[onebot]

The web isn't free. It is bought and paid for mostly by advertisers. I have seen web3 as a way to democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on.

Literally, if there was some decentralized advertising network, that paid for web3, it would be literally no different than it is today except maybe the people making money in the middle would be taken out.

[stevenjgarner]

Please clarify. I thought each Internet subscriber pays for the Internet with their monthly recurring charge to their ISP. The "web" is the network of world wide web (www) sites using http/https protocol on the Internet, many of whom use no advertising (news.ycombinator.com that we are all on for one). Yes there are extensive advertiser-funded services on the www, but many use paid models for premium services to remove advertising (e.g. YouTube Premium). I agree with your idea that "web3 as a way to democratize ... services/apps". There are no advertisers on my Bitcoin full node, for which I pay the Internet access fee every month.

[thegeomaster]

Each subscriber pays for access to the Internet with their ISP fee. However, operators of www sites incur costs that they need to recoup, and that also needs to come from somewhere.

The main problem today seems to be that the average Internet user (look beyond the HN/techie bubble) prefers free services with ads to paying a fee. They know about the evils of Internet advertising in broad strokes, and they consider it a good deal.

Until this changes, all attempts to "replace" the Internet are dead on arrival. In the olden days of www, the number of users was so small that you could host your own site out of hobby and incur negligible costs. If you "replaced" the Internet, all the monthly active crowd from all the social media would flock to the "replacement" with similar demands (sharing photos, videos, livestreaming, etc.) and then again it's time to pay the piper.

[stevenjgarner]

"The main problem today seems to be that the average Internet user (look beyond the HN/techie bubble) prefers free services with ads to paying a fee"

Is that true? Do more average Internet users prefer free services where their data is being sold or where there is advertising? Any citations on this? On average, what percentage of users on leading sites pay a fee to remove advertising?

[lupire]

> democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on.

This is called "federation" and "peer to peer" and it already existed before "web2" and it mostly died because it was too much hassle for most people to bother with.

[onebot]

Both federation and p2p still require some kind of centralization, currently. Furthermore, there is no decentralized governance nor incentive mechanisms. "Web3" is simply bringing a decentralized approach to p2p, governance and operations. Doesn't necessarily mean a token that is traded on an exchange. But what blockchain (and more importantly the consensus models) bring is the ability to create a decentralized FaceBook, WhatsApp, Insta, etc. allowing anyone participating in the operation of the network and anyone able to consume the network without anyone profiting in the middle. I think where opponents get hung up is the incentive mechanisms. Today the good is so overshadowed by the scam/bad. But if you want a good example of a shared utility build on blockchain look at Helium.com. It is a global wireless network operated by people that host their own hotspots--a true utility model. When you look at some of the services we use on the web, they are utilities and there are real value in both delivering them and consuming them. This is where web3 is trying to tie that all together so some giant company isn't in the middle monetizing both sides.

[cbm-vic-20]

> some giant company isn't in the middle monetizing both sides.

It seems with Helium, it's not some giant company in the middle monetizing both sides, but the fiat/HNT exchanges that are doing that.

[danaris]

That didn't happen in a vacuum.

Certainly, P2P services with federation require more people to put in effort, and for those that require each user to be their own node, unless they're designed to be very easy to set up, they're likely to fail to reach most regular people. This was part of the problem with the last wave of them, and could at least have been mitigated by better design on two fronts (first, designing the structure of the service such that it allows individual clients to connect to decentralized nodes run as servers, similar to Mastodon; second, designing the user setup process to make it easy to discover such nodes that fit with how you want to use the service).

But even with those drawbacks, some federated services were starting to gain some traction a decade or so ago. They died because the big players decided they wanted to own everything, and pushed their own services (see: all the various proprietary messaging services, etc).

Personally, I see decentralized, P2P, federated services as a necessary antidote to an Internet increasingly dominated by large corporations with a deep interest in harvesting your data. The problem is how to get there.

[d0gbread]

Are you suggesting that since it's been tried and failed there's no possible future or technology that might enable democratization of these services?

[geysersam]

It's interesting we haven't been able to create better financing models for the web than ads.

Sure, some sites have other models. But ideally you would like something as simple as putting a small ads banner on your website, without the inefficiency of wasting (website display) space, and integrity violations.

Edit: I'd be happy to transparently pay a small sum to each website I visit. If it was easy and and cheap.

An interesting feature of ads financing is that it is "progressive". The more money you have to spend, the more you are likely to spend on the advertised products. This effectively becomes a kind of price discrimination. But that's difficult to achieve with a "per view" price on a website.

[DocTomoe]

I think one of the problems is that the the more grandiose an ad gets, the harder it is to block.

Very few people have a problem with a small unobtrusive banner that's essentially an image and a link to some site. But filtering that away is trivially easy.

The ads we all hate, the 40-mb-of-JS-evasion-code monstrosities, the 'we actually compete against the CIA' data broker ads, the all-screen-flashing-ads, the 'watch this video first' abominations - those are comparatively hard to filter.