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Comment by evergrande | Hacker News Reader

Because web3 is, in part, about users having ownership and crypto is what enables that in a decentralized, censorship-resistant way.

Instead of big tech companies profiting off your data, you can profit off your data and output. A critical thing that decentralized networks have solved is the alignment of interests between the developers, the users, and the platform creators. They all share in the success of the network and you can build on it. Facebook, Twitter will deplatform you when you get too successful building on their API or for a host of other reasons. They can and do change the rules at will.

Web 1.0 - Read-only.

Web 2.0 - Read & write.

Web 3.0 - Read, write & own.

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Why is having ownership desirable on the internet? On the internet, everything can be copied endlessly and perfectly. There's no scarcity or limits. I can download a song, movie or game, and that doesn't prevent anyone else from doing the same. In my mind, that's a fantastic thing! Why would we want a system where access is arbitrarily limited?

It's absolutely not desirable. Some people have capitalist brain rot.

Let's take music as an example. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees. So yes, I do think web3-style ownership is desirable.

Love those stats but it's always better to provide a source for the numbers.

Are you referring to Audius or some other web3 platform for music?

Right now, a music artist can sell their albums on their own website, and get all of the revenue (minus payment processor fees). The reason people gravitate to Spotify is because it's incredibly convenient. A lot of people (myself included) like paying $10 a month for unlimited access to an incredible variety of music.

"Web3" will only disrupt the status quo if it provides a better user experience then Spotify. From what I've seen, "Web3" doesn't do anything that Spotify doesn't do better.

>"On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue."

Centralised "web2" solutions like bandcamp.com give the artist 80-90%. You don't need "web3" to be fairer to artists.

I do think there's an issue with companies like Facebook owning peoples' data. Instead, with Web3, the idea is that people own their own data, can verify who they are (they own their private keys), and can choose to interact with services on the web and share their data as they see fit.

I agree with you though that it's great to be able to download movies or music (even though the trend seems to be moving more and more towards streaming). I don't think Web3 means that everything is arbitrarily limited though, it means that it's more user controlled [1].

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/understanding-web-3-a-user-control...

This really feels like a push for a need that doesn't exist so the first-movers on the crypto market can have a manufactured "need" for the technology they invested so much into to pay out.

Nothing I've found about Web3.0 makes sense as an organic need that arose from internet usage... It all feels extremely manufactured.

No, that isn't it. You're just parroting a standard set of talking points.

Web 3.0 was about RDF, RSS/Atom feeds, microformats, and document semantics.

This crypto business is web 4.0. Don't trample on all of the things we learned.

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