I’m expecting “web3” to go the other way: all of those speculators are looking to get their money back at a healthy return and that tends to favor building up barriers to switching. I’d expect claims that being open makes it too hard to prevent spam or slows innovation by adding features which, ooops, they totally slack on making interoperable.

How can it go the other way, when it is specifically defined otherwise?

> Web3 revolves around the idea of a decentralized Internet. Proponents often contrast this to Web 2.0, where large amounts of the web's data and content are centralized in a fairly small group of companies (often referred to as Big Tech). [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

Yes, I've seen the marketing materials, too. The thing to think about is what you're actually using — the very next paragraph from your quote would be a good place to start:

> Specific visions for Web3 differ, but all are heavily based in blockchain technologies, such as various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Some visions are based around the concepts of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which seek to enable many people to have equal ownership and governance in an organization. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is another key concept, in which users exchange currency without bank or government involvement. Self-sovereign identity allows users to identify themselves without relying on a centralized authentication system like OAuth.

Note how the common thread is that these are all working around the scalability and reliability issues inherent to the popular blockchains. It's perhaps survivable for an identity system to be that slow when making changes if you don't do that very often, although it's definitely a risk for the overall network, but there's no way you're building an XMPP competitor on top of it even before you think about handling audio/video content, and privacy would of course preclude that as well.

That means that you're really building a system which looks a lot like the competitors except using something like a wallet ID to login. Beyond being rather less disruptive than the Ethereum salespeople like to tell you, that's going to look a lot like XMPP — a traditional networked service running a protocol of some level of standardization, only with a different login option. There are some natural trends which are hard to avoid: users will gravitate to the more reliable service offered by the larger companies who can invest more time in optimization, various parties will add extensions which either aren't well documented for competitors or favor their infrastructure choices, and abuse will be a problem which leads to some combination of arbitrary moats being created or users leaving to services where they don't get spam.

That last point is key: imagine if your web3 messaging startup starts to see enough usage that spammers descend en masse? Your real users will leave unless you do something about it. You can add entry fees, which will tank your user growth (which is probably already dangerously limited if you require a blockchain ID), or restrict federation to peers whom you trust to control abuse by their users.

And through all of this, big tech will fight you tooth and nail with the billions we gave them the last decades. And when web3 has burned down to a pile of rubble, they'll welcome the users back to be locked in their warm and safe walled gardens. (Terms and conditions and no-privacy-policy apply)

I don't really see this taking off and succeeding in the long run sadly. Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for it. But I'm pretty sure the game is already rigged.

I don't want to sound like an apologist for the large tech companies — they certainly can afford to pay for their own — but I think it's a mistake just to view this as a rigged game.

Decentralization sounds like a great idea but I've been watching that generally fail since the 90s and I think there are some challenges beyond aggressive acts by big players. Part of this comes down to how the terms are used to cover different levels: most of the advantages of decentralization at the infrastructure level are less pronounced in an era where a single entity can easily run code around the world and there are some drawbacks related to things like caching or security. “Distributed, run by one party” is probably going to outperform “Distributed, run by many parties” for most users and the things which are going to make them switch to something else would be high-level things like decisions about the product direction.

The higher-level organization trade-offs are less clear cut, I think. There's an advantage in having more than one party making decisions but it also harms your overall reaction time somewhat substantially. Other than the web and email there aren't all of that many success stories and I wouldn't feel too secure about email long-term. That suggests to me that we might be prone to give the drawbacks insufficient weight when we're thinking about decentralization, especially when it comes to the challenges of controlling abuse. I ran my own Jabber servers for a while and it worked well at work (centralized) but basically all of my personal messages came either from people on Google Talk or spammers. It wasn't just that Google put more money into running servers or building apps but that there wasn't a great path forward for a lot of features which federated services offered.

Crypto's target audience is cyberpunks, how do you expect those people to accept a walled garden solution? And spammers are already on the big tech platforms and nobody leaves those.

A tiny fraction of users of a system with minimal real-world impact do not have much leverage. As we’ve seen, most crypto users are comfortable using exchanges and there’s no reason to think that will change. The majority of users are speculators who are thinking about returns and don’t seem bothered by control accumulating in a few companies or mining pools.

Re: spam, think a bit longer about that — how much spam do people get in email versus Facebook or Twitter? Those platforms have a lot of users who value their control of user signups, monitoring, and ability to arbitrarily remove spam messages after delivery.

Email is one of the most distributed systems in the world but a rather large fraction of users self-centralized on Gmail. That wasn’t just spam control but I think it’d be really useful to think about why some new system wouldn’t follow the same arc: if your argument is “cyberpunks wouldn’t accept it”, remember that we had that ethos arguably even stronger back then and it didn’t have the predicted effect.

Before exchanges can do something shady, crypto must become really ubiquitous. I think analogy for exchanges is banks. Some people use big banks even though those provide poor service, in my experience switching banks has zero friction, but I evade biggest banks.

Yeah but then we gotta pay for em!