[tbabb]

And that's the biggest doublespeak lie about it.

The web is already open and decentralized by its very design, and that openness and decentralization is a major reason for its incredible success.

Web3 people want that stuff not to work. They want you to be unable to right-click save. You can already openly save, modify, and share images. Web3 people want to lock it down and charge you for memes.

It is the biggest, greediest grift in recent memory. If you are working on this, don't be fooled by all the empty words about "decentralization"; you are working on DRM for giant hedge funds who are trying to take over and own the entire web. Its current openness is their enemy.

[benrbray]

Has this "Web3 is DRM" argument been written up in more detail somewhere? The idea already seems silly to me as just crypto hype, but I haven't considered that there might be more sinister intentions behind it.

[spamizbad]

Yup. Web3 is basically trying to sell people DRM for web culture.

[rektide]

> The web is already open and decentralized by its very design, and that openness and decentralization is a major reason for its incredible success.

> It is the biggest, greediest grift in recent memory.

Strong agree, all around. But I also have strong laments about trying to better distribute, decentralize the technical potential we've already built. There's a couple rare projects like https://yunohost.org doing the honest competent work of making this power accessible, of sharing it. But there's a super toxic mentality that computing isn't worth doing, a belief that real computing is not for users, that users are only interested in highly synthesized Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS) horseshit.

I want to say that there's precious few real examples to empower & enable users, to really decentralize the power-base, to make accessible. If I look a little further, I can see endless fields of techies trying hard to make their projects usable, understandable. But so many projects exist in their own particular tech niches. Even if we are talking general software systems, there's still endless fractal mazes of Ansible or Chef or Terraform or Salt or Kubernetes, different worlds & paradigms to compute under, with various points of overlap & disjointedness. I cited Yunohost because it's one of the broader efforts to provide generalized mass configuration of systems, to make a lot of things accessible, in a friendly fashion from a central control panel. But it's still just a super cheap hack, a bunch of preconfigured scripts for a bunch of pieces of software, far from real systems mastery. Overcoming this our expectation that users fear & don't want real computing, that they must have baby-food, is not a real sustainable paradigm, in my personal view, and it cripples our ability to make real advances, real innovation: we need real operational paradigms to begin to have a power base upon which decentralization & distributedness can begin. For too long we've considered p2p & distributed to be app level concerns, things for the app. In my view, the cloud needs to come home, we need real bases of computing to start from, & a willingness to have systems that both have easy-to-get-started paths, but which also go deep & invite in real operational working & reworking. Computing is still closed. We need to re-embrace & make computing work. Web3 is not alone in not fighting the good fights.

[anonporridge]

Meh. There's some logic to that.

People tend to work harder to create interesting things if they get to have a chance to generate wealth from that work.

But the nature of web3 now really doesn't fulfill that vision.

[austincheney]

The web is highly centralized. For example there can be only one facebook.com domain and you need an account to do anything in that walled garden. With an account they will stalk you to death because are the product, not the user.

If it were decentralized then why would I need to go their servers to access my content or the content of my friends. Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive? That’s decentralized. Social media is not.

The web gave this up long ago for advertising revenue.

[jjulius]

>The web is highly centralized. For example there can be only one facebook.com domain and you need an account to do anything in that walled garden. With an account they will stalk you to death because are the product, not the user.

Facebook is not "the web". You can opt out of that walled garden and go elsewhere on the web if you want.

>If it were decentralized then why would I need to go their servers to access my content or the content of my friends. Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive? That’s decentralized. Social media is not.

Because you and your friends choose to host your content on their servers. If it's that important to share something with your friends, spin up your own website for your friend group. Don't wanna do that? Then get a NAS and show them how to log into it to see your photos. There are countless ways for you to share stuff with your friends that doesn't involve using Facebook, social media or walled gardens.

Hell, by virtue of the web being the web, you can "connect directly to [your] friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off of [your] friends hard drive". SSH, baby!

The web remains decentralized, but everyone chooses to remain in walled gardens.

[austincheney]

> The web remains decentralized, but everyone chooses to remain in walled gardens.

So despite how you wish to define the technology there exists maximum centralization.

SSH is not the web. The web is HTTP.

[tbabb]

> Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive?

That, my friend, is called a "web page", and thanks to the open design of the web, literally nothing stops you from setting one up.

[austincheney]

You are conflating a static file from a third party server for some streaming interconnection.

[NikolaeVarius]

> Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive?

You understand this is what Web 1.0 was right?

[austincheney]

How is a third party web server that accepts anonymous requests the same as a private feed directly to the hard drive of a friends computer?

[vitaflo]

You are forgetting the dozen other computers you are routing your request through in order to get to that walled garden, any one of which if it went down would route to a different computer so you could always get to that walled garden.

That's the decentralization of the web. And that decentralization still led to walled gardens, just like it will with Web3 because it's always in a corporations best interest to do so.

[austincheney]

You are conflating the internet, the network, for the web, the application.