What is Web3 and how does it differ to Web2?
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Web3 is blockchain based and allegedly decentralized, whereas Web2 stores data in centralized locations. I think it’s just a buzzword for NFT scammers though.
Web2 and Web3 aren’t specific technological standards or anything like that.
Web1 would be accessing content created by the hosting site.
Web2 is the idea of user created content but largely centralized into things like social media, wiki sites and forums.
Web3 is the idea of incorporating blockchain and nft technology. It’s kind of a buzzword without much concrete meaning.
Web 1 – The internet was website creators and website readers with little interaction between the two. For example – the Space Jam website where you went and learned about Space Jam. That’s about it. Sort of like the book industry, a writer writes a book, readers read the book. But that doesn’t mean readers interact with each other or the author directly. **”The product is what the user buys”.** (Amazon exists to sell books)
Web 2 – The rise of social media – the internet is now a place where people interact with each other, message boards, Reddit, people leave comments and reviews on Amazon. The internet is now a place of conversation and discussion. **”The product is how the user interacts”.** (Amazon’s book sales are secondary to Amazon’s algorithms and advertising engine, watching you and funneling your eyes where it wants)
Web 3 – The decentralization of the internet. With the rise of smart watches, smart speakers, smart refrigerators, smart sensors everywhere, the idea of “going online” is gone, we are now fully online without even thinking about. **”The product is user itself”.** (You’ve every waking action is now tracked, hashed, and sold as a single data point in the unimaginable massive internet of things).
This may go against the forums rules, but a far more interesting idea than web3 is the Semantic Web. Check it out on Wikipedia.
Web 3 is a marketing term leveraged by people trying to push blockchain into everything, even when blockchain serves no purpose in those cases. It’s pretty damn obvious because they always say it’s about the decentralization of the web. The web is ALREADY decentralized. The only reason you have huge players in it is because it turns out that building any sort of useful application on the internet is really complex and isn’t as simple as “just” hosting all your data on your phone.
Let’s put it this way. If all your data is on your phone and anyone wants to see any of your content, your phone has to be active 24/7. The only reason phones today have battery lives longer than a day is because they sit idle 99% of the day. It would be like having your phone streaming music 24/7. Or they host data on so called P2P networks. Yeah that technology already exists, it’s called bittorrent. P2P tech was all the rage back in the freaking 2000’s and there’s nothing blockchain adds to those decades old P2P tech. And this is only scratching the surface of all the problems Web3 and cryptobros gloss over when it comes to their “vision”.
To add to the comments another perspective is
Web1: centralized control of distribution (servers) and content.
Web2: decentralized content
Web3: decentralized control of distribution.
Web3 is a made up concept that doesn’t actually mean anything real. It’s a fairy tale.
“Web2” is the current layout of the internet, in that your main web-pages are owned and funded by giant corporations (Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc). And this is “bad”
“Web3” is <mumble mumble mumble> “blockchain” <mumble mumble> decentralized <mumble> Where everything is open and free and somehow works without anybody paying for it or taking responsibility for it. It ignores all the costs of development, support, storage, bandwidth, etc. And calls for a magical utopia where nobody has any profit motives, and everyone just gives everything away for free because “reasons”
Not exactly eli5, but ipfs is a concrete protocol that enables much of the buzzword hype:
https://ipfs.io/
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The first thing to note is that all of these are marketing terms and not the name of any underlying technology or standard. The web still fundamentally runs on protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP 1/2/3, TLS etc.
While the web traditionally used to primarily be a content delivery mechanism, the term Web 2.0 was coined when a lot of more interactive websites started coming about which focused on user-driven content creation (think social media, blogs, wikis).
The problem with coming up with a single definition of Web3 is that everyone has their own idea of what it should mean. It generally refers to anything related to blockchain and decentralization. So cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, NFTs, DAOs, peer-to-peer storage etc.
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