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Great phrasing I saw: "In web2, the user is the product. In web3, the user is someone else's exit liquidity"

But haven’t we already been seeing that out of tech companies for the last, what? 15 years? So many companies are built from the ground up to be sold off once the user base crosses a certain threshold. Then it’s sold and either absorbed by a massive company or broken apart for its contents. So many founders build companies for the explicit purpose of build it -> sell it -> build next one. Staying power is barely a factor in that. It’s the buyer’s problem. You just need to convince them it can be done and it’s worth it.

Companies like Reddit are the exception to the norm in many ways. They’re almost this weird experiment in “what happens when a built-to-sell startup decides to stick around?” Hell they sold to Condé Nast and lived there for years as just a part of the portfolio. They were in the red for roughly a full decade.

That whole arc is weird now that I think about it haha

A good point. You could call all those "end of our incredible journey" posts "rugpulls", except the investment isn't financial but the investment of your data on a platform which gets deleted. There are a few extra steps in "Vine sell out and now all your vines are gone", but the overall effect can be similar. Founders cash out, users lose out.

Somehow it's difficult when people invest actual cash money, especially in large sums.

Man you are too right about the data rug pulling.

I agree with your description of the situation, but that is actually a good thing (for the internet). [1]

The reason everyone is doing speculative bullshit in Web3 is exactly why it isn't a threat to the internet. There is nothing useful that it has created. There is no reason for anyone who isn't trying to fleece bigger fools to buy into it. There is nothing that ecosystem does that's at all better than what we have today.

Web3 isn't going to replace the internet - all it has replaced is the penny stock scam.

[1] it's a bad thing for the participants in these schemes.

One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? I know it’s not a zero sum game but at the same time we only have limited resources, and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers, at a scale where whatever FAANG is doing, the rest of the world is keen on doing.

I guess what I’m saying is web3 being terrible, scammy, and useless don’t strike me as reasons why it won’t supplant the web as it exists today. It could just win through attrition, as everyone interested in keeping the current web going retires and dies, as there’s no money in maintaining old systems; while those making fortunes off web3 scams are massively incentivized to keep the scam money flowing.

Are they though? How many people do you know working on shitcoins? How many people do you know working on real things?

For what it's worth, I do think this is (or was) a problem. For awhile late last year and early this year a large proportion of the people I saw leaving my big tech company were going into blockchain stuff.

I suspect the current correction will put an end to that though, which I must say seems like a good thing.

> How many people do you know working on real things?

Pretty much everyone I know working in industry is working on imaginary things like increasing engagement and aggregating data. They are doing this because FAANG want them to, not because this is critical work that needs to be done for society.

I anticipated this objection to my phrasing and I agree, but I couldn't think of another word to use :) Maybe "other" things would have sufficed.

I know exactly 0 people doing any kind of crypto work. I do know plenty that are in the ponzi scheme though.

> One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff?

Very few engineers are working on web3 nonsense.

> and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers

They're really not. Like, if you're defining "interested in web3" as "they have occasionally said the word 'blockchain' in an attempt to get some press", yeah, sure. But not that many large companies are actually putting significant resources into this. Of the really big tech companies... maybe Facebook is putting substantial resources into it, or has in the past? Though surely not a significant part of their total resources. The others, not at all, really.

I’m mostly forecasting in my comment based on what I’ve seen happen to the current industry. It’s completely centered around nonsense like “engagement”, and because there’s so much money involved it impacts the direction of the industry all the way down to education of school children.

We have students today who have no idea what a blockchain is, but they know they can make a fat salary working on it, and that’s enough for them to devote their career to the idea. They come to school demanding courses in blockchain, and so blockchain 101 is born. Then you need professors to teach it so you hire the blockchain researchers funded by Facebook, because they’re the experts. Next you have blockchain publications and conferences (it’s already started). Pretty soon the nsf starts funding blockchain research at the government level and your tax dollars are hard at work doing Facebook’s research for them.

Before you know, at a country-level you have devoted countless man hours and research dollars toward something no one except Facebook really wanted in the first place. That’s the way I see it going.

Eh, there've been technology fads before; they sometimes make it into universities, but rarely further. When I was in college, XML databases were very much the thing, and there was a whole optional course on them (which I didn't do). You don't hear much about XML databases these days.

(I think a couple of years before this, it would have been CORBA).

There are a lot of steps in the chain between what we have now and the end state you're afraid of, and none of them are certain. Maybe students don't believe they can make a fat salary working on blockchain technology. Maybe they're not successful convincing schools to offer courses in blockchain tech. Maybe Facebook researchers don't get hired by universities, and maybe academic research into blockchain tech doesn't take off in a big way. Maybe the NSF doesn't see the need to start funding blockchain research.

I can't tell the future, but given the current trajectory (like the recent big crash) I see at least a decent probability that web3 goes absolutely nowhere.

To be clear, I’m observing these things first hand as a professor. Students are asking about blockchain at info sessions more than any other tech. Many students see CS education as a fast track to blockchain tech, coins, and nfts they’ve been hearing turning people into millionaires overnight. That’s what they are interested in!

Parents want to know what blockchain classes we offer. And in fact we do have blockchain 101 and a single faculty member in the space, but there is a lot of pressure from market forces (influenced heavily by FAANG) to hire more.

Fair enough. I’ve been out of college for almost a decade, so I’m out of the loop with respect to what students want. I do suspect that unless crypto bounces back relatively soon some of that desire will go away.

I’m with you there and I’ve got all my fingered crossed.

I'm sorry but you do not get to arbitrate what engineers enjoy and choose to work on, whether that is web3 or something completely different.

This authoritarian approach justified "for the good of humanity" is dangerous. It actually makes me sad this comment is on "Hacker News". We should value tinkering and hacking on what we enjoy.

and this gets at what's really threatening about web3: it's an inherently libertarian technology and authoritarians on both the left and right of the cultural/political spectrum are terrified by that.

It's libertarian in the sense that the final stage of libertarianism is that the well-connected insiders get to abuse everyone else, with zero recourse against them.

In this sense, Web3 is a tremendous success of libertarian thought. No rules, no laws, and an absolute honeypot for hustlers, thieves, and fraudsters. Anonymous founders running off with the money, repeat fraudsters pulling off bigger and bigger heists, and money being poured into the dumbest schemes which, inevitably, end poorly.

I can't think of a better condemnation of libertarianism.

We shouldn't value net-negative tinkering, which is what pyramids and pump-and dumps are, so I would say that these engineers are mostly making the world a worse place.

However, I don't think most of the work that goes into internet companies at the moment necessarily makes the world a better place, either.

> token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding.

You just reminded me of EOS, which raised over 4 billion dollars and promised to run a 'world computer', that descended into a morass of speculation on everything up to and including RAM timeslot bookings on the system. I just looked it up, and a mere two years later the entity that had all the funds is doing something else, and the community announced the project a total failure.

The blockchain space really is stunning to behold.

it's not a total failure if something was learnt in the process. web3 proposes radically restructuring the web and possibly the economy more broadly, it shouldn't surprise us if it isn't done right immediately.

I imagine what was learned was along the lines of “don’t give 4 billion dollars to a company with vague promises about development but no concrete plans or legal obligations.

Or it should have been, I see little evidence of learning in this space.

Have you checked POAP (Proof of attendance Protocol)? poap.xyz 5M mint, one the most used protocol, everything is free. Look for it on twitter and you will go nuts.

It's an ERC-721 compatible token, free to create, free to mint and collect

POAP stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol

— POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event

— Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers

— POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

Who cares?

(So that's not a dumb dismissal: no really, who cares? Who wants to do these things, what value are they deriving from it, why does the user want to bother with this overhead, and who pays for it?)

That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now.

> POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event

Save your ticket stub. Buy a t-shirt from the event. It's not even valid proof if the event organizer can hand them out to anyone.

> Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers

How does an NFT work better than emails/organizing website?

> POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

Oh good, so instead of posting things on facebook, now facebook can just read the public chain to get that automatically. Brilliant.

"That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now."

I love the nft haters who think they're sounding smart but sound like absolute morons to anyone who's done at least a few hours of oBjEcTiVe research into the space. And normally I'd take the time to educate but with attitude like this and a made up mind, nah hfsp.

I simply addressed each of the points using basic observations. I'm approaching this in a good faith as per HN guidelines.

It doesn't take hours of reading academic/white papers or hours of research to evaluate this at a surface level. (And if it does, why on earth would I trust it over traditional methods I can understand?)

If someone was trying to say a pile of dog poo was a great solution to the problems described, I'd say have the same response (granted a shorted one.)

If you want to people to actually use and understand and use this technology, then you gotta take some actions towards that. If you can't actually "sell" a fix to an actual problem using these objective facts, then maybe you should go back to the drawing board and come up with a better idea.

Or I guess just stay on your bubble and stew about it if that's what you want.