eli5 what is web3
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So, the original form of the world wide web (the part of the Internet you use a web browser to see) was just a bunch of basic files. Not terribly unlike MS Word documents or PDFs or something, just in a different format. Whenever you clicked on a link, your web browser would download that file, and show it to you, and that was it. The file was static, didn’t have many if any interactable elements. If you wanted to do something on the page and send data to the website, by stuff like filling out a form, you would have to send that data the next time you refreshed the page, and your success message would come back with the next page you loaded. It was a very simplistic way to use the web.
A bit later in the web’s evolution, JavaScript really took off with a concept called AJAX (which stands for **a**synchronous **J**avaScript **a**nd **X**ML, but we don’t really need to sweat the details on that). With this, you could have web pages where you would do things like click buttons and toggle switches, and the page will dynamically update in-place, without a refresh. Think of all the social media apps you use, including Reddit, where you type a message into a comment box and send it. In the old web, you’d have to refresh the page, and after reloading, your comment would be there. But in the new web, you click the button, the comment box magically disappears, and your comment is loaded right into the page. This new way of interacting with webpages paved the way to websites that worked more like desktop computer programs that happened to be running inside of web browsers rather than a series of individual pages you hopped around. The industry term for websites that behave like this are “web apps”. This is arguably still where we are right now.
When we look back at history, we have a habit at seeing patterns in how things were done, and retroactively giving labels to those time periods. Like, think “stone age”, “bronze age”, “iron age”. Absolutely no one in the bronze age used that term (or whatever their spoken language’s equivalent to it was) to describe where they were in history. Absolutely no one. We invented that term later with the power of retrospect. That’s kind of how we came up with the terms “Web 1.0 and Web 2.0” as well, to describe these two somewhat distinctive eras of how the web was built. Key point being, the names came AFTER the fact. No one (well, probably not a lot of people, anyway) saw AJAX on the horizon and said, “This is it, this is Web 2.0”.
Of course, once you start numbering things in that way, the inevitable question comes, “What will Web 3.0 be?” And it’s a valid question. We probably won’t have a world wide web that looks the way it has looked in the past decade forever. It will continue to evolve with time. And if we let it cook and then look back, we might notice another shift in how the web was used and feel compelled to give it its own name. But the tricky thing is that it’s really difficult to tell in the moment when things are shifting. It’s clear as day looking back, but not when you’re living it. That hasn’t stopped a lot of early-adopter types from looking at new web technologies, christening them as the future of the web, and declaring them “Web 3.0”. *Maybe* they’ll be right, but *probably* they’ll be completely wrong.
People thought crypto and blockchain were going to be Web 3.0, for example. And I mean, saying crypto and blockchain didn’t take off would be objectively false, as billions of dollars have gone into both of those to some level of success, but would you say either one of those has fundamentally *changed* the way we use the world wide web? No. I mean, *maybe* they still can, in some way shape or form, but obviously not yet. There are other candidate technologies too, like web monetization, which promises to allow websites to set up systems where users can stream tiny payments on the order of fractions of pennies to use websites as a way to monetize the web without invasive ads or predatory subscription bundles. Maybe services like OpenAI and its competing products will really take off and become key players in how we use the web. Any of these *might* end up being what we call Web 3.0 someday. But until it’s already here and we’ve already been living in it for some time, it’s hard to say.
The tl;dr of this being: anyone who calls anything “Web 3.0” at this point in time is synonymous with someone gambling on something being “the next big thing”. It’s all puffery and hype. *Maybe* these things will actually take off as promised, but until then that’s all they are. Promises. From marketing execs. Take them with all the grains of salt in the world.
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