- Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (there is plenty).
The reason AWS, Azure and GCP are so popular is because people don't care.
- Privavy intrusions -> Adblocker/DNS Blocker/Turn off JS/Use browser settings
This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand.
So what is being fixed?
It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press releases to get it to catch on. I don't even know why people are giving it the time of day. It's someone's marketing speak and it smells awful.
And furthermore, decentralization is not new nor is it unique to the web, nor does this "web 3" garbage have anything to do with the web either. Web 2.0 was also buzzwordish but at least it was referring to a genuine paradigm shift in the way that websites work. The inclusion of the XHR request API in browsers and the birth of publicly available RESTful APIs that web-sites could consume which helped lead to the split between frontend and backend development as specialties that we see today (whether that's a good thing or not is another discussion).
"web 3" is just marketing PR garbage for "crypto is the next big thing ... somehow."
Counterexample: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclus...
It's not fixing anything.
It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement.
"But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc.
If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done.
Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.
1. Ownership by default. NFTs are kinda a silly example, but since your wallet ("You") own your the token that represent your assets being able to transfer them around with you whenever you go somewhere new is cool.
2. Authentication with your wallet makes things much better. SSO for the whole web.
3. Alignment of incentives for users + service providers. (DAOs, traditional corps, etc.).
So with a concrete example.
In Web2 social network, the social graph is closed off along with all your account info. If you want to move to a different social media website, you have to reenter all your info and re-friend everyone etc. The corporation chose to ban people, and the only way you can in theory get a vote is through owning a share.
In (the ideal) Web3 social network, the social graph is open b/c all your friends are attached to your wallet. If you want to move websites you can take them with you, or even have you be on multiple front ends. Even better you might get tokens to vote for certain proposals in the DAO, for example such as banning people off the site etc.
Decentralization is valuable b/c it allows the above to happen, not because it's valuable in it of itself. Without a decentralized network there wouldn't be enough trust in the network for anyone to use it (long term).
After all blockchains are basically one giant shared database, if someone thought you can modify it, it loses all value (Similar to fiat money in a way ;) )
There's another big issue, what if your friends don't want to exist on that front end? Either events/posts are private, or they're on the public ledger and distributed. There's no way to keep interactions private.
In the end, if we think of having these messages sent to clients directly and stored locally, have the clients being able to subscribe to groups, have the clients maintain the friend list, and people being able to post to sets within that list. We have this already. Its called email.
I'd assume a social network's storage layer would be distributed as well, on IPFS or something similar with an encrypted blob that includes all your content.
Paired with a privacy focused scheme like Monero's where you can't see the contents of wallets you could keep the contents of social graph hidden, and do some transactions around.
I'd also say that privacy wise it's not like our current systems are perfect. You had reddit admins deleting and modifying people comments for example.
Not as bad as the general public being able to see your interactions, but not great if employees at these companies can see all your things you'd rather keep private. (And the design of these services makes it so that from a business perspective they want to see that data for targeting, and from a customer service perspective you want to be able to debug issues unlike crypto which rn has no CS expectations.)
0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
Please explain how adding a crypto wallet or blockchain into this mix changes anything meaningful.
I wouldn't say it's very high, where crypto is here now, and the default design is with ownership in mind. Plus with crypto's money side you can find different business models than traditional web companies. (As a matter of fact with a public blockchain data probably becomes a lot cheaper on a mass scale.)
Crypto maximalism IMO is a "doomer" position, the idea of burning down more efficient and established systems for a new one.
I personally don't know if it's a functional idea, but I can see a case.
SSO for the whole web means if you do something deemed "bad" you can be blacklisted from every service at the same time. How is this good?
See what happened to Alex Jones, regardless of if you think it was justified or not.
With a crypto wallet, you don't have to start from scratch with a new account on a service that doesn't ban you because you own that data, in theory you could even port your social graph over.
I don't think this is inherent to crypto, but it is inherent to decentrazlied open standards like Mastedon for example. The advantage that crypto "wallets" have here is that it's not just for social media, it can be for payments etc.
Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]
This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)
This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.
In contrast, in traditional web2, companies gatekeep this information so hard that there are 10B+ companies such as plaid that mostly just scrape user bank account data. Just recently AA is suing The Points Guy for scraping their website. [3] I recall there's even a comment in this thread about someone getting their own scraper banned because they were trying to scrape their own data.
> rent server from small provider
If everyone rents a server and we make these servers talk to each other, that is what I would call decentralization. If you rely on a server operated and rented by someone else, you are subject to their whims: arbitrary bans, censorship, bait & switch, security issues, downtime, etcetra.
I don't believe web3 fixes this but in I don't think decentralization is in principle a useless concept.. It's just hard to do right and harder than that to get enough people on board. And now with cryptocurrency, it's harder than ever to get people on board who aren't just looking to profit off of their buttcoin investment.
Maybe all these things will fade into obscurity and come back one day and "fulfill their true purpose". If all goes well, barely any of us will care about the underlying technology of the problems they solve.
However, using AWS for some things and pinning stuff to IPFS and blockchain for others does prove convenient (I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example)
IPFS isn’t magic: you have to pay for hosting somewhere - you can use it like a CDN to pick cheaper networks but that’s maintenance optimization.
In some cases you can align incentives differently than with traditional solutions. For example with DEXs you can spread the profit and work (such as providing liquidity) to participants rather than a central operator.
It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there and if you are trading you only have to trust them for just the one function call rather than for holding your funds in their hands longer like with traditional exchanges.
Prove might be too strong a word to use in this instance.
Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative?
Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.
You want to organize the worlds information and build a search engine. Okay, you create a google coin. You issue 21 Million coins.
As soon as you announce it people are going to buy in and you will in a period of a few months become a billionaire. With no product. Just an idea.
And then you get to dump your shares on the "investors" and you get to be a billionaire.
There is no incentive to further develop your idea.
Look at what happened to ICP. The VCs got in at 3 cents a coin. Each coin shot up to $750 per coin. Then the VCs dumped it on the retail noobs making a lot of money with absolutely no working product.
A global blockchain enables millions of people to access banking services -- globally -- that they are currently shut out of.
Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out