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Comment by astoor | Hacker News Reader

It is incredible how divisive web3 has made people. I don't think I recall anything quite like it. I think it is because:

1. It is primarily about politics rather than technology. Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp, often with a strong dislike of government, banks, taxes etc., which those against web3 associate with anti-social ideas such as anti-vax, permissive gun laws, conspiracy theories and the like.

2. It is an existential struggle. Those in favour of web3 have a vested interest now and don't want to see the value of their coins and tokens fall, while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.

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It is possible to be left-leaning, support regulation + taxes + social structures, and still be in favour of web3/crypto.

I agree #2 is a common issue, people become "maxis" of one protocol if they over-invest in it, or if they are holding it purely for speculative value.

To your last point: many in favour of web3 feel it is more "free" and "open" than advertising or subscription based models that extract tremendous value from creators (Instagram, Spotify, traditional art galleries, etc).

> while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.

i'm confused here. isn't the free and open web that we currently have already destroyed by monetization and data capture of your every click and move?

There are still bits of the original web around if you know where to look. That's why I used the terms "last vestiges" and "existential struggle". Web3 would be the stake through the heart.

> Web3 would be the stake through the heart.

why? it seems to me that these new digital lands that are currently being dreamed up will be right next to the old-new ones of FB/Instagram/Google+. The old-old ones are either still where they used to be (eg. old school forums, IRC, blogs).

web3 at this point is basically a big sign put up next to an empty desert claiming "the future is built here" with a few shoddy tents selling wallet extensions for browsers, which you need if you want to buy sandcastles from the strange circus folks over there, between those dunes littered with old collectible cards.

if people who currently spend most of their time on "social media" start to spend some/all of their time in web3 land, that still doesn't mean much for the true old-old parts of the web. most users already have no idea of what the web was like ~20 years ago.

Point 2 is exactly right, and is partly why this is so piqued. Point 1 used to be correct until around 2019, when DAO governance (and to some extent NFTs) began to attract much more left leaning crowds.

Ultimately blockchains are frameworks for multiparty governance. The implementation doesn’t have to be terribly libertarian if you don’t want it to be, and the actual blockchain protocol is only part of what comprises DAOs. I’ve seen smart contracts with “C-suites” and with voting bodies. It’s political legos.

So Web3 is now really the home of techno political ideologues in the broadest sense. I personally don’t find the notion offensive because this is, in fact, what decentralization has always been about: creating more sophisticated power sharing structures in virtual space. We can disagree about the implementation details quite a bit, but reducing Web3 to coins is like reducing America to dollars: you can make some valid points but you’ll miss some salient details.

NFTs make a little more sense when you view them as existing within one of the Web3 political regimes. The basic bet is that the NFT registry of your choice will have some kind of political legitimacy in the long run. Whether that looks like copyright or DRM or bragging rights or something else is not clear. Most sane people I know are aware that it’s a bet on future value, and for now enjoy it as a social toy.

I think regardless of which 'side' is correct, it's really interesting that as a crypto enthusiast I completely and utterly disagree with your POV.

I (and many other socialist libertarians) are interested in privacy/decentralization, and see crypto, as a permissionless and decentralized system, itself as the last vestige of the free and open web. There's a very strong and thriving open source community/ethos in crypto, it's kinda built in by design.

I don't really care about the price of my tokens (I only have ETH and some ENS I got airdropped), as they have intrinsic value to me. Of course it would be nice to be rewarded for being early in a new tech, but I have no aspirations of being a crypto millionaire or making a bunch of money, I just think the tech is really cool.

I wonder where the divide comes from?

> Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp

While I agree, those groups are perhaps over-represented in web3 discussions, I don't think it's accurate to say web3 supporters are 'typically' right-libertarian.

The politics are not entirely what you think they are, my circles are super left/socialist and they are very anti-crypto-chain-nft.

I have the opposite experience. My circles are super left/socialist and are also very pro-crypto. Reorganizing a traditional web 2.0 app into a web3 app governed by a DAO is very much a proletariat revolution. In web3, users, not the SaaS operators, own the means of production and wealth distribution.

In my view web3 is socialist in the same way that the national socialists were, i.e. claiming to support social ownership while really being bankrolled by big business. There's nothing that gives capitalism a worse name than burning 5% of the worlds electricity to generate imaginary money, nothing more socially unjust than (to quote Satoshi) "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more", nothing more oligarchic than the original gangsters and venture capitalists manipulating the cryptocurrency schemes, nothing more kleptocratic than irreversible transactions and unfixable bugs and systems that seem like they're designed to facilitate fraud, and nothing more plutocratic than pyramid schemes and pareto distributions worse than those of any nation state on earth.

It sounds like you are calling me and my friends Nazis for wanting a more egalitarian Web?

First of all wow, comparing crypto fans to nazis, that's quite a stretch!

Second of all, the crypto 'community' is not one giant community with homogeneous ideas, there are many who scoff at being bankrolled by big business and venture capitalists. I can't imagine anything less 'big business capitalism' than a system where no one entity has any control, and where users have the ability to democratically control the services/protocols they use.

There's no requirement to participate in 500000% APY LP farms or buying a bunch of meme coins and shilling VC funded ponzi schemes to be a fan of crypto. Critique that BS all you want but it's not everything.

I would consider myself a socialist libertarian and a fan of crypto. The best part of being free and open source is that we can always come along and make better software and better ways of organizing ourselves. Personally I see DAOs and zero-knowledge proofs as the most important uses so far, I think there's a lot of really cool potential there for organizing systems in ways that weren't possible before.

I have found that left-leaning techies (or at least the ones I've run into) seem much more interested in federated options such as Mastodon or the IndieWeb; distributing the costs of web app infrastructure into something local and negligible (ex: just running on a Raspberry Pi) and creating a whole network out of those, with moderation, administration, etc. done on a per-instance basis.

Granted, there's a few problems with the federation system (mainly that finding an instance whose admin you agree with can be daunting; Mastodon being a clone of Twitter and all its flaws; etc.) but I don't think they'd be solved by adding blockchain technology.

You may be interested in these communities; lots of interesting anarchist, mutualist, and socialist activity in the DAO/DLT space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptoleftists/

http://theblockchainsocialist.com/

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