What is Web3 and how does it differ to Web2?
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It’s a made-up term and some don’t even think it is well-defined yet.
A long time ago business folk started describing what the internet had become as “web 2.0”. This is acknowledging that some of the largest sites and services like Instagram, Reddit, and Discord revolve around *user-generated* content. “Web 1.0” was the equivalent of online newspapers and magazines. Those are still around, but marketers wanted a buzzword to describe social networks and “Web 2.0” was basically that.
The stuff circling “Web 3.0” involves pointing out that while content is user-generated in “Web 2.0”, the posts generally become the property of Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc. So even if I work hard on producing a video of me covering a song on Youtube, ultimately Youtube and their content policy describe how I can monetize it if at all. Web 3.0 is an attempt to create a web where I can post content in a “decentralized” manner, meaning there’s not any one content host who controls it. A lot of stuff claiming to be “Web 3.0” is using blockchain technology to do this.
But there are some good questions Web 3.0 hasn’t really answered.
For one, it doesn’t cover why Web 3.0 is much different from Web 1.0, where if I wanted to write a blog instead of using a site like Tumblr I’d pay for some server space and run a blog application. People were posting and hosting content in Web 1.0, but they were doing it on small personal sites at their own expense. Web 2.0 took off because it offered more or less infinite space for hosting in return for loss of ownership. Web 3.0 seems to only be returning to the 1.0 philosophy and using blockchain tech to try and say it’s unique.
Further, a lot of Web 3.0 stuff is questionably decentralized. The various crypto systems have their own blockchains, but it’s really hard to work with all of them if you aren’t using a service like OpenSea. And if you are using something like OpenSea, to some extent they manage your wallet for you and that means they can revoke your access to it the same way Facebook can block you from your content. I can’t tell OpenSea that I own my wallet and it should only act as a client for data on my devices, it works the other way around.
So Web 3.0 is harder to define. When people came up with “web 2.0” the experts nodded and said, “Yeah, it makes sense, we’ve changed how we look at the internet.” But now that Web 3.0 is proposed, most of the experts are tilting their head and saying, “You aren’t really delivering on your promises and this looks a lot like Web 1.0.”
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