Are we wrong about Web3?
terminusdb.com
terminusdb.com
Web3 scammers insert meaningless hand-wavy-techno-babble homophone phrases like 'Layer 1', 'off-chain', and 'decentralized' to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware.
Web3 is literally not a real thing. If you want real talk about empowering the users to own the network infrastructure then you better be talking about publicly owned ISPs and data centers; not about bullshit 'smart contract' VMs deployed into the proprietary Cloud environment of one Global monopoly or Another.
>to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware.
I would just add that it is not just VCs but also everyday people expecting to get "rich" overnight that buy into the FOMO.
I don’t understand the git analogy at all.
> If we’re extending the definition of web3 to include decentralized software systems
We certainly aren’t. Web3 is defined by “trustless” decentralized systems (which usually aren’t actually decentralized, in practice).
Branding a database as “Web3” is terrible PR, given web3’s reputation for obscene inefficiency and high latency. The marketing team should reconsider this post.
Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc...
Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....
People forget that the current financial system is a product of thousands of years of evolution and many hard lessons learned.
Web 3.0 (as VCs see it) is a solution looking for a problem. I get a late-90s dotcom-era feeling from it. People saying what it takes to raise money and throwing a technical solution at what often isn't one.
Email and websites in general have tons of scams associated with it, to the point where I'm required for whatever company or client I work for to take phishing/security awareness lectures every single year, yet those things don't "need to be defended".
I'm not exactly sure what they're saying at all.
Total shit show.
It's like that puff piece on crypto that was in the NYT last week.
For instance the official site for Bored Ape Yacht Club shows a bar with a neon sign that says "FOMO". Near the entrance in Decentraland there are pictures of the Doge and other internet memes.
It is not about communicating a message in the conventional sense but rather like plucking a string and having it vibrate another string of the same length by resonance.
I'm a bit of an expert in the graph and document space and sometimes I have been in a position to recommend or specify a product. I see it as a very crowded space, terminusdb is going to have to work to convince me that it's worth my time to really understand their offering, never mind that I should put my reputation on the line by advocating for it.
The blog is a place where a company like that can demonstrate that it is going to do the right thing for customers, employees, vendors, investors and other interested parties. As it is I'd be a little embarrassed if I was recommending their product to a client and had to make excuses for them and tell clients "really there is a good team behind it, ignore that blog positing, it is just a fluke..."
Someday the last post on their blog might be "we are proud to admit that we got acqui-hired" and it will all be because their customers, employers and investors left because of this blog post and the thinking behind it.
The management team should stop what they are doing now, remove this post from their blog and make a public apology to all their stakeholders.
ps For the record I also hate web3
pss Feel free to remind me you hate web3 too
If you want to try and redefine this term to not be about cryptocurrency and blockchains, then good luck with that. Realistically I think it would be better to try and make a coordinated push to make some other term a thing, because right now the instant response to "web3" among the non-believers is, at best, an eyeroll, a sigh, and closing the tab.
I mean, the current top story on HN while this is on the front page? "$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network". That's Web3. Right there.
Adding payments into the mix kills it like every other microtransaction protocol though. git would have been significantly less successful if it cost you a small amount of money to merge a PR, or to fork a repo, or to push something.
Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better.
Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it… and they wish it was you!
Just look at how advertising is creeping into premium streaming services.
If you subscribe to The New York Times or Cosmopolitan you have qualified yourself as being interested in the subject, attached to the brand, and not hopelessly penurious. An advertiser would rather pay to get a message in front of a paid subscriber rather than anyone else.
Just to point out, "Web3" usually is talking about smart contract executions; All the smart contract platforms I know of are (or will soon be) proof of stake, so no burning the planet required
(1) I'll believe it when I see it, (2) "proof of stake" is not proven to be effective against takeovers to the extent that "proof of work" is.
It would be nice if everything was free, but right now everything has a cost associated with it. Whether that's your attention, your data, or outright paying for the service.
To me the better question in regards to Web3, is it necessary to have so many middlemen? That's my issue with it.
Blockchains do nothing to advance this cause, it's a technical shell game, "ownership of content" is already possible without blockchains.
> Federation between platforms
Same as above.
> trustless publishing
Same as above.
"Web3" is a highly technical MLM scheme, it's not a solution to the concerns you have expressed.
Web3 has no mechanism to prevent centralization. There are such things as natural monopolies, and these typically happen through network effects. This network effect is so powerful that everyone uses Google Maps. Web3 does nothing to prevent this (we even have to ask if we want to prevent this). So what is it solving? Hosting monopolies? If that's what it is solving then it seems like there are likely better ways and no need for the blockchain.
I even say this as someone that thinks there's value in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Yeah, a lot of scammers in the area, but I can see some utility in the ideas (but huge noise to signal ratio). I just can't see any signal in web3.
I can only imagine the DMs flying around in their company's slack after this post went out.
This is probably a million dollar question, no?
Which is to say, it's Web 1 tech, if it's a Web 'N' tech at all.
Git has nothing to do with the web whatsoever. I suspect that the author may be confusing git itself with git "service providers" such as github.
That 'philosophy' definitely has Web3 'resonance'.
It could be used as an example of 'decentralization', surely, but it's hard top put anything in the context of Web3 given how vague it is.
If you want to have good people for customers, if you want to hire good employees, if you want to have good vendors, shut up about "Web3".
Don't take good free software like "Git" and slander it by associating it with platforms that charge fees on top of fees on top of fees; platforms that charge you fees to pay your fees that make rent-seekers like Visa and Mastercard blush.
It looks like terminusdb is a good product that somebody can use without paying money to grifters. Why slander it? Why put up a big sign on your web site that says "Nothing more to see here move on" to the good people in the world but that will attract evil people, scammers and clueless people blinded by FOMO who will bleed your company dry and leave it a rotten husk?
Terminusdb should fire the person who made this blog post and make a press release about it immediately to protect your investors, your employees and your customers.
Web 2.0, as I understand it, was about increasing interactivity so websites aren't all static, which has the possibility of being beneficial to end users. Web 3.0, as I understand it, is crypto-nonsense.
Not the technology itself, that was great, and was already named.
When Web 2.0 arrived as a buzzword the web was already an interactive, dynamic platform with databases, server and client side scripting, user generated content and social networking. All of the technologies involved were in fairly widespread use.
For a minute the term Web 2.0 might have been a way to recognize how cool the natural evolution of the web was, but it was quickly co-opted for use as cutting edge sounding investor bait. Same general principle as Web 3.0, but with useful technology.
Side note: The Web 2.0 hype was mostly a 2000's thing.
The problem is that the solution to centralization is to stop centralizing, which the new approach doesn't seem to do. Perhaps there is a way to have our cake and eat it too?
Anyway, beyond the fact that it's a cheap and incoherent attempt to capitalise on the Web3 hype train, I'm also vaguely irked that they confuse Web3, with Web 3.0 - the latter being Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the next iteration of the web (worth searching for if you're interested).
I don't know that I'd say Terminusdb should fire the author, but they should probably take the post down because, honestly, it's not useful and is just contributing to the already deafening noise about Web3.
[0] Actually, now that I think about it, it's incoherent enough that I wonder if it was perhaps generated by GPT-3 or a similar AI, which would possibly mean the whole thing is intended as some sort of joke. Obviously just a hypothesis.
There's nothing 'slanderous' about 'charging fees' for something, and that has nothing to do with why it's 'Web 1' vs. 'Web 3'.
'Web 3' is a nebulous concept bordering on ridiculous, and Git really isn't part of it by their own definition.
People should stop talking about 'Web 3' because it's mostly a marketing term that's based on a meme, not some kind reality.
The article is not fully unreasonable, it's nuanced, your reaction to it is over the top.
I don't read anything that refers to "blockchain" the way Apple refers to "iPhone". I don't know what the term for it is but they always do it. "With iPhone, you can enjoy being smug and superior in 8K!"
Anyways as soon as I see that sort of corporate newspeak I immediately close the tab.
It makes me a lot happier.