Rather than try to seize 100% of the value, the virtuous approach was also the best for the ecosystem. In those days, Google especially was seen as a role model, in the way that it sent searching users away to the best resources. Web2 at its outset was about understanding and emulating the ideals and design concepts of the open source movement, but also the success of companies that were still expanding despite the drought, like Google and Amazon. In particular, there was a sense that the vertically integrated portals, like America Online and Yahoo, had created unsustainable monoliths ‘evilly’ trapped users and their data, prevented creative innovation from smaller startups, and led to bubble and bust. In 2004 “Web2” was popularized at a conference which sought to ask the very same question: “What is wrong?” The organizers of the first Web2 conference felt that the industry “had lost its way” after the dotcom bubble burst and needed an injection of confidence. Given this dynamic, how realistic is some transition? Or have we actually trapped ourselves deeper in a centralized system? And what is actually wrong with Web2 anyway? What is actually wrong with Web2? And it is arguably precisely the gamified virality of centralized platforms that makes them so valuable to crypto marketing and community. How many influencers have used their followers to make an easy leap into crypto sales? How many important projects have used social media to find and recruit contributors? Where else would advocates for new coins and tokens state their cases and share their memes? Where else could we show off our CryptoPunks, Hashmasks and Bored Apes? And how could a Bitcoin day trader not keep his eyes glued on Elon’s Twitter feed over the past few months? Social media is so essential to the day-to-day reality of DeFi that it is hard to see where one ends and the other begins. If anything, it seems like crypto has made the ‘old’ centralized social networks, especially Twitter, more central than ever. The attractiveness of this superior model, it is proposed, will lure in key influencers, provide a better user experience, and propel a shift from the old social platforms to the new.Īnd yet, it’s difficult to see how that happens. And governance, like moderation policies, would be driven by the entire community, rather than a small club of executives and their handpicked oversight committees made up of insiders looking to maximize their own wealth or security. The distribution of content could be based on meaningful values like reputation and expertise, rather than gamified outrage and algorithmically rewarded hype. Community-owned networks would be fairer, in that the users who created the content and attracted new members would fully participate, as token holders, in the value they created. As the term Web2 has become closely associated with centralized social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and as those networks have become increasingly politically powerful - with arbitrary, capricious or simply incompetent moderation policies not to mention potentially societally harmful business practices - it is common to hear crypto folks imply that decentralized applications would do a better job. Many blockchain enthusiasts seem to suggest as much. Is this what we mean when we refer to Web3? Will it replace the set of principles, technologies and behaviors that we’ve come to know as Web2? (Is this even the way that phases of the Internet works?) When the new model comes out, we upgrade and the older one is replaced and forgotten. Implicit in the name ‘Web3’ is the expectation of replacement.
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