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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes, I remember this from web0:

    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
    <meta name="twitter:title" content="My first web0 website!">
    <meta name="twitter:description" content="">
    <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://elliott.computer/pages/web0/social.jpg">

Trying to make web3 go away is just as pointless as trying to make web2 go away. It's here, it's going to stick around. Yes, there's a lot of hype, it probably won't look the same in 10 years, and yes there's a lot of charlatans, but I think ignoring its importance is myopic.

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> Trying to make web3 go away is just as pointless as trying to make web2 go away. It's here, it's going to stick around.

Web3 is not here lol, it’s literally nowhere. It’s a few Ponzi schemes grafted on top of some MySQL stores like OpenSea and Coinbase. This does not a revolution make.

You’re forgetting that it also has hoards of naysayers clamoring to be the loudest to say “it will never work”. So, at least in that limited sense, it very much feels revolutionary.

Sure but you’ll have folks doing that whether an idea is brilliant or utterly idiotic. That in and of itself doesn’t really mean anything other than the idea is polarizing.

> Web3, also known as Web 3.0, is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web

Cool, cool...

> that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains

k bye

Yeah, the Web is supposed to be decentralized from Web 1.0, right? Or is this wrong?

It's supposed to be, and it is. Every domain points to a different node in the decentralized web. Just because some nodes are massively popular doesn't mean the technology is not decentralized. Popular nodes will always exist in every decentralized vision of the internet.

Yeah, so... why on Earth do people keep saying that it is centralized? I understand that for some there is nothing beyond Facebook, but that has to do with Facebook apps on the smartphones, restrictions or limitations at the smartphone-level, ISP-level, and so forth. Regardless, it is decentralized, so what is this decentralization based on blockchain bullshit? Do we need it? What problem does it solve? I hope that the problem it solves (if any) has not been created beforehand.

I would argue it's demonstrably wrong to say that the web isn't decentralized, however the thing about web3 is that it means a dozen different things to different people. For some it's all about a vision of the web where everything is gated behind cryptocurrency payments, for some it's a world where websites, apps, and games rely on blockchain data instead of self-hosted DBs, for others it's a world where most software vendors have acquiesced to a business model where all digital products are minted as NFTs. There are many other visions, but in my view, all these ideas have glaring problems that make them fundamentally unworkable.

> Yeah, so... why on Earth do people keep saying that it is centralized?

Cryptocurrency culture fosters dishonesty: billions of dollars have been poured in by people who think it’s an investment they’ll get a large return from. The only way they profit is from other people putting real money in, which means everyone involved has to be a marketer.

That’s why crappy generative artwork will get talked up as nauseum, people will wax rhapsodic about logging in using a third-party service, etc.: the people saying that know they will lose money if the rest of us don’t agree that their random hashes are worth more than they put in.

> Web 3.0

In my mind, Web 3.0 was synonymous with the Semantic Web.

Same here. After web 2.0, next one was supposed to be about the semantic web.

Right, we're somewhere up around Angular or React version numbers of web.X at this point

Some of the arguments here fill me with good hope that the semantic web is going to be the next revolution.

After all, it very much feels like a revolution with the amount of people saying it'll never work.

So true. It's funny that the Web 3 folks just coopted that phrase from the Semantic Web. And the Semantic Web was/is an actual useful building block on top of the current web whereas blockchain based Web 3 is a side step using entirely different protocols and paradigms.

> Trying to make web3 go away is just as pointless as trying to make web2 go away. It's here, it's going to stick around. Yes, there's a lot of hype, it probably won't look the same in 10 years, and yes there's a lot of charlatans, but I think ignoring its importance is myopic.

Web 1 and 2 were almost immediately popular because they had real things you could do better than the alternatives. The blockchain financial systems being marketed as “web3” aren’t here in any meaningful sense: if you aren’t interested in cryptocurrency speculation, there’s very little reason to care about it (this is staggeringly unlike the earlier web), and a micro-transaction system for rich people with more centralized infrastructure is a big reversal — especially since exactly none of it works in any way without using the real web.

"web3" is not here, and it's not going to stick around. piling it up with web2 is beyond absurd.

A year from now there will be a new buzzword to try to take money away from the get rich quick crowd.

Let's hear what the father of the web had to say about web 3.0.

> People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty – on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource… — Tim Berners-Lee, 2006

That's funny, he didn't mention blockchains once.

People bring up this semantic web thing in Web 3.0 discussions all the time. I still don't know what he was talking about. I don't think it happened, though?

Semantic Web 3.0 and blockchain web3 stuff both suffer from at least one shared problem* -- the internet is a living, evolving system. Web 2.0 was labeled in retrospect to describe a general, but clearly visible change in the way websites were build. Much easier to predict something that has already happened and which everyone can see.

The only prediction I think that we can make about the internet is that it will defy any predictions that we make about it.

*Not to say this is the only problem either had -- for example, web3 also suffers from a wide range of credibility issues, IMO.

> It's here

Can you post a link to a place where I can interact with some web3 content directly then?

Not an article about what web3 will be, but something I can play with? Back in the early web 2.0 this is pretty easy, just point to twitter, myspace, stumble upon etc.

I'm genuinely curious what web3 really even looks like since all the pages that talk about it mostly sound like marketing pitches without a single real thing I can interact with.

There was that website posted a few days back on non-fungible Olive Gardens and you could make unlimited breadstick tokens. If that’s not peak web3, I have no idea what on earth is.

OpenSea is probably the biggest thing, it's the largest NFT marketplace and it uses web3 extensively.

Starting to figure out Clarity.so, which is a project management tool kind of like Notion but with some web3 features. Haven't done too much with it yet, but an organization I'm working with is using it.

Metamask is a browser wallet that also serves as your login and identity for these sites.

If you want to learn some code and concepts in smart contracts in a really friendly way (while providing a lot of good information), you can go through the tutorials at https://cryptozombies.io/, which works like FreeCodeCamp.

Smart contract code has some similarities but also a few things you need to do differently because of the nature of the blockchain. Like random number generation you have to be careful with since your code is public, and people could potentially game it unless you do it a certain way, also function visibility is very important because it might allow other apps to call your contract and/or certain types might cost gas (i.e. tokens) when you don't need it to. Also a smart contract is immutable once it's published, so you need to be very careful you get it right, or you will have no choice but to point people to a different contract (and even still that other contract could still do some damage). Also the way string comparison is done is to make a hash of each of the strings and compare those to see if they're equal. Just a few examples of many.

So it actually feels like I'm learning something different, and not just "okay, what do I need to call/integrate to add authentication on this new platform" for the tenth time, or "Oh, the coordinates for drawing to the screen start from the top left instead of the bottom left for this tool, good to know."

I mean it's not as different as learning something like Prolog, but still fairly different.

> OpenSea is probably the biggest thing, it's the largest NFT marketplace and it uses web3 extensively.

Is this website hosted or somehow powered by web3? Does it store its data in a blockchain or a traditional MySQL/postgres/etc db? Are its user accounts nothing but wallet addresses and entirely managed and controlled by the wallet owners? Is the computation, access control etc done using smart contracts and resilient to dropping their servers?

These are honest questions I really don't know the answer to, but based on other posts in this thread this would all be required to qualify as a proper web3 example.

Powered for sure, but I don't know if absolutely everything is stored via web3, like their html or whatever. I know the NFTs and metadata are[1]. Purchases, transfers, bids, offers, etc. are handled using smart contracts. User accounts are just wallet addresses, yes. I don't know how it manages access control, but besides what I assume is some sort of admin access it doesn't really need it.

If OpenSea doesn't qualify as web3, I don't know what would.

[1]: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/opensea-decentralizes-and-per...

Web3 is not relevant today and there's little indication it ever will be.

thanks for viewing the source ; )

Thanks for taking the inevitable HN nitpicking politely :)

when the folks with the laser eyes won't even look at the existing systems which can be used to extend the web in a standards-compliant way, then we have every right to be dismissive of their position (holding bags).

They have every right to come to the table at the W3C. The federated social web has existed since 2008. It is the real web3.

"The folks with laser eyes" are affectionately known as bitcoin maxis, and they have more interest in web0 than in web3.

the bros with the ape avatars then? you know who I'm talking about.

Also <meta name="viewport" ...> didn't exist.

Don't remember if self closing like <br /> was possible in the HTML2 days.

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