Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better.
Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it⦠and they wish it was you!
Just look at how advertising is creeping into premium streaming services.
If you subscribe to The New York Times or Cosmopolitan you have qualified yourself as being interested in the subject, attached to the brand, and not hopelessly penurious. An advertiser would rather pay to get a message in front of a paid subscriber rather than anyone else.
Just to point out, "Web3" usually is talking about smart contract executions; All the smart contract platforms I know of are (or will soon be) proof of stake, so no burning the planet required
(1) I'll believe it when I see it, (2) "proof of stake" is not proven to be effective against takeovers to the extent that "proof of work" is.
Blockchains do nothing to advance this cause, it's a technical shell game, "ownership of content" is already possible without blockchains.
> Federation between platforms
Same as above.
> trustless publishing
Same as above.
"Web3" is a highly technical MLM scheme, it's not a solution to the concerns you have expressed.
It would be nice if everything was free, but right now everything has a cost associated with it. Whether that's your attention, your data, or outright paying for the service.
To me the better question in regards to Web3, is it necessary to have so many middlemen? That's my issue with it.
Adding payments into the mix kills it like every other microtransaction protocol though. git would have been significantly less successful if it cost you a small amount of money to merge a PR, or to fork a repo, or to push something.