https://braid.org/meeting-107 https://braid.org/meeting-107 [2] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

169 points by warrenm 1y ago

Ahh! It says a lot about the state of “Web 3.0” that I forgot that it was even a thing. I was hoping that IEEE Spectrum would cover the actual Web re: the efforts to un-silo it that I reckon will result in more silos with just less volume than before.

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
Isn't "more silos" the desired outcome, more or less? Has the web been anything but many silos? Of course it might have been different when everyone who wanted to have a presence on it was expected to build their own homepage. Now billions are online, courtesy of their phone, and don't even know what a computer is. So they naturally fall into silos where they and their friends are welcome.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  There was a point where "the web" was literally a web, and it was literally "linked" together by...get this: hyperlinks! I think that what killed that is that hyperlinks work great for browsing & discovery, but as the web matures, a lot of people want to use it for task-oriented things. And all of the Big Tech companies that came afterwards succeeded because they built a task-oriented interface that co-opted the links that were there before and turned them into ways to accomplish the task. Google took hyperlinks, used them to compute PageRank, and then used that to create a better way to solve the task of finding specific information. Facebook took user activity, aggregated it, presented it in a feed, and used it to improve the task of killing time. Amazon took product pages and direct links and used them as lead-gen to increase the ease with which you can buy things. Stripe took embedded Javascript and used it to make paying for things easier; Uber and Lyft took mobile phones and used it to make transportation easier; AirBnB took these large Internet markets and used it to make vacation rentals easier. Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?"
  - tolerance 1y ago
    > Where all these decentralization efforts fall down is that they tend to focus on content, the technical details of how they're going to spread bytes around, and nobody focuses on the task. It'd be interesting to recast the problem in terms of "Here's a common task of everyday life; how do you accomplish it in an adversarial environment where the government or major corporations are trying to shut off the Internet?” Nice observation and can speak to why anyone intent on selling you content writes a “user story” to outline the tasks that lead to a purchase or engagement.
  - stahorn 1y ago
    I've become a bit cynic, and I think it will take time until it becomes better. Eventually though, there will be large protests that turn into law that change the dynamics of the now very centralized web. London was known for having so thick fog from burning coal, and in 1952 it was such a bad event that 4k people died and 100k got badly affected from it. It is was started the Clean Air Act of 1956, that eventually led to clean (cleaner?) air in London. Another one is Amsterdam. It was a car-centric city up until the 70s, where they started to rebuild it to be a walkable and cyclable city. This started because people protested the dangerous roads, which culminated with the "Stop de Kindermoord" protest. Maybe if we live long enough, we get to experience a decentralized web again. Next time will come when it's supported by laws, that in turn stand atop a large understanding in the population of why those laws are good and needed.
  - bigbuppo 1y ago
    The cult of marketing ruined it. They're still fantasizing about personalisation, which in marketing speak means optimizing a mattress sale opportunity for Ted Waciznski of 932 West Moreland Ave in Walla Walla, Washington next Tuesday at 3:54pm as he reads CNN.com as he has every morning between 11:19am and 11:26am from a mobile device in the same spot every weekday for the past seven years, rather than, you know, "here's a cool thing you asked us to show you." The only links that matter are to an adtech/martech firm, and presumably the company that wants you to buy something.
- tolerance 1y ago
  Yes, I think so. I agree with you actually. But it doesn’t always seem like that’s the desired outcome for some people when they mention “decentralization”. I have a particular interest group in mind here, who lament the current state of the Web to an extent unique to our time. It seems like they’re upset with their loss of agency/authority online. When a free, ad-less *.blogspot.com or LiveJournal presence could net you some clout you’d be precluded from otherwise in the real world. Take for example any evidence of disapproval you may find from the proponents of ActivityPub toward the development of the AT Protocol in parallel. Also notice how moderation features on these federated platforms essentially centralize them and their respective enclaves. The desire for interoperability between social media platforms conflicts with the imminent re-siloing being examined. Or is it just the same ends with new wiry means attached? “Decentralization” in this context seems more like separating from the whole with the hopes of replacing it. And I’m not confident that these many new “wholes” can resist jockeying one after the other for political influence.
- atoav 1y ago
  A big chunk of my favorite websites to this day are hosted by motivated individuals in their spare time. And that hasn't changed. Maybe I am an exception as I find social media nearly worthless by this point, but hey: Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it is not there.

AfterHIA 1y ago

The real Web 3.0 is the Ted Nelson internet we never got.

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fluoridation 1y ago
Wasn't Project Xanadu just HTML with backlinks? I was just thinking about it in the shower yesterday and realized I had no idea how it could have possibly worked for cross-site links, unless the web was either fully centralized, or fully distributed.
- AfterHIA 1y ago
  It was/is an pipe dream. The whole schtick was that links were visualized so you could, "trace" what you were researching visually without having to rely on jump links. In theory (more pipe dream) the whole topographical link structure of the internet would be capable of pretty easily being visualized by a person.

Analemma_ 1y ago

What a load of nonsense. The dream isn't "dying", it was never alive: crypto and "Web3" were never about anything other than "number go up" speculation and gambling; anyone who thinks otherwise is either profoundly dumb or in on the con and trying to leave you with the bag. Very disappointing to see IEEE cover this as though it's an actual thing, would they cover the "dying dream" of Amway knives?

ramesh31 1y ago
>crypto and "Web3" were never about anything other than "number go up" speculation and gambling You forgot organized crime

coldtea 1y ago

It's not just the dream that it's dying - I mean, it's not like it's just external circumstances that are killing the dream. Where are the dreamers? Back in the day tech nerds, coders, and hackers were far more vocal in favor of open standards and decentralized web.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
They are disillusioned. They watched big tech clobber the internet. They watched network effects cause irreversible centralization. They watched Cambridge Analytica and "openness" get abused. They watched toddlers being given iPads to watch YouTube by their parents. They watched kids have mental health issues from online participation. They watched teens start strangling each other after watching porn. They watched robots become 40% of internet traffic, and that was before AI. They watched crypto go from decentralized payments into a get-rich-quick scheme. And they questioned whether it's worth standing behind this.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Damn right. I don't hate tech, I fucking love it and I always have. I have a career because of tech. I have tons of friends I met online and continue talking to via tech. I hate tech companies because of what they did to tech.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    But this is where the disillusionment of this idol continues: Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook? Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough? There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again. In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless; we started decentralized and became centralized; a re-decentralization moment just causes the same economic forces to pull everything together again.
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verdverm 1y ago

We're reimagining what web 3 means in atprotocol, without the blockchain and probably avoiding the term "web 3"

evbogue 1y ago
a colleague of mine recently insisted that bittorrent be included in web3 techs since it uses hashing. if we toss torrents under the title of web3 then it's been a huge success. atproto, however, could learn a lot from torrents and all of the other protos since then. for example, their recent push to centralize bookmarks.
- verdverm 1y ago
  Yea, the bookmarks thing is interesting, and wearing my conspiracy theory hat (it's not the red one), I wonder if it's not an experiment to see what the people will tolerate or how they will respond. It could equally be attributed to an early win for the new product manager, finally delivering a long requested feature in a POC form factor, while private data gets figured out. I'm highly involved in the private data work and we'll have a better bookmarks in the long run I like that atprotocol sits in the middle of web 2 & 3, ideas from both without being beholden to either
  - evbogue 1y ago
    agreed! we should continue this discussion over on atproto
  - verdverm 1y ago
    one thing I would like in atproto is some form of smart contracts (transactional semantics over accounts and xrpc calls)
  - pfraze 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure the private data model is going to be clearly defined by EOY, between the community group work and bluesky internal work. We also made sure that bookmarks will migrate cleanly to protocol private data when it lands, so no need for the tinfoil hat. Your other explanation is pretty close to the mark. EDIT: also fwiw, I got my start in 2012 working on ssb and then in 2013 on dat, both of which were conceptualized as bittorrent variants. Atproto has a pretty clear lineage from that p2p work. You just can't do large scale social computing on user devices.

musha68k 1y ago

Missed opportunities over decades, in EU especially. Which areas support community‑owned or open‑access networks that enable multi‑ISP competition and affordable symmetric service (aka "true internet")?

paulsutter 1y ago

Little known fact: Starlink should be a pure orbital internet backbone to communicate anywhere in the world, right? Because of the laser links between satellites? Not so much. All the traffic from the US must transit through an earthbound surveillance hub, so the latency advantages are lost. Same with other countries. (Please anyone correct me if I'm wrong about this, I was gravely disappointed to hear it and would love to hear that I'm wrong)

pragma_x 1y ago
Gotta keep in mind that PRISM (or maybe something like it) is still a thing. If US traffic isn't sniffed by Starlink itself, then it's happening at the next hop in the nearest terrestrial network provider.

vannevar 1y ago

As goes capital, so goes the web. Capital is becoming more concentrated, and so power over the internet becomes more concentrated. Because at the end of the day, the web serves capital, not individuals. And AI represents the ultimate centralization of information and power.

Prunkton 1y ago

>The term Web3 was originally coined by Etherium ... Sure, mistakes happen, but it's hard to take an article seriously when such fundamentals are messed up 8 words into the article...

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Terr_ 1y ago
Tangentially relevant: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
delichon 1y ago
The term "web3" was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, and the idea gained interest in 2021 from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies, and venture capital firms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
- noman-land 1y ago
  I also responded this way until I realized this original comment was talking about the misspelling of Ethereum as Etherium.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    i don't get it. is the fact that somebody misspelled a recently-coined nonsense-word product name/trademark an indication that the broader points are invalid?

k__ 1y ago

I think, the Permaweb is on a good way. They have decentralised storage (Arweave), decentralized HTTP gateways (ar.io), and decentralised name service (ArNS).

Karrot_Kream 1y ago
What's some content on Arweave that's good to follow?

minimaxir 1y ago

The failure of Mastodon to break into the mainstream especially in the wake of Twitter/X's debacles is a good example on how decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practice. It turns out that a) people will just join the largest instance/community possible for network effects b) internet discourse is bifuricated enough that preemtively banning instances just in case makes discourse even more bifuricated and c) maintaining and moderating said instances is expensive and time-consuming. Even though Bluesky did break through to the mainstream with ATProto, it's unclear how ATProto is either a functional or competitive benefit, or if its users even know about it.

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snarf21 1y ago
I agree completely. This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. As long as posts are gamified with likes and notifications, decentralization will never win. Even HN isn't immune and it has carved out a pretty specific niche of text based and no ads social network focused largely on tech. I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers.
- krapp 1y ago
  >This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. Yes it is. It literally is. If we want to do that we can just do that. The internet is not a zero-sum game. We don't have to play to "win." >I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers. The only reason HN is popular is its connections to Silicon Valley and startup culture. It didn't really carve out a niche so much as succesfully create and market an image. Without that it isn't anything remarkable, and there are already tons of technically-focused communities on the fediverse.

throwmeaway222 1y ago

The real challenge is network effects. You can't fight it. If the top dog has a considerable percentage of the population trapped in their platform, then it is already too late. The only way to get people off the platform is to literally get hired and "trip over the cord" on purpose.. which at this point is likely going to involve very elevated permissions, and a really high chance of jail time.

ysofunny 1y ago
I'm starting to imagine that diferent currencies, like money are converging with their platforms each platform having your its own currency? well that's simply one nation. a federal government, registered at the UN. this translates the UN into Etherum, register your currency and be a part of what exactly?
CM30 1y ago
I have to admit, I've always wondered what would happen if say, the old Twitter staff had just completely wiped the servers before they left. Would they even try to bring the site back, or just write off the whole company? But seriously, a network effect isn't necessarily the end of the industry. Lots of sites and services make major screw ups that drive away a lot of users to an alternative in some way or another, or outcompete a huge incumbent. Like what happened with Digg and Reddit.
- throwmeaway222 1y ago
  Digg was sold to someone that didn't understand the internet, and it was not social, so it was just like HN - not a place to put your "page" down and have your friends follow you there. Reddit is a bit different - but as far as the data is concerned it has not once dropped in usage and is about double what it was a couple years ago.

AlienRobot 1y ago

Oh, this is about crypto. I thought it was about the decentralized web for a moment.

Yeul 1y ago

How much of the world's traffic goes through Cloudflare? Won't be surprised if in 75 years we all learn it was a NSA front lol.

mips_avatar 1y ago

I think a different type of decentralized web is growing. It's in Hetzner datacenters but it's a lot more "free". We're at an age where besides GPU inference an indie can afford to create cutting edge web services. There's still players that could really harm this new ecosystem (looking at you cloudflare) but the fact that the majors like Google and Facebook tried to kill it and failed to kill it proves something.

K0nserv 1y ago

The core tenets of web3; privacy, data sovereignty, encryption, open source, open protocols, and peer-to-peer networking are all good. The problem is the movement was never truly about this, and, even to the degree it was, it was taken over by crypto grifters. The ultimate indictment of web3 is that the old school nerds weren't interested, they are the perfect audience, and yet...

pseudocomposer 1y ago

Web3 and blockchain are not the only form of decentralization. Email is a decentralized protocol that has stood the test of time. The bigger problem is having mega-entities like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate the web. Instead of crypto, there should have been a focus on allowing mid-size players to have more power.

JimDabell 1y ago
Can you really say that email is a decentralised protocol that has stood the test of time? It’s more centralised than the web that you complain is dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. What proportion of mail isn’t sent or received by Google or Microsoft?
- estimator7292 1y ago
  Yes. There's thousands and thousands of independent email servers online. You just haven't heard of them. Mine is 15 years old soon.
  - pcthrowaway 1y ago
    Even if there are 1 million independent email servers, if Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple send, receive, or pass along 98-99% of emails, there's still a fair bit of centralization in the network which should be acknowledged, though this is admittedly not the same as the protocol being inherently centralized.
    - atoav 1y ago
      How do you messure this? Every university in my country has thousands of mail accounts that are constantly used and having worked at an university IT department I have never heard of any numbers collection coming by to ask us how many mails our users sent to each other. I wouldn't be surprised if that percentage was made up by the big ones to give you the feeling that self hosting mailservers is useless.

non_aligned 1y ago

The simplest way to answer this is to ask "whose dream?". We have billions of data points conclusively showing that users don't care about nerd fantasies. No one cares if it's decentralized or not, if it's open source or not, if it's patent-encumbered or not. Maybe there are good philosophical reasons why people should care, but they don't. So you can keep digging your hole, or you can build products that are simply good and happen to embrace your philosophy without that getting in the way of usability. In this particular case, the dream the article is talking to was tainted even for the nerd audiences because of the sleaziness of a lot of what was happening under the banner of web 3.0.

Terr_ 1y ago
> users don't care From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, on a similar dilemma between pursuing the (journalistic) public-good versus satisfying the immediate desire of the average public: > "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?" > "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week [...] This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are." > [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?" ____ Our civilization is filled with uncountable things that were once "nerd fantasies" that the average person doesn't even remotely care about... Until it all goes tragically wrong.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  If I'm being honest, your quote makes the first character sound like an out-of-touch loonie. It doesn't make the point you're trying to make. Maybe in its original context it did, but the way you've presented it, it's like going to an AA meeting with a large binder, intending to expose corruption in the senate. There is such a thing as time and place.

koolala 1y ago

If only we had an totally open universal way to signal between two WebRTC clients. It wouldn't be perfect but it would go a very long way.

halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
868mhz/902mhz ISM bands
- koolala 1y ago
  That would be pretty cool if everyday computers could do that. I'm wishing for something that would work in a browser like with HTTP.
jckahn 1y ago
https://github.com/dmotz/trystero https://github.com/dmotz/trystero is the closest we currently have.
- koolala 1y ago
  I wish one of these networks could be the go-to clear default choice. Options are good, but it would be great to have a best option for a large discoverable community. Actually, their default choice Nostr sounds pretty awesome https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/
corysama 1y ago
I never see mention of https://holepunch.to/ https://holepunch.to/ I think it would be great if we had more serverless apps.
- koolala 1y ago
  I'm trying to understand its github if holepunch itself open-source or not. Hypercore is but is holepunch different?
  - 1y ago

CM30 1y ago

I'm still not a fan of how 'web3' has become a buzzword for crypto. The name seems like it should describe a much more interesting and general concept, not just "it's a service, except you can make money/sell NFTs/whatever". But I'm not sure I'd write the decentralised web off yet. A lot of the issues it's faced are UX and design problems more than fundamental issues, and the way the world is going makes it seem like a comeback could be inevitable at some point. After all, a good federated or decentralised system could be resistant to the age gating laws in places like the UK and Australia at the moment, and be a lot more tolerant of content that's critical of those in power than Twitter or Reddit would be (like with criticism of Israel and the goings on in Gaza, criticism of Trump and his administration, protests against authoritarian regimes worldwide, etc). Large social media services are very willing to bend the knee to those with power (both political and corporate), while a more decentralised service may very well not be, especially if either the people using it are hard to identify or the infrastructure is spread across the world/in places with much more lax laws.

oytis 1y ago

The problem with web3 is that it's a solution in search of a problem. People have decided they should build something around blockchain instead of starting with what they want to build and why

atoav 1y ago
This is the main issue with it yes. Instead of having a compelling user- and/or howter-centric vision of how Web 3.0 could look and why, it was basically just like: like web but with blockchain and yet somehow more centralized and with changes, because we want to make a new thing. That isn't how you elegantly solve problems and get people to use your solutions.

naet 1y ago

To me "Web3" frequently feels more centralized than just the regular web. I love that on the regular old internet I can stand up different websites, host them myself, and have anyone with a web connection be able to pull it up on their computer and see whatever it is I'm putting out there. There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do. That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I can put whatever I want, you can put whatever you want, anyone can access it. Buying into some more distributed web3 type hosting feels more centralized at least in the way that I personally feel. I have to buy into a specific blockchain or platform, host in a specific way, hope that it gets picked up by other distributors, deal with hashing and immutability, etc. Maybe it's a difference in understanding of the word decentralized, or a different emphasis on certain parts of the definition.

pixl97 1y ago
>That kind of standing up my own little server and running it myself while being accessible over the broader web feels decentralized. I mean that is how the internet used to work. >I can put whatever I want. Then I make a series of false reports and copyright claims and your ISP boots you. >anyone can access it. Anyone can DDOS it, forcing you behind a centralized system like cloudflare. The internet has turned into a dark forest. Standing out and saying something controversial will ensure something shows up to eat you.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  No, it hasn't. The small web is quite healthy to this day. I haven't heard anyone who actually runs services like this complain about any of the problems you suggest. Those problems only happen to large entities. There's simply nothing to gain from DDoSing frankshobbytrainsandflowers.com other than sheer malice, and then it only lasts for as long as you care to spend resources. Frank won't care and likely won't notice if his website is unreachable for any length of time. Conflating the small web with enterprise problems is an extremely ignorant take. Besides, the single biggest threat today is not some motivated attacker trying to deprive you of your three visitors a week, the threat is gigacorps exploiting the public commons with reckless abandon. The only thing small web admins are actually concerned about is LLM scrapers. You should try actually talking to small web admins before spouting off nonsense like this.

1970-01-01 1y ago

Article title was either changed or wasn't correct to begin with! I'm 100% OK with "Web3" dying a slow death. Garbage in, garbage out.

lexx 1y ago

Is it possible for any tech to become mainstream without monetization being the fuel? Especially social media

jagged-chisel 1y ago
Possible. Very, very unlikely.

righthand 1y ago

I was just browsing Neocities yesterday and having fun online for the first time in a long long long long long time.

OhMeadhbh 1y ago

meh. "cryptographer" usually means someone who practices "cryptography," [or "cryptology" if you live near Baltimore] not someone who participates in "cryptocurrency" transactions.

DonHopkins 1y ago
"cryptogrifter"

dotcoma 1y ago

> “Hey, this is a technology that has something to do with blockchains.” This.

nakamoto_damacy 1y ago

In my somewhat educated opinion, David Chaum is the OG inventor of crypto currency aka digital cash (eCash), back all the way in 1982. He was last seen pitching family offices in the UAE pitching AstroCool, a concept involving spraying moon dust in orbit around the earth to block some of the sun light. You won't see this referenced anywhere. I was told about it by the person who introduced him to family offices over there. Weirdly enough, in 2008, I was so pissed about the financial crisis, I went online to promote the idea of an absolute-valued energy-exchange-based currency called the Joule Token. It had no cryptographic component (was a centralized immutable store that is co-owned and co-administered by the community) The banner I promoted it under was "P2P Programmable Currency" and I kind of spammed Michel Bowen's P2P Research mailing list and wrote a giant post on the P2P Foundation Wiki titled the P2P Energy Economy. The idea was to decouple profit/interest from exchange, so you can value things based on the energy it took to create them and transport them, and instead of profit as an incentive it was about fulfilling the need for energy: you sold things because you needed to recoup the energy and you created the good that you sold because you could, no other reason. Obviously, it was a thought experiment, not an actual implementation or anything meant to becoone real. However, after I was kicked off the list for spamming (or rather for list etiquette -- Hi Bryan! if you still frequent HN lol), Satoshi@gmx.de replied to my emails 4 times between early 2009 and late 2010, so I literally ghosted him, but without knowing. I didn't know until Bryan Bishop, who was behind my banning, I think, told me here on HN 3 years later, in 2013, if I recall correctly. Here is what ChatGPT knows about those times (I asked it to tell me what it knew without searching online) https://chatgpt.com/share/6893129d-1a20-8002-a08b-acd66bf91bac https://chatgpt.com/share/6893129d-1a20-8002-a08b-acd66bf91b... If you remember me from those days, I moved from Evolving Trends on Wordpress to Substack https://understoryai.substack.com/ https://understoryai.substack.com/ Good times. They're back again. (sarcasm)

neilv 1y ago

Is the title a nod to Molly White's skepticism? https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/about https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/about

leptons 1y ago
Came here looking for this. Love that site. "web3" is almost a blast from the past though, simpler times. Seeing it mentioned on HN now, I just had to take a look at https://www.aiisgoinggreat.com https://www.aiisgoinggreat.com to see if it was available, it is not. Nothing there, but I'd love a similar site about AI debacles.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  Pivot to AI probably fits the bill pretty well? https://pivot-to-ai.com/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/

floppiplopp 1y ago

Is Web3 just regular internet with ponzi schemes bolted onto it?

ahartmetz 1y ago

>Web3 Why the humility? If I'm ever going to create a payment system, I will call it "Universe v2".

Terr_ 1y ago
Or slightly less grandiose on a mere planetary scale, "World[coin]" :p

TrevorFSmith 1y ago

I would really love for new projects to find their own name instead of calling themselves the next version of something they don't like. "Web3" has never been a new version of the web, just a way to inject undeserved clout into a (IMHO fundamentally flawed) experiment. There are so many great unused names! Please pick one.

teleforce 1y ago

Please check the new Braid HTTP, it's shaping up the as the killer feature of the Web 3 to enable killer web based local-first application [1],[2]: [1] A Synchronous Web of State: https://braid.org/meeting-107 https://braid.org/meeting-107 [2] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/