Companies like Reddit are the exception to the norm in many ways. They’re almost this weird experiment in “what happens when a built-to-sell startup decides to stick around?” Hell they sold to Condé Nast and lived there for years as just a part of the portfolio. They were in the red for roughly a full decade.
That whole arc is weird now that I think about it haha
Somehow it's difficult when people invest actual cash money, especially in large sums.
The reason everyone is doing speculative bullshit in Web3 is exactly why it isn't a threat to the internet. There is nothing useful that it has created. There is no reason for anyone who isn't trying to fleece bigger fools to buy into it. There is nothing that ecosystem does that's at all better than what we have today.
Web3 isn't going to replace the internet - all it has replaced is the penny stock scam.
[1] it's a bad thing for the participants in these schemes.
I guess what I’m saying is web3 being terrible, scammy, and useless don’t strike me as reasons why it won’t supplant the web as it exists today. It could just win through attrition, as everyone interested in keeping the current web going retires and dies, as there’s no money in maintaining old systems; while those making fortunes off web3 scams are massively incentivized to keep the scam money flowing.
Very few engineers are working on web3 nonsense.
> and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers
They're really not. Like, if you're defining "interested in web3" as "they have occasionally said the word 'blockchain' in an attempt to get some press", yeah, sure. But not that many large companies are actually putting significant resources into this. Of the really big tech companies... maybe Facebook is putting substantial resources into it, or has in the past? Though surely not a significant part of their total resources. The others, not at all, really.
We have students today who have no idea what a blockchain is, but they know they can make a fat salary working on it, and that’s enough for them to devote their career to the idea. They come to school demanding courses in blockchain, and so blockchain 101 is born. Then you need professors to teach it so you hire the blockchain researchers funded by Facebook, because they’re the experts. Next you have blockchain publications and conferences (it’s already started). Pretty soon the nsf starts funding blockchain research at the government level and your tax dollars are hard at work doing Facebook’s research for them.
Before you know, at a country-level you have devoted countless man hours and research dollars toward something no one except Facebook really wanted in the first place. That’s the way I see it going.
I can't tell the future, but given the current trajectory (like the recent big crash) I see at least a decent probability that web3 goes absolutely nowhere.
Parents want to know what blockchain classes we offer. And in fact we do have blockchain 101 and a single faculty member in the space, but there is a lot of pressure from market forces (influenced heavily by FAANG) to hire more.
(I think a couple of years before this, it would have been CORBA).
This authoritarian approach justified "for the good of humanity" is dangerous. It actually makes me sad this comment is on "Hacker News". We should value tinkering and hacking on what we enjoy.
However, I don't think most of the work that goes into internet companies at the moment necessarily makes the world a better place, either.
In this sense, Web3 is a tremendous success of libertarian thought. No rules, no laws, and an absolute honeypot for hustlers, thieves, and fraudsters. Anonymous founders running off with the money, repeat fraudsters pulling off bigger and bigger heists, and money being poured into the dumbest schemes which, inevitably, end poorly.
I can't think of a better condemnation of libertarianism.
Pretty much everyone I know working in industry is working on imaginary things like increasing engagement and aggregating data. They are doing this because FAANG want them to, not because this is critical work that needs to be done for society.
I suspect the current correction will put an end to that though, which I must say seems like a good thing.
You just reminded me of EOS, which raised over 4 billion dollars and promised to run a 'world computer', that descended into a morass of speculation on everything up to and including RAM timeslot bookings on the system. I just looked it up, and a mere two years later the entity that had all the funds is doing something else, and the community announced the project a total failure.
The blockchain space really is stunning to behold.
Or it should have been, I see little evidence of learning in this space.
It's an ERC-721 compatible token, free to create, free to mint and collect
POAP stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol
— POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event
— Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers
— POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms
> POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event
Save your ticket stub. Buy a t-shirt from the event. It's not even valid proof if the event organizer can hand them out to anyone.
> Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers
How does an NFT work better than emails/organizing website?
> POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms
Oh good, so instead of posting things on facebook, now facebook can just read the public chain to get that automatically. Brilliant.
I love the nft haters who think they're sounding smart but sound like absolute morons to anyone who's done at least a few hours of oBjEcTiVe research into the space. And normally I'd take the time to educate but with attitude like this and a made up mind, nah hfsp.
It doesn't take hours of reading academic/white papers or hours of research to evaluate this at a surface level. (And if it does, why on earth would I trust it over traditional methods I can understand?)
If someone was trying to say a pile of dog poo was a great solution to the problems described, I'd say have the same response (granted a shorted one.)
If you want to people to actually use and understand and use this technology, then you gotta take some actions towards that. If you can't actually "sell" a fix to an actual problem using these objective facts, then maybe you should go back to the drawing board and come up with a better idea.
Or I guess just stay on your bubble and stew about it if that's what you want.
(So that's not a dumb dismissal: no really, who cares? Who wants to do these things, what value are they deriving from it, why does the user want to bother with this overhead, and who pays for it?)
I’m not sure about dangerous or threatening, but virtually every “web3” product so far has come with a blockchain and token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding.
Look at any web3 style project from distributed file storage to virtual land sales and you’ll find the majority of participants in the ecosystem aren’t actually interested in using the platform. They’re interested in getting there early and scooping up as many tokens or coins as possible so they can flip them to someone else in the future. Actually using any of the NFT based systems can be shockingly expensive ($10-$100 in fees just to modify an ENS entry, for example) or involve a lot of weird financial quirks like a price that effectively varies wildly from month to month depending on blockchain congestion and speculative forces.