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!
Web 2.0 was:
* 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
* portable data standards
* 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.
From:
https://accordion-druid.tumblr.com/post/685175656750972928/ dont-lie-to-me-about-web-20
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