I feel like web 1 & 2 was really about sharing things. Newsgroups and forums. Then videos and social media.

However 'web3' seems the opposite. Decentralization is touted as a feature, because we cannot place our trust in other people. NFT hype is all about 'claiming' ownership over something. Where is the sharing and community?

For these reasons I do not think it is something interesting.

"because we cannot place our trust in corporations"

Fixed your statement to demonstrate why Web3 is a thing. Once we saw how many scientists on FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, YT, etc got muted the past few years, the need for communication outside of the corporations is desperately needed.

There has never been a web problem with people being published. Run your own website.

What you are talking about is how large companies are not willing to amplify those voices.

Web3 so far has not been about new forms of publishing _or_ amplification nearly as much as it has been about owning generated cat drawings. I don't think it is meant to solve this problem.

There's also the question of whether uncontrolled and anonymous amplification is a societal harm.

I'd rephrase amplification as discovery.

As a consumer of publications, I am limited by the centralization of discovery mechanisms, to only see what big companies want to show me.

It becomes a bigger problem when they choose to show different people disjoint information. Eg. Somebody could plan and attempt a coup without me hearing about it till after the fact, even though they conspired quite openly

Yes 8note, exactly.

Can't really "Run your own website" without filtering out the unsafe hosts. If you don't march to the beat of the drum, then Google, AWS, GoDaddy, MicroSoft, likely CloudFlare, IBM, etc will shut you down with little to no notice. & they're big enough to pressure others to do the same.

Thus, an underground web is needed for actual discourse.

also the early web had some hype with claiming ownership of web domains.

Domain squatting, and all the security effort of protecting now worthless code IP, meta data analysis for private use, profit being funneled to fewer and fewer people are all outcomes of web 1 & 2

Take off the rose colored glasses; it’s all been a speculative game. That’s the root node of our economics at this point.

At the end of the day it’s electron state in a box of metal and plastic. It’s been generating “value” for owners distracting people from their lives.

I’ve been online since the 80s; people were complaining about web 1 ruining usenet, irc, and everything else.

Time moves on.

This isn't going to age well.

That’s what people keep saying but I’ll start to believe it when any web3 tech has even a hypothetical consumer or business application outside of web3.

Name a non-speculative usecase

I mean, I'm far from an NFT buyer or fanboy, but what can smart contracts and distributed trust-less compute do?

Supply chain tracking is a fairly perfect match. An example in production usage today is https://simbachain.com/ and https://www.computerworld.com/article/3439843/how-pharma-wil... and a particularly interesting vaccine distribution database from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/industries/vaccine-distributi... - or how about voting: An example in production usage today: https://www.govtech.com/products/utah-county-makes-history-w...

There is the obvious securities trading usages, but that may or may not qualify as speculative. Anyways, you could argue blockchain is a stupid tech for all those reasons and all the startups mentioned in these articles will fail - and fine, maybe you're right. Maybe postgres is better for all those jobs. But these are non-speculative use-cases. If they're the right fit for those problems -- well, I'm not running a crypto startup, so... But in the long expanse of history, I do believe trustless societies will eventually emerge.

Thanks for sharing the examples!

The obvious criticism is indeed that these use cases could be addressed—if not with Postgres—with Merkle trees, no? Like (at a quick glance) MediLedger wants auditability similar to (say) Cert Transparency, and is using a “permissioned” blockchain to do that. How that differs from a centralized or partially centralized model like CT isn’t obvious to me.

Perhaps more importantly, though, none of these examples seem like they demonstrate the supposed appeal of “Web3.0”: permissioned blockchains, by definition, do not have truly distributed ownership; the entire bullshit premise of Web3.0 from people like (ironically) a16z is that you get to own “digital assets.” Yet permissioned, partially centralized blockchains—-irrespective of whether Postgres would be a better solution!—-exhibit none of those characteristics, right?

If all the hype around “Web3.0” is just a way of saying “supply chain tracking will be done, at greater cost and complexity, in a distributed manner”, that doesn’t strike me as deserving of all the hype. What broad cultural or economic impacts will it have?

I'd expect a voting system to be unable to prove that any one voter voted in a certain way. I don't think that requirement is well suited for a blockchain?

There are a couple solutions to this. The simplest one could be for the government to publish a known public-key. Vote-data would be encrypted with the public key which only the election board has the private key to decrypt. This would ensure that no citizen could vote twice, each vote could be tracked to where, when, who, but not _what_, except by the election board.