[spiddy]

There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data, which provides a big incentive to not be evil. the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform. Unfortunately this is not so easy on web2 because of the data that locks users on those platforms.

[acdha]

> There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data

This is only true of the data stored on the blockchain itself. As described in the article, that isn’t anywhere near enough to replace the centralized systems being billed as “web3”, and it’s completely unworkable for data which can’t be public, which is updated frequently, or which needs to be deleted. Combined with blockchains being unavoidably quite expensive and slow, and the challenges of standardizing protocols while the competition is shipping it seems quite unlikely that this will change.

It doesn’t reduce lock-in meaningfully if Google were to continue to store and process all of your data but now you’re using an outside authentication system. I’m sure they would love, however, the way “web3” makes their job of tracking users so much easier.

[necovek]

Deletion and/or non-public is an interesting problem. Obviously, you can store it encrypted and delete the key, but advances in compute and algorithms might render that encryption breakable.

For data that needs to be updated, all you need is an override mechanism, which sounds simple enough.

[acdha]

Storing it encrypted also means you have to ask what happens if the key is leaked — for example, if I tried to sell movies that way rightsholders would be unlikely to accept a system where you could pay $10 and then give the decryption key to all of your friends, leaving me no way to revoke it.

For updates, you can definitely replace things but that's expensive if you have to pay a transaction fee regularly and it could quickly get to non-trivial storage sizes if you have to store obsolete versions in perpetuity, especially with non-trivial metadata overhead.

[dmitriid]

> the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform.

As we have clearly seen with OpenSea and rampant fakes, copies, plagiarism etc. Oh wait...

[manmal]

I don't think making all data public is the best solution for preventing companies from selling my data, or withholding it from me.

[betterunix2]

Distributed storage does not make any difference for lock-in with a centralized API. For example, imagine a system for storing photos on some distributed system and a popular, centralized web front-end for users. Now what I will do with the centralized front-end is to give users a "value-add" by encrypting their photos, thus protecting their privacy, and better still I will use my proprietary key management technology to relieve end users of the various problems with losing private keys. Lock-in achieved, and all you accomplished with distributed storage was to outsource the maintenance of the storage infrastructure.

We already see this with blockchain payments. The vast majority of merchants who accept cryptocurrency payment do so through a service that manages their wallet and typically offers some kind of value-added features to lock them in. There is no reason to believe the same will not happen with Web3, if it is not happening already.

[robbiep]

This is probably the best argument I have seen in favour of web3