Web3's fake version of Web history

"It has always struck me that the rush to define the next chapter of the Internet (“Metaverse! Web3! AI! Oh my!”) has been driven by tech elites’ hunger to turn the page on the techlash years. They want to go back to being judged based on their ambitions, rather than their results."

This was the a16z-backed "Internet Computer" which launched a token, ICP, that Chris promoted and was then dumped on retail investors as liquidity for insiders.

Chris's version of the history of web was created to sell retail investors on this narrative. And a16z has made a pile of money doing it.

The web during this time was marked by many commercial languages and app servers. (like ColdFusion, server products by Netscape and Sun, etc). A decent IDE was typically several hundred dollars. Corporate interests were trying to control the protocols and standards (Flash, ActiveX, Applets, etc). Even browsers were initially paid commercial products.

…if you’re a scammer.

The absolute ease with which crypto allows criminals to scam and cheap people is extraordinary. And web 3.0 is the perfect handy-wavy buzzword to cover the absolute shitshow that happens in cryptoland.

1) AOL was the first centralized Internet service in America to offering a walled-garden Internet in the mid-90s. Back then, they'd package their 30-day trials floppies with games and magazines -- physical bloatware! You'd see things like "AOL Keyword" instead of 'search term'.

2) Jim Clark and Netscape. After the Netscape IPO, his next project was "Healtheon" a dotcom boom project that positioned Clark's company as the middleman between insurers and care providers. Decentralization this was not. The project ultimately failed, and it's only remaining trace today is the now-blogspam site WebMD.

People who make up models on Twitter, or for blog posts, generally make them up to demonstrate a point. That's what Dixon did, that's what this author has done.

In the internet’s early history, the commercial internet experience was very different and often about companies trying to make money with different rather than all powerful “big tech” platforms. And yes, of course many tried (and often failed) to commercialise it.

However, the experience of being “very online” back then was completely different and existed outside all that.

It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites. Yahoo vs Google was mostly irrelevant for people inhabiting this world, which was indeed much as Chris describes, at least from my perspective.

Although it evolved over time and was clearly under threat towards the end, this version of the internet lasted well up to the mid-late 2000s.

Summary: this post misses the point and does not paint a “more correct” narrative than Chris does in any meaningful way.

web1 -> peer-to-peer decentralized networks without built-in consensus or economics; end up de facto centralized because of this

web2 -> corporate owned networks; from iMessage to Tiktok to Reddit, this is most major networks today

web3 -> networks whose decentralization is enforced by cryptography and economics; Ethereum being one such example of a programmable network

If the terms were just marketing that would be one thing. But they actually describe real differences in properties that have significant consequences for those who build and rely on them.