[cam0]

I think it's poorly named. It's not a new major version of the web. Forget the fact that the vast majority of the web's users don't care about decentralization vs. centralization even a single bit. People will continue to mindlessly use WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Coinbase because decentralization is not a concern for _most_ users. Most users of these apps just want to socialize with friends and family, show off / humble brag / argue, and gamble.

[acdha]

> Forget the fact that the vast majority of the web's users don't care about decentralization vs. centralization even a single bit. People will continue to mindlessly use WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Coinbase because decentralization is not a concern for _most_ users.

I think you're doing a real disservice by characterizing this as “mindless”. For most people, decentralization is an anti-feature — it adds cost, risk, and performance issues while usually making the UX worse. The web has become more centralized over time because that allows people to build more compelling services, and much as that is disappointing from the perspective of the dreams many of us had in the 90s it's hard to argue that, say, a primary driver of the re-centralization of email wasn't the difficulty of controlling spam in a decentralized system.

This intersects well with the blockchain advocacy: this post mentions a lot of terms which the VCs like to hear but there's a conspicuous absence of anything which normal users care about. There can be an argument for robustness in the case of an outage for a shared service but that's very far from a given and could only be measured by comparing specific examples since no two systems have the same failure mode.

[dreyfan]

I’m so glad the entire decentralized community has rallied around the limitless power and innovation of NFTs.

[officialchicken]

Please make an NFT of your comment for sale on opensea... I suggest "Bored hackernews comment club"

[rchaud]

Christie's and Sotheby's will be on red alert when this drops.

[poetaster]

I'd buy an officialchicken fungible whatyamathingy!

[Nevermark]

When it comes to tech, you can't judge what's important by people who use tech but don't spend three seconds in a day working on its possibilities.

Surprisingly few regular people thought they wanted a PC before the World Wide Web. They still don't care about the technical details.

Web 3.0 is obviously an aspirational name for what is still mostly a vision at this point. But developers need their moitivators. :)

[aty268]

The difference here though is that web 3 really is just 'technical details' to most people. PC's had potential, they were getting cheaper, faster, and more software was being written for them every day. People could play video games, and show off to their friends. Web 3 has none of that, it's all just technical details that 90% of the population doesn't care about one bit.

[Wazako]

Web3 is money! The web2.0 it is impossible to make transactions between people, sites, and others.

It's easier to put an ad than to ask the visitor for money. Imagine the possibility of creating feedback with automatic micro-payments!

[warkdarrior]

That may not be the selling point you think it is, since most people are not creators looking to monetize their content. Your statement then sounds like: "Envision web3: your opportunity to pay to visit any website!"

[Nevermark]

Most people are sick of ads and would happily pay 1/10 a cent to read a quality article, especially if the process was frictionless.

And most creators would love to keep their content open for everyone, but not have icky ads cluttering up their content.

I think you are underestimating how much micropayments will iron out a lot of problems for a lot of people.

Host your own scrapbook page (er, Facebook) for penny's without ads, tracking, manipulative promotion of content... People lose sight of the fact that Facebooks massive server farms are not really there to serve little posts, but to track and make predictions about people.

Those are just two ways

Another is people learning to support many causes they believe in with very small regular donations. I would voluntarily pay 1/10 cent for every wikipedia page I looked at, or 10 cents a week. Doesn't seem like much but that's $5.20 a year painlessly given.

Enough people do that and they could stop their annual funding drive.

They would also have just got an even clearer incentive to up the quality and usefulness of what they do. Greater efforts resulting in greater donations directly.

[giantrobot]

> Most people are sick of ads and would happily pay 1/10 a cent to read a quality article, especially if the process was frictionless.

I don't know that an article is quality until I am done reading it. I already paid for my ISP, my electricity, and my computer equipment. I'm spending my finite amount of time reading it. Why would I pay extra for the privilege? Unless I will materially gain from reading it, i.e. "here's a discount code for your next month's ISP bill", I'm just gambling 1/10th of a cent that I might get some sort of emotional contentment reading an article.

Even if the content of the article is good, what if the presentation sucks making it physically difficult to read. For my 1/10th of a cent am I getting an easily accessible form of the content? If I want to read the content again will I have to pay another 1/10th of a cent? If my 1/10th of a cent for a single page view or a full read of the content, if the host breaks up an article over multiple pages am I paying for each one? Can I freely download and use the content within the bounds of Fair Use? What are the full terms of my transaction?

While you're trying to make the case for some trivial amount of money, if everyone is asking for a trivial amount of money then in aggregate it's no longer a trivial amount for users. If I can't get a refund if an article sucks then I am not interested. If a website has to potentially give refunds to users then they won't be interested.

Even with micro-transaction payments websites have the same perverse incentives to get traffic as ones that run advertisements. The more traffic they get the more money they make. Content producers will also eventually require some sort of onerous DRM to make sure that every single view of some bit of content is paid for with a micro-transaction.

[rchaud]

This will fail for the same reason other attempts at stimulating micropayments has.

People are used to accessing text and video on the web for free. You and I may have a paid subscription to a Patreon or newspaper, but in both cases we are not paying piecemeal.

[Nevermark]

Micropayments need to be frictionless. If a 1 cent payment requires more than 1 cent of a persons time, it is not a workable system.

Many people would love to auto pay 1 or 2 cents a page view, to no longer see ads.

It might take a while, but I think eventually most people not in financial hardship will be happy to do that. (And people in financial hardship are not the best people to put ads in front of.)

[singularity2001]

I tried micropayments three years ago but transaction fees of up to a dollar forbade 1 cent payments. Is this solved now somehow?

[poetaster]

Flattr didn't fail because it wasn't blockchain. And paypal is still seen as a boon by most consumers in a hurry.

[Nevermark]

People who used PCs for software and games were in a minority.

It is hard to remember, but the WWW was the killer PC app for a huge majority that didn't jump on Visicalc, adventure games or other pre-web fare.

[poetaster]

I like to chat with other devs as we work out problems on community code bases. Web 1 would suffice since much talk is still in irc. But we would miss stuff like git/obs...

[timdaub]

Yeah, I also think it's poorly named. It's semantically speaking not a major upgrade. But additionally, I'd prefer web 2.1 over web 3.0 first...