Web3

[Neal Fultz]

FWIW, there were sarcastic predictions of web 3 even back in the
early-mid-web-2.0 era:

https://alistapart.com/article/web3point0/


Web 2.0 was initially kind of a "we're not dead" rebranding exercise for
the valley after the dot com crash, and it took a couple of years between
the web 2.0 hype cycle starting (RSS?), an actual killer app shipping
(Google Maps), and what it ended up as (highly monetized
user-generated-content farms).

so tbh I was surprised the web 3.0 rebranding push after the great
recession never took off - it was supposed to be iphone apps or AI or
something; just like 2.0 it was all quite vague to the point of meaning not
much.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2010/02/03/web-3.0-and-its-relevance-for-instruction.aspx
https://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/hempel_threepointo.fortune/index.htm
https://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/what-is-web-30-and-why-do-you-care-013072.php
https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/11/analysis-web-3-0-the-mobile-era/
https://www.govtech.com/archive/web-30-could-lead-to-e-government-that-anticipates-citizens-needs.html

But COVID was certainly big enough to trigger another rebranding attempt,
but because the 2010s web 3.0 never stuck and/or because time is a flat
circle we get to do it all over again.

In another (better?) universe we're already on web 4.0

---

Bumping a version number is like the easiest way to send out a press
release without doing any real work.

In 2008ish I worked on enterprise software called M3 (Marketing Mixed
Models) and the new CEO decided to increase the name to M4, to be one
better.

Unfortunately for them, M4s were also popular assault rifles, so domain
names were quite expensive.

- Neal


On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 6:27 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does BE even mention Web3?
>
>
>  “The problem here is the profit motive: people who are working on web3
> generally want to get paid for it, but it’s fundamentally harder to extract
> rent from truly decentralized systems than it is from centralized ones.
> Because of that, people end up building systems that are centralized at
> their core, with some aesthetics of decentralization smeared on top, and
> call it web3.”
>
> web3 is Centralized <https://azspot.net/posts/web3-centralized>
> https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/web3-centralized
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>