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Comment by rambambram | Hacker News Reader

> These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space

Then call it just that: blockchain space.

Why web3?

I think because the 'web' part of web3 needs to be attached to this idea of blockchain and distributed ledger to give it a sense of fairness and legitimacy.

I'm not saying blockchain or distributed ledgers are bad, I know way too little about that to judge it accurately.

It's just that the name 'web3' irks me a lot. Maybe it has something to do with the 'web 2.0' that promised golden mountains, but eventually just F'd everybody in the A.

Just add another number to the name and all the sh1t is forgotten, it seems. Here's a blank screen for you all, please start painting the same pictures.

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What's frustrating for me is that there is clearly a place for a new vision for the web beyond what the "Web 2.0" vision provided: client-first rich web applications that offered desktop-like capabilities. Along with that are the social/centralization/managed "pros/cons" that a lot of commenters decry. But this was the economic model, not the technical one.

"Web 3.0" should be indeed be about decentralization-- but more in the sense of building applications that take advantage of the enhanced client abilities and de-emphasize central control. The colloqiual term is the "Fediverse". The modern web has brought about offline support (ServiceWorker), multi-processing (Web Workers), local capabilities (Filesystem API, local/DB storage, peripheral APIs) interprocess communication (Broadcast Channels), peer to peer (via disinterested party HTTP/WebSockets coordination), verifiable privacy via encryption, backend server federation (see Mastodon, Matrix, diaspora, PeerTube, etc).

Web 3.0 already exists, we just hadn't named it yet, but there's so much more there to be built.

Exactly. I feel like crypto guys are hijacking the term. For me web3 is about p2p, federations and new browser features you listed + wasm.

If we call all that stuff web 4, maybe people will lose interest in "web 3".

as the article mentioned, web3 was a term coined back in 2014. It was very much a reaction to "web2.0" silicon valley years which was probably felt a lot stronger back then. the term flew under the radar for a while, but the past six months people suddenly got annoyed by it.

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