The web is fraught with scams because it's grown to the point now where the only remaining ways of making next-level Internet money on the web are to resort to wildly complex and unethical tactics and/or deception to get attention, to fake success, or to spend a lot of money to gain attention. Social media is also not accurate in it's portrayals of potential for many because they simply are too big to allow users to succeed or even to be organically visible now.

Something like NFTs, which are totally worthless digital files in real life, are marketed as "valuable goods", and it's literally insanity... Trust me, I've seen plenty of pitches even when I didn't want to on social media... Non stop. If you lose your wallet your money is gone? No FDIC protections? Good luck waiting for government to catch up on proper regulations.

Even if this poorly though out pyramid scheme of branding the online greed heist as "Web 3" succeeds, it will be short lived once the rich cash out, and all that will be left is a totally broken internet with no commerce flowing through it, and the value of real world products and services will be severely corrupted by it all. Everyone will suffer for it, from the rich that get literally mugged on streets by the disenfranchised to the disenfranchised that spend years trying to find success with their last dollar.

The solution is to stop supporting platforms that are peddling this phony pyramid scheme, and to reinvest in keeping the Internet open, and to stop money and influence from changing how the Internet worked 5 years ago, but even if you don't change this terrible course, you'll suffer too when you realize that everything has been dumbed down or made overly-complex on the Internet and function and utility have been corrupted to get you to pay for upgrades each month...

Internet-based business had been making record breaking profits for years based on fair payment for advertising space, and for selling tangible goods and services. If you start a high-overhead business for free and then try to convert it into a paid service then that's where the business model went wrong, not because users are now dependent on the service and primed for milking that dependency.

The only people advocating the schemes are people who are invested in them, but they're too caught up to admit the simple truth. We will learn how to communicate in real life again probably while the Web3 dumpster fire burns out, and then rebuild hopefully... :/

It feels as if 5 similar articles reach the HN top page every day like this. The same arguments are made, the same rebuttals are made, the same comments are made ad nauseam, every single time, with no apparent conclusion. Are we officially living in a simulation? What's happening?

The web is free because companies are profiting off your data. In no way has server costs ever been free.

It seems really odd to lambast the 'claims of web3' and then link to a project with far great ambiguity in how it intends to 'make a better, free, decentralized internet'. Indeed, even the authors have to write a dripping apology justifying why they are reliant on Discord, a highly centralized chat service.

Every time web3 is mentioned, a sizeable portion of HackerNews goes into "old man shouting at clouds" mode and logic seems to go out the window.

Noone who has any interest in web3 is going to change their minds based on strawman sloganeering arguments like those presented in this article, and it's hard to imagine someone who is currently undecided being persuaded when the very first arguments presented are as weak as 1)"There are projects with this thing called 'quadratic voting' that I don't like" 2)"You don't need cryptocurrency to be decentralized" 3)"If it was good why would FB and Twitter allow it?"

The article raises some valid concerns, all of which can be addressed.

What it doesn’t do though is propose any sort of solution.

The criticism of catering to early adopters and whales is a bit weird to me. How is this different than any project that receives funding? What's the ideal solution for this?

Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token. I don't think those projects will ever get any meaningful use aside a few nerds and outcasts that got booted off of Web2 properties. You'll probably get speculators in it purely for profit, but to me it sounds better than the alternatives.

Everything wrong with the internet, for me, is nothing crypto can solve.

I am concerned about monopolies turning evil. Average Joe wants facebook, and google. People need those services to be regulated.

And average Joe can't deal with descentralization. Average nerd should deal with that.

Ah yes, let’s keep the web “free” as it is today.

Btw, anyone else have issues today because AWS-US-East broke?

> Keep

What kind of freedom is it if it's completely dominated by hostile megacorporations?

The web is mostly decentralized, set up a server in your home and off you go.

I wouldn't worry that much about Web3 because very few organizations will care to partake, there's not value in it for them.

If a bunch of kids want to make fake money, tokens and have fun in the their 'Web Tree House' and call it 'Web 3' with Paper Pirate Hats and Wooden Swords then so be it.

> “Now imagine with this proposed Web3 that it’s true that users will own their data and experience. Why in the world would FB and Twitter and the mega corporations allow that? They stand to gain so much.” - my friend Auzzie, a pretty smart dude.

This defeatism is kinda almost the point. Why are we just conceding the internet to this small group of companies? Why not at least try to take it back? I really don't understand what this particular bullet-point is trying to say here.

People tend to forget that users determine the course of things, companies just build for users. Web2 gets better as things centralize, Web3 gets better as they decentralize and compose/interoperate. That is how we change this dynamic and "eliminate the middlemen."

The web is free, and the web is free to adopt or not adopt web3

Web3, metaverse and things like that are just vaporware. Not going anywhere. Someday in the future we will laugh about those terms as much as we do when we remember bill gates vision of “the information superhighway”

I don't agree with your conclusions about Web3, but if you have a vision for the future of the web, go for it - you may be right.

Most of the problems cropping up are due to insecure computer programs that run on a blockchain (aka Smart Contracts).

Centralized control whether VC's and money, or Goverments and regulations, skew the decentralized world into a framework that works for Profit or Fit a government model.

Cheers

All the things about "community" owned just raise the question that what are the structures the communities adopt, what are the roles and what are their rights and responsibilities, and how are people elected to the roles. And how do you make sure these communities don't end up like the existing communities (countries, companies, NGOs, etc...) that you are trying to differentiate from?

You can't just have a bunch of people and call it community owned. By that definition then this world is already community owned, the internet is already community owned.

You can't also just bypass humanity, this world is the way it is largely due to humanity, not capitalism, not socialism, not because it's not community owned. If the human beings in your community inherently have the same traits as human beings in other communities, how can you make sure you community doesn't end up like the other communities?

Brought to you by "my friend Auzzie, a pretty smart dude."

I think we arrived at the "then they fight you" stage :D

People are losing their minds over this. Barely anything web3 has even been built yet. Perhaps it never will. Still, the idea that young people want to do things differently is so terrifying to these geocity boomers that they must churn out pamphlets like their life depends on it. Embarassing.

If we really want a decentralized internet, the right ISP needs to come along and strike the right balance between allowing ingress traffic and pricing. If everyone could run a website from their homes without worrying about DDNS then things would be much easier -- buy a <$25 SBC, buy a domain name, and you're off to the races on the "small" internet -- if you ever need more then pick what you want.

We don't need blockchain for this.

undefined

Listening to Stephen Diehl is a good way to stay poor. Web 3.0 is not a sector that Diehl and his ilk will be able to get their favorite left-wing legislator to squash.

1. "Quadratic voting"

Not all web3 apps will use this, in fact most will run away from any kind of voting system, so moot point.

2. "on a handful of very-expensive-to-run nodes hosted on Amazon Web Services and maintained by insiders."

Use Bitcoin, with lightning, runs in your Raspberry.

3. I don't even get the point he's making.

4. Ethereum themselves suffered a leak that drained their cryptowallet of $55M.

Again, use Bitcoin, don't use centralized hackable shitcoins.

5. "These attacks happen at least a few times a year. Some famous events are Bitcoin Gold in 2020, Etherium Classic in 2019, and Verge in 2018."

And again, the answer is use Bitcoin.

"Any entity (or group of entities combined) that control 51% of the hash rate have the collective power to control the network,"

So you want to buy 51% of bitcoin's mining capacity? You absolutely can, it would only cost you billions, well within the reach of any tech magnate or nation state. But the more you pour into it, the more profitable the mining becomes, thus other miners get more BTC, that they can in turn transform into USD to buy more mining equipment.

6. Artificial scarcity.

I don't even follow.

7. Early adopters etc.

And again, the answer is to use Bitcoin, not preminted centralized shitcoins.