Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0
If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.
I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:
"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"
No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!
blogs with comment sections
wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)
forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)
bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us
user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)
on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)
AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page
Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash
RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content
when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.
I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!
The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."
It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.
Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!
You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.
Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:
running your own server is a pain
running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video
signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1
once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)
non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up
the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in
Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.
To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:
the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.
for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.
people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node
in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.
in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums
if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!
What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:
cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting
antitrust enforcement with teeth
privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable
a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media
I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.
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