But... the old internet didn't have any cost-per-interaction associated to it. Not to the consumers anyway. Why fix something that isn't broken?

Oh right, to make money.

And that's the reason we have paywalls and ads crammed into every single square inch of screen estate and websites treating users as the product. And you tell me that isn't broken?

I'd be glad to pay a penny (or a fraction of it) for each comment on HN or whatever and have it fund the network (server hosting, staff, etc). Much better than the current alternative.

>I'd be glad to pay a penny (or a fraction of it) for each comment on HN or whatever and have it fund the network (server hosting, staff, etc). Much better than the current alternative.

Really? You'd prefer to pay for every single interaction on the web rather than be served an ad that you can block by the way anytime?

What about people that don't have the luxury to throw away their money like that, should the internet exclude poor people from participating?

The whole idea is just so dumb.

This comment I am making is not worth $.000000001 USD, it is worth exactly zero in whatever currency you want to denominate it in. $0 BTCH, $0 ETH, even $0 Zimbabwean Dollars. Take your pick.

It might even be worth a negative amount of currency since it is a mostly pointless comment and anyone who reads this has kind of had their time wasted. That is practically most of what is online IMO and why micro payments are an idea that have not and never will take off.

web3 is for the rich. can you get rich catering only to the wealthy? perhaps, if web3 also has a mechanism to perpetually tax the poor. something needs to keep trade flowing into their trade bloc. as it stands web3, if it were a country, would have. negative trade balance and no GPD (except for fees paid to miners and exchanges)

Yes, I'd prefer to pay a fraction of a penny (which might go as low as $0.000001 for example) for each and every single one of my interactions, both read and write, and have it fund the decentralized network of data providers (servers, staff, users, ...) rather than have them try to extort money from me in predatory ways via ads, paywalls and the like. The fact you can block them only hides the problem and it's a pointless game of cat and mouse that only gets more and more devious.

Of course that expenditure has to be reasonable, ideally $1/day for intensive use or something affordable by everyone or trivially subsidizable, either externally or by participating in the network.

Costs ballooning out of proportion would be a problem of course, but the decentralized nature allows developers and users to move to another data provider once it proves it costs too much to operate (as it happened with Ethereum).

Hint: you'll pay a penny for the three sites that implement it (and who will make about 2 bucks a month out of it), and the majority of the web will still be massive corporations that will either stay on ads, or make you pay _and_ stay on ads.

Please explain how blockchain will solve user-hostile UI.

You can have web3 without blockchain and blockchain without web3.

If your use-case requires some form of transfer, or proof of ownership of digital assets then blockchain is usually the most appropriate.

Most things branded as web3 aren't. Especially the recent bubble of art NFTs. That does not mean that the concept is pointless.

http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash...

The data is not held hostage by the centralized entities who serve you the UI.

If a website turns their UX user-hostile for whatever reason, one can simply build an alternative UI that interacts directly with the distributed data.

>one can simply build an alternative UI

Oh, so web3 is for niche hobbyists?

That's a little unfair. Niche hobbyists will build the alternative UI, and regular people can choose to use it. Like Youtube Vanced or all the Wordle clones (yes those are both normal web. open / accessible data is orthogonal to blockchain, IMO)

How does one discover these alternative UIs?

How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?

How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?

More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?

> How does one discover these alternative UIs?

Social trust networks -- they get recommended by friends or shared online by someone you trust.

> How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?

Those same social trust networks -- someone realizes what's going on and shares it, people start telling other people to stop using it. There's no technological solution to prevent technological abuse -- the abuse can be built into the system, after all. Half the warnings about "stop using this site" are warnings about a first party UI -- "Facebook is reading your messages!" or "Youtube is hiding dislikes!" or whatever. Social networks (as in, networks of people, not websites) are the only way this sort of knowledge is ever spread.

> How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?

Not long, of course. I'm not sure if this is an argument in favor of Web3, though, since that can work the same way -- a startup needs to move fast and frequently change things to iterate, which means they will be changing the data representation on the blockchain frequently (going forward, of course they can't change past blocks), which means alternative clients will need to keep up with those data changes same as with API changes on a normal website.

> More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?

? Web3 is just as for-profit as the normal web, if not more since every database interaction is monetized? YT and the like aren't on it because there aren't that many users.

So you want average person to pay for every interaction they have with any given site. While leaving all the "bad stuff" of web2 on some random enthusiast to fix by "making their own site".

And that won't even fix things like Youtube hiding dislikes or Facebook reading your messages. Even if your TotalyFreeYoutubeWithNoAds.com delivers on what it advertises you still need to interact with Youtube's APIs and if those don't deliver out dislikes then there is nothing you can do about it apart from creating your own parallel database with dislikes, but then you can only show the ones that come from your instance of Youtube and not ones that come from actual Youtube or from FreeYoutubeNoAds.com.

I haven't yet seen a single reason why normal consumer would use web3 over web2. Why would I pay for the privilege of responding to you or for downvoting bad ideas? Only response is "magically overnight all web2 websites transfer over to web3", but you have to be really out of touch with reality if you think that will happen in the first place and if it happens actual enthusiast won't create replacements for free on web2.

Web3 is literally just another cryptobro scam like NFTs and it is sad that anyone falls for them.

Ah yes. Because network effects are not a thing, building an alternative UI is super fast, and the website cannot do the things it does today like obfuscating their data, or regularly changing the data format. This way your website keeps spending its time running after changes, and your two unpaid volunteers will absolutely easily catch up to an army of devs focused on a single product. And of course, copyright and other things will go away. Oh wait, no, that's what cryptobros are pushing for NFTs, that it's online enforcement of copyright. Okay, so the data that is now public (why the fuck would GIANT_COMPANY_A make their very important, very private data public?) but is still owned by its authors, you're going to take that and reformat it, redisplay it, without any license to do so ?

Have a good time at court I guess ?

You're the one acting like a jester.

Also, look up open-source. Your mind will be blown.

Don't forget Solana, Stellar, Hedera as well which the anti-crypto crowd tend to ignore too.

>popups, paywalls, ads and sudden user-hostile feature removal or UI redesigns meant to maximize profits

And why wouldn't we see this on the web3?

For one when was the last time you saw a popup? Probably not within the last 20 years.

Isn't everything in web3 by default behind a paywall?

What prevents a web3 website from changing it's UI?