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The thing with W3 is that it's mostly driven by either bored tech bros who cashed out during W1/2 or a generation of young hustlers who were born with phones in their hands and never experienced the bliss of a non-commercial Web. Pair that with little to no physical desires, no traditional economic/educational perspective and it's no longer a surprise that making money from nothing is so attractive among these peers. The good thing is that the entire ecosystem is still so clunky* that even old blokes like us can help steering the ship into more meaningful territory.
It's fine to get jealous when selling a rock is making more money than your startup in its lifespan but on the other hand, let's enjoy that the Web is now an instrument to reward individuals for their creativity and not just the most sophisticated tech stack or pay to play game.
Overall, I miss Web 1.0 as much as Retro games. And that means looking at screenshots brings me more joy than actually using/playing it. Because let's be honest, it mostly sucked in comparison.
https://paulstamatiou.com/crypto-design-challenges/
This article spoke to me.
I do find the technical underpinnings of crypto (I refuse to ever use "web3") fascinating and I'm sure there are some valid applications. But everything I see right now is empty hype and usually just an open invitation to land grab in the promise of future profit. The spirit couldn't feel any more different than the original web.
The original web was building something because you wanted to. It was about staking claim in a space online, your own space, where people could visit (or not) and it was all yours. Geocities and YTMND taught so many kids HTML where they could build wacky sites just because. There was no monetization driver.
Web3 feels like a by-product of being taught to monetize every hobby we have. Nothing can exist for free anymore. There is no more web to stake without some ad or product being shoved down your throat.
I do hope it's only a trend. I've been itching to create silly sites again, just because.
How did YTMND teach kids html? I thought it was just a site that hosted a soundbite from 'Finding Forrester' and had a wacky colored background.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating those, with the added benefit that "web3" will allow you to host and distribute your content without ever worrying about Geocities going down.
Don't believe me? Make your silly site and put it on IPFS, or host it on the beaker browser. That is "web3" already.
You missed the point tremendously.
I didn't/shouldn't care that Geocities went down. Who would? Back in the day I had a page on my site dedicated to how much I loved the Mets. Putting anything like that on IPFS or whatever is so overkill and for what? So it's always online?
Good luck with web3 or whatever, I'll gladly and kindly stay behind.
You _still_ don't need to put it on IPFS. You have your own website? Great! I am glad it works for you.
But for the absolute majority of people, they don't know or care about "having their own website". Early in the century, those people _would_ go to Geocities/Yahoo. Later on with "web2.0" the mainstream went on to have their blogs and their social media presence, which made it easier for the mainstream, but not without its problems - e.g, people getting into walled gardens, surveillance capitalism, tragedy of the commons due to the eyeball-chasing nature of web content producers, etc...
Now with "web3" the idea is that the individual nodes can be in control of their data, and that the tech is (slowly) becoming easy enough to be adopted by the masses. That's all there is to it.
You can say "I could do that with web1!" Yes, it is true. But it is also largely missing the point. The fact that _you_ (and I) could do these things with "web1" does not satisfy the mainstream that does not know or care about setting up their own pages and setting up a server.
Dissing "web3"on the grounds of "it doesn't give me anything new" is the nerd's version of "I was a fan of the band before they were mainstream".
> Now with "web3" the idea is that the individual nodes can be in control of their data
I'm genuinely curious how this statement differs from
> the mainstream that does not know or care about setting up their own pages and setting up a server.
What is an individual node if not just another server? And on top of that, web3 wants to throw words like "distributed" and "blockchain" at people like they have any more idea what those are than a box that runs code.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
> What is an individual node if not just another server?
A "node" in decentralized network is both a server and a client, with the difference that it only is required to "serve" the data that is in control of the node operator, right?
> web3 wants to throw words like "distributed" and "blockchain"
Have you seen any demo from the beaker browser? Or have you used the IPFS Companion extension? You can just add a folder there, get a content identifier and share that with anyone. That is literally all that there is to it.
I'm certainly very disappointed that so many old "just because" sites describing quirky one-user (the developer) technology are forever gone, including the tech.
This isn't really about what is technically possible but rather where the critical mass of thought/discussion is. There are a whole bunch of things you _can_ do with crypto but the majority of what _is_ being done, talked about and hyped up is a money grab.
How is that different from "web1"? Do you think that the internet became a mainstream thing just because the suits looked at what the nerds were doing and thought "oh, this is cool!" or do you think that they were attracted to it when they saw the chance of making big money?
How is that different from "web2.0"? Do you think that "the web as an application platform" and "freemium SaaS" because of the technical superiority of the web, or because all the money in Silicon Valley needed a place to go, and it ended going to repackage every already-existing utility as a web application, and later on as a mobile app?
Yeah, so a bunch of people now are hyping "web3" and quite likely they are doing it as an attempt to make money out of it. Just like _every other industry_ from our modern globalized society.
Welcome to Late-Stage Capitalism.
While I am somewhat engaged in crypto, this is so true. After listening to Kevin Rose's crypto podcast and hear his excitement about some NFT projects I yesterday took another dive into that world to see if I find something I like. Almost everything that's there is a devirative money grab. The few things that don't are spoiled by association. I really liked one video. Turned out that the creator had just taken someone else's images and turned them into video that chained them by morphing them into each other.
[Edit: autocorrect error]
I'll admit to being extremely annoyed by web3 (due to javascript massively disempowering users, taking away things we used to be able to do).
But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about. It's a false flag and the wrong ideal to look towards.
Even if you go back to Bush's "As We May Think", the focus was on making information _accessible_ and _editable_ using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.
Gemini is a fun alternative; it's not supposed to be an ideal to look towards. The nice thing about Gemini is not so much its aesthetic as its human focus. It leans away from automation.
It sounds to me (and I may be wrong and picking up on the wrong things) that what you'd really like is something like Project Xanadu? Which is, unlike Web3, a reasonable position to hold, though it's one I strongly disagree with (I consider a fully realized and mainstream Xanadu as a Grim Meathook Future, though one not as thoroughly inhuman and extinctionist as Web3).
Got me there.
What I secretly wish for is a reliable all-encompassing technical reservoir of information without all the cruft that used to be unavoidable (books, libraries, lending, paper copiers, fees etc.). And a working human language that allows for deterministic logic on top. Yes, it's impossible, but some nights I allow myself to dream Frege's dream [1].
So to be realistic, I don't even need this all-embracing technology to exist. I just want current technology to _not prevent me_ from building my own tiny pocket of it.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift
i’m currently reading Ted’s “literary machines” and fascinated by the description of xanadu, it lines up with a lot of my own intuition of the way things “should be”
i’m curious what comes across as so grim to you
A lot of the assumptions of Xanadu are incompatible with an open world. For a trivial example, bidirectional links require either a central authority, a burn-the-forests blockchain solution, or acceptance of the fact that every document will consist entirely of links to Viagra pharmacies. Unbreakable links (no 404s, no link-rot) implies the inability to ever remove anything from the system, which means no right to be forgotten, your bad takes will haunt you forever. (This lovely feature is implemented as "content-adressing" in some Web3 protocols.) Transclusion and transcopyright mean the whole system has to be surveilled to enforce IP law, and all expression is potentially financialized.
Basically, something like Xanadu would work very well as a personal system, or even a closed research system like a law library, but an open-world Xanadu would be even a worse hellscape than the Web-as-we-know-it.
Thanks, I agree that blockchain-permenance is undesirable (not to mention illegal in EU !)
Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive?
The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous.
More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for.
[ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]
"I'll admit to being extremely annoyed by web3 (due to javascript massively disempowering users, taking away things we used to be able to do)"
JS is a web 2 thing though.
Agreed, and web3 isn't getting any better
/snark off
Genuinely curious, what has JavaScript taken away that you used to be able to do with the web? (other than use sites with JS turned off :)
I'll bite - this is an incomplete list:
- Save web pages to disk (in an usable form, i.e. usable by scripts etc., offline)
- curl + script to handle content - now you need puppeteer etc.
- Easy automation of web pages (same as above) - can't just do POST (yes some pages have APIs. Most are different and require effort)
- Custom CSS that works universally
- Do powerful stuff with proxies (i.e. rewrite requests, responses)
- Link to individual documents or even anchors by default
- Pages are the same for everyone, you can send people a link and expect they see it, and see it the way you do
... the list goes on, but these cover some of the most important points.
You can still do all of these things. JavaScript isn’t the problem.
Your issue is more that there’s no longer any standardization of the web and the surface area to which sites are designed have increased drastically.
One could still make a site today that can do everything you’re describing
I invite you to try and do any of these things and discover how hard, prohibitively hard they are.
It’s not - a plain text site example, does all of these automatically
Sorry, you're right of course.
But anything like a SPA where javascript populates and/or changes the DOM - that's not accessible to a plain client without rendering engine.
Sure, but the issue isn’t JavaScript, the issue is that people are building their websites as web apps and when it isn’t necessary.
Java applets and flash had the same issues.
Printing web pages. Those days is either print screen and paste in an image editor or copy text and paste it in a text editor.
> the focus was on making information accessible and editable using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.
Maybe what I'm aiming to do with stealth aligns with your goals? [1] I'm trying to use the best parts of the web3 idea (decentralization, distribution, sharing of storage + bandwidth) and combine it with the ideas of the old web, where the focus was on distributing information and not on advertisement or social influence.
[1]
https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
_> I'm trying to use the best parts of the web3 idea (decentralization, distribution) and combine it with the ideas of the old web_
Weren't decentralization & distribution already part of the “old web” idea too?
Decentralization: Yes, but Distribution: No.
I was more talking about what's possible when your Browser can share resources with other Browsers in your local network, e.g. saving redundant downloads when one of your peers already downloaded the very same URL ... or long-term caching everything by default, and making the URLs and their content offline-readable when you have no internet connection.
Gopher isn't/wasn't part of the web. It was an alternative and it failed in part due to licensing.
>_But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about._
It's what _I_ want it to be about, for one.
Gopher is about meta indexing information in files. If the world gives me a news site with an index and links to nicely typeset articles in PDF I will be happy. That’s where we should be.
Instead we have 5MiB of marketing, tracking and manipulation JavaScript, infinite scrolling and useless content. It’s difficult to find gold in an ocean of shit.
Having written web apps for 20 years, I would pick native apps over anything www based now.
Who is the author talking to? The people writing the tech would prefer to make a straight html page, it's the Powers That Be that pay them well to do more.
Nobody's being stopped from making "web 1" webpages. Making a call to action like this isn't going to make big companies suddenly change their mind.
I was around for Web1 and remember it being kind of awful beyond giving great hope for what it would be like in the future when the sorted it out. Pages taking minutes to load, almost no decent content. Most of that stuff seems better now.
Web3 seems a bit like that now in that the payment and distributed bits don't work very well but may in the future.
Related:
https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
Given how each Web n.0 is met with fizzling hype, it's kinda surprising to see some of the people hyping Web 3.0.
I agree that decentralization will be important going forward. There are some specs starting to emerge that give me hope that a decentralized, open, and free web is still possible. For example:
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
Maybe we should call it Web 3.1 or something. The typical bug fix point release.
The web was arguably more punk when I was young, but the corporations were all still there. Most of them were really bad at it, but they sure tried.
As an example, my parents subscribed to Time Magazine in the 1980s and 90s. They devoted a lot of pages to cybersex, games (Megawars got an entire page) and porn on networks like AOL and Compuserve.
If this was Shadowrun, my character would find an ic reason to say “same corpies, different corps.”
I for one miss the Web Zero - the page-oriented terminals such as the 3270s and the Uniscopes connected terminal controllers and then to mainframes...
Paah! I once had a job programming Computer Automation kit using a 120 column teleprinter - you're not even back as far as web0.5
I would say stream-oriented devices, like the VT-52 or the ASR-33 would be Web -1. Block-oriented devices have a lot in common with the way HTML specifies forms and requests.
BTW, I love the way the ASR-33 sounds.
On my phone, about 70% of the screen is a newsletter popup and a cookie banner. The title is the only part of the content that's visible. The cookie banner isn't GDPR compliant.
This might not be the best platform to complain about the state of things.
I stopped after i have seen:
By using the Revue Service, you agree to our cookie use in our Website Privacy Policy or Platform Privacy Policy. We use cookies for purposes, including analytics and personalization.
When you talk about web1 do it in a web1 way.
Tedium.co is apparently primarily a newsletter and not a website. Doesn't address the GDPR bit, but explains the dominance of the "subscribe" stuff.
Personal websites, guestbooks, web rings, funky visuals, midis and personalities, people were never as connected ever and after.
I got a warning that this page was slowing down my computer on Firefox. Possibly the recaptca web workers?
Web3 is an attempt to solve a political problem with technology. The issue facing us is corporate power. Rather than engage in a political fight to change either the way corporations are policed or the incentives that produced our situation (i.e. capitalism), they are desperately trying to build a wall around themselves with "trustless", "decentralized" technology. What they're missing is, the centralized powers they're trying to defeat will never permit a technology to succeed if it removes their power. That being the case, we may end up with a version of "web3", but it will be one that either supports the powers we'd hoped to defeat or creates a new class of powers we'll be trying to combat with web4.