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Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know web3 is the idea of building a web on a decentralized blockchain. I think more specifically the idea is to replace the need for name servers with a blockchain protocol. Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I find it ridiculous that this idea even got to occupy the name as I think we'd want to reserve it for the next generational change in web technology and not half-baked bs.

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The original definition of Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and meant something completely different, it referred to a web that had all information assembled into an open graph that was easily accessible and machine readable with the goal of leading to an AI revolution. AFAICT the "web3" moniker was co-opted by Ethereum developers to refer to something which is almost entirely opposed to that, it's about locking everything up on the internet behind paywalls. But somehow this is supposed to be revolutionary because technically anyone can set up a paywall, as if they somehow couldn't do that before, as if web businesses haven't been a thing since the early 90s.

Yes, and it is pretty typical of blockchain cheerleaders to imagine ideas that have already been imagined as revolutionary

This. The Semantic Web produced some interesting technologies that lost their cool factor and dissolved into the background (SPARQL, graph DBs... etc.). Ontology everywhere simply never caught on because it wasn't worth it.

This co-opting of term by blockchain-backed everything is for something actively dangerous as opposed to simply too little bang for too much buck.

To be fair, the semantic web was also very much bullshit It completely ignored "trivial" things like the cost and benefits of maintaining machine-readable general compatibility with unknown consumers of said data. Companies and people are rational in their self-interest and the semantic web is just an academic utopia that was never meant to be.

I personally think it's very fitting that web3 is now hijacked by crypto, another utopia dream that tries to deny the benefits of government and human judgement in the rule of law

Aren't most new technologies academic utopias until we find a way to make them affordable/monetize them?

Aren't most new technologies discarded once we realize that they are just a waste of time and money unless they deal directly with the financial system, sports, religion or the law in which case we cherish and protect them with great zeal?

I guess you were wise to use a throwaway to gamble on the theory that crypto currency is paywall-centric; as you very clearly missed the hoop.

I've looked at a ton of these "web3" startups and basically all of them are trying to build some form of payment system or financial service via smart contracts. Either that or they're making a less efficient version of a "web 2.0" company by forcing everyone who uses it to go through a blockchain first. If that's not true then please enlighten me as to what I missed. If you were trying to do something else then why even bother with blockchains? They don't bring anything of value if you're not trying to "keep score" and then make decisions based on that.

You took a sample of startup-land with people using the latest buzzwords and came away thinking that the meaning of those buzzwords is actually "scam." I mean how naive do you have to be to not realize how these people advertise? You basically have the same level of nuance as the suckers but with a different predisposition - there is actual tech and progress being done by teams not spending all their money on marketing; I don't suspect your cursory glance capable of finding any.

I don't think that's what web3 is, that's just one direction some are taking it. Web3 is a move away from centralized platforms to ones which are either decentralized or more directly controlled by users (self-hosted, federated).

> Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes.

I don't understand this part. In pretty much every decentralized name system I've seen a user pays to own a name for a period of time, there's no stale records.

"Web3" has been fully co-opted to be blockchain related.

Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not.

> Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not.

Random pronouncements on HN don't make it true. If you want to restrict your understanding of the term, by all means do so. But don't expect others to follow suit.

Ok. We'll see where this end up.

I hate it too but it feels too late to turn back the tide.

You might be right. But just like crypto bros co-opted the term, it could very well be co-opted again by whatever tech seems like the next big thing after "everything is blockchain" fades into obscurity

I suspect the term will have become tainted before that happens. "Metaverse" has turned into hollow nonsense within the last few months.

But what do I know? I'm still sore that "content creator" now means "social media person" rather than "someone who creates content".

We can have self-hosted, federated web sites with Web 1.0 technology.

I used to use this obscure little piece of software for that called Apache. Maybe y'all have heard of it. Though I think it's getting some competition from this unknown little project called nginx. Really looking forward to that stuff becoming mainstream, it'll be revolutionary.

TCP/IP is going to be wild.

What sparked the sudden surge of interest in "Web3"? Was there a specific blog post or talk that pushed web3 = distributed web into the spotlight? I feel like overnight there was all this discussion about web3 and it felt very artificial because I didn't see any build-up.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...

Its just VCs. Its the same playbook they (some of the same ones) did for Web 2.0, which was just as cringy at the time. Keep repeating it enough and it becomes normal.

The comparison graph breaks down: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w... but I feel it was around the NFT time, and "web3" was a way to market "blockchain" solutions without using the words "bitcoin" or "blockchain" directly.

Everyone focuses on the big scams, but there's lots of "small-scale" attempts to get funding from big players who don't want to "miss out" - some may not be scams, but they're all filled with "true believers".

My cynical take is that some of the smarter players in the field were worried about running out of greater fools, so they did a concerted marketing push of something new.

The feel like the meaning of the term "web3" is not so specific. It refers more generally to the idea of building decentralized services that run over blockchains whether they resemble web apps or not. I think the sentiment is that blockchain technology is imagined by some to be the next technology that will be as transformative as the web was when it first showed up. It's also a play on the term "web 2.0" which I believe referred to a new generation of more powerful web services and more refined design aesthetics that showed up on the web beginning around when Facebook started getting popular.

But from what I've read, there is still reliance on centralised APIs which still run on traditional servers and infrastructure. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

> there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time

What do you mean? Record expiry can easily be incorporated into the smart contract protocol. ENS already does that. When you register an ENS domain, you can pre-pay for up to 10 years, after which you have to renew the domain. Same as web2 domain name registry.

The blockchain pumpers co-opted the word “crypto” so it’s not too surprising they tried to co-opt the next generation of terms as well

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