Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

A very, very confusing article that jams together several seemingly unrelated concepts, and makes it hard to understand what the overall point is.

- different sites having different UIs (so?)

- Companies use tools like Intercom chatbots because they don't have the resources to develop them in house (again, so? don't reinvent the wheel)

The case study presented is a crypto wallet, because of course it is. I have yet to see an article from a person with ".eth" in their handle that isn't shilling NFTs, Web3 or something else that's pretty much only for the Ethereum crowd.

The thing about Web 1.0 was that it sold itself. The first time you saw it in action at a friend's house or in a college computer lab, chances are you immediately recognized its value. Whether it was exploring X-files fansites, Shockwave games, or even the original CERN site with its then-novel hyperlinked structure. It was Minitel in full color, with audio and video support (RealPlayer "buffering...." messages aside)

Web3 OTOH doesn't seem to be much besides gauche e-trinkets and dApps that are mostly crypto/NFT stores. Is there a killer app or use case that isn't already served by the actual open web?

The very first website I ever saw was at my cousin’s house during a visit for Christmas. They had just recently “gotten the online” and he was showing me his favorite site which was an Oprah talk show discussion forum. At first I was like “wow this is stupid” but then he told me that there’s discussions for “almost everything” and that you’re talking to people all over the world…now I was from a town of about 10,000 people or so and had probably met a thousand people total in my lifetime if that (I think I was 8 or so at the time) so it was mind boggling to me to have the ability to just talk to someone on the other side of the world just by clicking a few icons on a computer screen…I was hooked immediately.

Flash forward years and years and so far I just have not sensed the same magic and awe with things like blockchain “stuff” but it may be that I’m not allowing myself to be mentally agile and open (I’m willing to admit it’s a possibility, at least).

Law of diminishing returns i guess

i apparently failed at getting my message across... c'est la vie !

I hope I was not too harsh in my comment. There are a lot of disparate threads in the article. If you wanted to get one point across, what would that be?

Web3 isn't an easy concept to understand because it has 'web' in the name, yet it can't be accessed via the clearweb, only via browser extensions, or mirror sites.

The NFT site "hicetnunc" went down recently, with little to no explanation and people on Twitter recommended going to one of several of its mirrors, all with a different address. Would a regular user go to "amazon.win" if "amazon.com" was down?

There's so much about Web3 that feels shady or prone to malfunctioning at any time, with no communication. I hope you can understand that that aspect of it simply does not reconcile with the 'monetize-first' attitude of its proponents.

my article is not really about web3, just using the analogy to touch on "layer 2" and introduce the idea of querying your interactions with a website _over time_ : hence the "temporal web"

Web 3.0 immediately sells itself the first time you make a transfer using your MetaMask account. This is a transaction effected solely from your computer, using no trusted third party intermediary or proprietary financial network. Its appeal is immediately evident.

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