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veen  ·  853 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Web3 Renaissance

Here's what I have been mulling about recently; what do we lose when we monetize the Internet, when we let go of the ol' paradigm of "information wants to be free"?

I, too, am very excited about it. Yet at the same time I do not hold the illusion that web3 won't be without its downsides. I have to admit my reluctance to do more with Web3 stems largely from not (yet) understanding what kinds of downsides there will be, besides the current obvious ones (grifting, market manipulation, to name a few).

Web2 has given us enormous amounts of information and entertainment at our fingertips. To make an imperfect analogy, I sometimes worry if we're trading a library for a bookshop; trading a public, nearly free realm for a commercialized place of exclusionary / elitist information. I hope the global scale means the payment per user becomes so marginal that this won't be a problem, but at the same time I can't be sure of that.