A simple explainer video below. I love the idea of a decentralized web. Using sites that have no central ownership. A place where I am not the product. A place that isn't tracking me. A place where AWS is displaced by a decentralized cadre of hosts.
It's exciting stuff that I am just now wrapping my head around.
I'm not. This will never overcome the sales and marketing power of the big boys and girls for the majority of consumers. Most people aren't all that worried about being censored which is a good chunk of this guys sales pitch. It will give the librarian crypto set something to jack off to for the next decade, which is nice I suppose. Anything good or useful in the tech will be subsumed by big business and government and put into a package that grandma can handle.
These videos are generally written and hosted by SalesBros who are mostly writing and performing for Youtube's recommendation engine. They do more harm than good. "Hi, I'm a talking head, here's my clipart, significant search term buzzword jargon, like and subscribe see you next time." I made it 2 1/2 minutes into it and I talk about this shit to skeptics multiple times a week. Your objections, however, are easily answered: The big boys and girls lose their leverage. "aggregate all my shit on Youtube" goes away when you don't need to go to Youtube to see videos. "I hate Facebook's ads" ceases to matter when you don't need a Facebook to serve you updates from your friends. "Reddit is censoring my posts" ceases to matter when the censorship is per user, chosen by the user, rather than by the site choosing for everyone. Of course it is, that's what TechBros are all about. The chinstrokers will work the word "fiat" into the conversation within the first three sentences. The important thing to consider, though, is "censorship" is the majority of the labor at any organization that posts controversial content. If that organization gets blown up because their aggregation is no longer useful, then the idea of "censorship" pretty much shifts: Web3 permits a pull model of subscription, rather than push, which means the onus is on the receiver rather than the transmitter. I'm gonna leave that typo in there because it's hilarious and awesome, but beyond that, the Randians are gonna be bummed because "survival of the fittest" becomes "thriving of the community." The architecture of the web these days is "everything, cut down to what's appropriate" while the architecture is about to be "nothing, except what you chose to add." This presumes that they have insurmountable advantages. They have advantages, I agree - I've argued before that the first company to figure out how to offer "credit card protection" on a crypto wallet is going to win, at least until someone else does it for less. "Government" has already subsumed it in China - they're kicking out all the ground-up crypto in favor of their own top-down social system. It's gonna kill innovation, though, and curtail their trade practices. When the Treasure Fleet becomes conditional on your continued worship of their system lest you anger the Emperor, the Treasure Fleet is left in the harbor. The United States, on the other hand, seems to be circling around "remember to pay your taxes" - that $600 moneysniffer letter that the IRS put out also explicitly prevents any investigation of person-to-person transactions within a noncustodial wallet. In other words, the US Government sure looks like they're favoring innovation over censorship, so long as they get paid (the $600 isn't "$600" it's "reportable 1099 income"). There's a growing consensus within the bureaucracy of the US government that monopoly has been bad for the country but nobody has the teeth to do anything about it because Free Market. Here's the CEO of Walmart begging congress to raise the minimum wage. By adopting a "pay your taxes and innovate" framework for crypto/Web3, the United States is basically choosing to do the exact opposite of China. I wouldn't write this stuff off just because everybody talking about it is just shilling their stock. As mk told me, the guys who actually understand it are spending their time writing apps not sales pitches.This will never overcome the sales and marketing power of the big boys and girls for the majority of consumers.
Most people aren't all that worried about being censored which is a good chunk of this guys sales pitch.
It will give the librarian crypto set something to jack off to for the next decade, which is nice I suppose.
Anything good or useful in the tech will be subsumed by big business and government and put into a package that grandma can handle.
People like YouTube and Facebook for the stuff the algorithm spoon feeds them. They don't want an alternate social media that doesn't' push shit at them. I'm sure you have a better idea than I do about the kind of resources and brainpower that get applied to getting one more click and one more minute of time on site. I really might not be getting it at all but what does web 3.0 offer my aunt Cindy that is better than careful constant stimulus massaged with all the tools of modern marketing and neuroscience? Maybe a hatred of ads and a hatred of the pound of flesh that gets taken is enough to topple the giants but I doubt it. Distributed storage and computation is another one of the big wins for web 3.0 I guess. This is an extension and derivation of "The Cloud!." "The Cloud!" is just storing or computing on someone else's computer, that's all it is right? So once again the big win is no one will be able to censor you if you distribute you shit on a bunch of random computers instead of Amazon's computers. Will it be cheaper than Amazon? I doubt it. If you don't want to be snooped on you can do all this on your own computer, I guess you can do it on the people's computers and hope for the bet. Once again, maybe I just don't get it but this seems like a not amazing use case. I could watch this fucking awful video again and try and figure out what's so fucking great, but it's just about unwatchable if you aren't the kind of person that jerks off to corporate orientation videos. The Domain name stuff seems fine, I don't use the domain system Comcast tried to impose on me but it's hardly revolutionary. I'm fast becoming a luddite who increasingly understand little about the techno nonsense going on around me. I'm still trying to wrap my head around why people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for shitty jpegs and all the indecipherable shit that's happening seems to be intertwined with that kind of nonsense. twenty years ago people were mocking guys who paid ten dollars for a sword in MORPG, that seems silly but not ridiculous. Real revolutions that seem exciting to me are things like having a mental health professional show up when someone is in distress rather than a cop, or breaking up the nation. If you are pedophile or a criminal web 3.0 sounds like it might really be the bees knees but I'm just not keeping up and profoundly don't get it.
It is my experience that my understanding of a subject improves the more I explain it to someone else. It has also been my experience that if I cannot succinctly explain something to someone who actively does not want to understand it, then I don't truly get it myself. As such, this is as much for my benefit as it is for yours, but it's going to be piecemeal because you threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall there. Sure - same reason they used to like television. However, good television wins out over bad television. This model doesn't work with social media or Youtube because you can't change the channel - you've got the Facebook channel, the Youtube channel, the Twitter channel and they all show you things of maximized engagement. Television and radio don't work this way: you sit there and they interrupt your content with ads. The more ads you sit through, the more money TV and radio makes, so it's in their best interest to give you great content so that you'll sit through lots of ads. Social media measures its effectiveness by how much you change the channel. That's really what "engagement" means: how uncomplacent are you in your viewing habits. Commercials are a terrible business model. "Here is a free thing, let me bug you enough that you buy something." It was the model we arrived at because broadcasting or publishing cost a lot of money and "give it away for free and make someone else pay for it" worked with the broadsheets. It's particularly terrible for the Internet because the carry cost is one tenth of fuckall and the ads are easily ignored, which means they're impossibly cheap and there's a lot of them. What we've gotten, in effect, is something free that's paid for by stuff we don't want that's so worthless we're buried in it. It can all. Go. Away. You know what my favorite Twitter account is? This Massimo guy. he serves up always-sourced, usually-interesting little tidbits of science, engineering or kismet, usually with links to more in-depth coverage. And he's constantly fighting Twitter, constantly fighting Instagram because people steal his shit and report him. He mentioned once that just keeping his stuff online costs him about a thousand dollars a month. The modern Web makes it untenable to just put up a website of this stuff. You have to do Twitter or Instagram or Substack or Medium or whatever. There has to be an intermediary because of the structure we've adopted. But that structure is a function of a top-down hierarchy. Web3 will allow you to curate a collection of whatever providers you find entertaining, or someone else's collection, or someone's collection of collections. And all of it will get paid for in tiny little instant increments because we've poisoned the term "micropayments" so much that nobody even wants to discuss it anymore, but it's real now. And perpetual. And frictionless. And murder for Facebook. Because really - they've got an algorithm they constantly fuck with and if I can just go "I'm going to go with Bob, Jerry, Larry, Gerald and Ralph's curation because I like what they're doing, thanks" then Facebook's algorithm loses. Cindy gets alignment. The people making the content want Cindy to see it, and Cindy wants to see their content. If what she really wants is holocaust denial videos and flat earth conspiracies hoo boy she's gonna get it, no doubt. So long as she doesn't watch anything that violates the law there's nothing stopping her from marinating in antisemitism and cat videos. BUT there's also nothing profiting off of shoving antisemitism uninvited in between her cat videos. Not the way you think. Everything is already distributed, you just don't really notice it. What Web3 changes is centralization. All those servers do what Facebook wants to do. There isn't a rogue Aunt Cindy server creating her own David Duke Cat Video graph. There will be now. "The Cloud!" is very much just someone else's computer. Blockchain, however, is no one's Internet. The hierarchy is gone. The control is gone. The tollboothing is gone. It is truly peer-to-peer without some heinous centralized tracker telling everyone where everyone else is. Right now, everything you browse through your phone is put there by a bunch of indexes that talk to a bunch of corporations that work with a bunch of advertisers and host a bunch of content providers. Soon, your phone and the content providers will negotiate directly. "The Cloud!" is about to be fired. Frankly it'll probably be on Amazon. For work and play I have double digits of instances on DigitalOcean. Used to have a couple on Google and with a click I moved them. I don't deal with DigitalOcean at all - there are companies that do it for me. I am running software that I can't configure to accomplish tasks that are unique to me. Yeah - there's giant server farms. Yeah - they're owned by corporations. That's not going to change. What's going to change is who controls what they're doing. I'm going to guess he's talking about single-sign-on and ETH2 domains? Yeah so basically the cool thing here is identity is indelible and can be parsed by humans. All that "sign in with Google, sign in with Apple, sign in with Facebook" shit? That universality is baked in, no corporate overlords necessary. I wrote a thing. Long story short, because they're unique, easily traded and are taxed differently. I mean, what do you get out of it? Does it give you $10 worth of joy? Then fuck the haters. I also have no need for a million dollar jpeg. But hey - if it goes up in value more than the stuff you bought it with, that's a win, right? There's a very real disconnect that everyone from Millennials up are extremely resistant to bridging. We all grew up with "you wouldn't download a car" and the idea that digital things can be infinitely duplicated therefore they cost nothing to make and have zero actual value. But NFTs and cryptocurrency are something entirely new: you can create a thing that's digital and it's the only one and everyone in the world can verify that, as well as verifying everything that ever happened to it. ____________________________________ Look. There's a lot of synthesis necessary here to really see the elephant, rather than grabbing a trunk and thinking it's a snake or whatever. If you try and have that discussion, people sniff the air for bong smoke. BUT HERE'S WHERE WE'RE AT: Trade has, since the dawn of civilization, happened under one of two rubrics: - Trust - Violence If you're in a family group or a village, stuff happens through trust. Jerry's a lazy-ass but his dad's okay so I can give him a sackload of grain, I'll get my milk one way or another. Traders coming through? Yeah, no reason to trust them; we'll exchange goods of known value because we may never see them again. If you're under a king, city-state or nation, stuff happens through violence. That's what the social contract is: I abide by the rules, you punish anyone who doesn't. Graeber pointed out that governments are fundamentally monopolies on violence - one ducat is worth five ounces of gold and if anybody disagrees we'll smite 'em. From warlords to central banks, trade happens because if it goes wrong someone's gonna get lit up. But now? now we've got every computer out there with an indelible record of what was agreed. We don't need trust, it's all right there. We don't need violence - if the money doesn't go through, the transaction doesn't happen. We're legitimately looking at a third way for the first time in human history. It's gonna crack the world. What does it look like on the other side? I don't know. But I do know that the people who are looking for analogies and previous examples in order to argue that nothing's gonna change aren't thinking about it. They're looking for a reason not to. This stuff is worth thinking about.I'm fast becoming a luddite who increasingly understand little about the techno nonsense going on around me.
People like YouTube and Facebook for the stuff the algorithm spoon feeds them.
I really might not be getting it at all but what does web 3.0 offer my aunt Cindy that is better than careful constant stimulus massaged with all the tools of modern marketing and neuroscience?
Distributed storage and computation is another one of the big wins for web 3.0 I guess.
This is an extension and derivation of "The Cloud!." "The Cloud!" is just storing or computing on someone else's computer, that's all it is right?
Will it be cheaper than Amazon?
The Domain name stuff seems fine, I don't use the domain system Comcast tried to impose on me but it's hardly revolutionary.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around why people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for shitty jpegs and all the indecipherable shit that's happening seems to be intertwined with that kind of nonsense.
twenty years ago people were mocking guys who paid ten dollars for a sword in MORPG, that seems silly but not ridiculous.
I also hate every aspect of this but for different reasons. Big business and government will eventually shift to blockchain. But that is horrifying in it's own right. I mean hell, one of this guy's examples is Donald Trump being censored. Our social media platforms are already horrible enough, imagine if they're completely unmoderated.
The fundamental basis of cryptocurrency is disintermediation. Everything will shift to blockchain, which eliminates the middle man. Donald Trump will still be Donald Trump. But there is no economic advantage to a Facebook or Twitter sitting in the middle deciding that Donald Trump stumbling is newsworthy. There is no economic, strategic or financial advantage to a "platform", thus there are no economic forces funneling everyone into one paradigm. There is no platform. That has good aspects and it has bad aspects.Big business and government will eventually shift to blockchain.