Ask HN: Are things like Web3 holding back innovation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are things like Web3 holding back innovation?

10 pointsjusonchan8111 comments

I think it’s cool that such a huge community is behind things like Web3, NFTs etc. That also means a ton of talent and investments is being directed into this.

But is this stealing the focus from things that could make a bigger impact to human life? Are there other better things we could be doing instead with the amount of energy spent in these areas?

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> Are there other better things we could be doing instead with the amount of energy spent in these areas?

Yes, including literally nothing. We could stop wasting all that power on reinventing worse versions of what we already have and breathing new life into old scams.

Yes, but adtech (Google and Facebook) is much, much worse. Many of the most talented programmers work ultimately toward adtech, not making society better.

Those aren’t the only two options. There’s more to life and technology than blockchains and ads.

I have no idea what you think I'm saying. I said that adtech wastes a lot of R&D talent to make our lives generally worse instead of better.

I don't need someone to tell me that other things exist in life because I've never been either a developer or a customer of either adtech or blockchain.

If my comment was taken as an insult, I apologise. It was not my intent.

Thank you for apologizing. I was not offended. I was baffled because it was totally non sequitur.

It isn't necessarily. Sometimes fools are parted with their money and the recipients go on to do things beneficial to society.

The scary realization though is that the problems that really need solving in our world are hard.

> Sometimes fools are parted with their money and the recipients go on to do things beneficial to society.

A common thread with NFT projects is lying and rug pulling[1]. Everything about this movement comes back to trying to make an easy buck, it’s a stretch to claim this could be beneficial to society[2]:

> (…) made off with $30,000 and wrote that the charity to which they'd promised to donate "will instead now be... my bank account".

[1]: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?theme=rugPull

[2]: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?theme=rugPull&id=2022-02-06-2

Depending on which way you look at it, Jeff Bezos turned dubious labor practices into a space program.

Web3 and blockchain are both an ideological and technological framework. Rather than holding anything back, they're originating and introducing a new way of looking at both personal data and how it's ingested and interpreted by web services.

All the crypto criticisms, the scams and rugs and mlm schemes; these are all characteristics of capitalism first, technologically implemented.

Where Web3 works, in the DAOs and decentralised governance systems, in the melding of decentralised tech and decentralised authority over it, that's where Web3 will flourish.

As humanity takes on the task of redressing the effects of capitalism, this ideological framework will guide our social development in the same way the blockchain is now reinventing software development.

" the blockchain is now reinventing software development. "

what is it reinventing exactly? how to handle data as inefficiently as possible?

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