Web3 is a Pyramid scheme for people who get hyped from just hearing the word 'blockchain' but who don't have any technical understanding of how one computer actually communicates to another computer.
Web3 scammers insert meaningless hand-wavy-techno-babble homophone phrases like 'Layer 1', 'off-chain', and 'decentralized' to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware.
Web3 is literally not a real thing. If you want real talk about empowering the users to own the network infrastructure then you better be talking about publicly owned ISPs and data centers; not about bullshit 'smart contract' VMs deployed into the proprietary Cloud environment of one Global monopoly or Another.
Honestly, until any of this 'Web3' malarky has even a chance in hell of being superior to AWS or Azure I think most of it is worthless. None of it has a
trajectory of becoming superior so far and most of it is incredibly slow, expensive, and wasteful (as far as electricity goes).
This is poorly written; words and punctuation are missing all over the place.
I don’t understand the git analogy at all.
> If we’re extending the definition of web3 to include decentralized software systems
We certainly aren’t. Web3 is defined by “trustless” decentralized systems (which usually aren’t actually decentralized, in practice).
Branding a database as “Web3” is terrible PR, given web3’s reputation for obscene inefficiency and high latency. The marketing team should reconsider this post.
It's basically a decentralized, censorship-resistant P2P internet. The philosophy has merit, but the performance sucks and it is currently mostly a venture capitalist funded scam.
I'm going to reprise a comment of mine that I posted on a similar HN article some time ago.
Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc...
Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....
Part of what makes cryptocurrency so alluring is its (current) Wild West, little to no rules, nature. Those very things will scare aware the masses until things stabilize at which point we return to the current state of things perhaps with some modest differences.
People forget that the current financial system is a product of thousands of years of evolution and many hard lessons learned.
Web 3.0 (as VCs see it) is a solution looking for a problem. I get a late-90s dotcom-era feeling from it. People saying what it takes to raise money and throwing a technical solution at what often isn't one.
And completely ignore increasing talk of official state backed digital currencies which will be the Orwellian horror that results from all this crypto froth.
To be fair, none of those other debates have anything to do with finances and wealth tools or vehicles. There's inherently less incentive to scam people with those things because it won't make someone rich to do so (at least nowhere near the extent that other options, like stealing digital financial assets, would).
Email and websites in general have tons of scams associated with it, to the point where I'm required for whatever company or client I work for to take phishing/security awareness lectures every single year, yet those things don't "need to be defended".
False equivalence. Email and websites have immense self-evident utility, thus they do not need to be defended. Web3 doesn't actually solve any of the problems it claims to, so the proselytizers are always fighting hard to downplay all the problems it creates.
Someday the last post on their blog might be "we are proud to admit that we got acqui-hired" and it will all be because their customers, employers and investors left because of this blog post and the thinking behind it.
The management team should stop what they are doing now, remove this post from their blog and make a public apology to all their stakeholders.
I can only guess, but it looks like they want to ride (and got VC funding to ride) the Web3 hype wave, but they don't want to be lumped in with "the other Web3 people".
It's consistent with what you see in other insider communication about "Web3" in that words and symbols are used in isolation from each other and without any attempt at weaving them into a narrative.
For instance the official site for Bored Ape Yacht Club shows a bar with a neon sign that says "FOMO". Near the entrance in Decentraland there are pictures of the Doge and other internet memes.
It is not about communicating a message in the conventional sense but rather like plucking a string and having it vibrate another string of the same length by resonance.
Note the "Are we wrong..." kind of phrasing and use of unspecific hypnotic language right out of Milton Ericson. This is aimed to provoke FOMO in the clueless; people like us will read this and realize the author is clueless but the clueless will struggle to find the wisdom here and assume they aren't getting it because they don't understand the text, not that the text is meaningless.
It's like that puff piece on crypto that was in the NYT last week.
It isn't really saying anything - just trying to give a look at an ongoing internal dialogue about web3, which i suspect is pretty widespread. Devs often don't like permissionless blockchain and crypto, but do like decentralization and moving away from giant beasts like Apple, Google, Facebook. The Socratic method of back and forth points can help to stimulate critical thinking. Thou maybe that has failed in this case!
Marketing communications on a blog need to be better planned than this.
I'm a bit of an expert in the graph and document space and sometimes I have been in a position to recommend or specify a product. I see it as a very crowded space, terminusdb is going to have to work to convince me that it's worth my time to really understand their offering, never mind that I should put my reputation on the line by advocating for it.
The blog is a place where a company like that can demonstrate that it is going to do the right thing for customers, employees, vendors, investors and other interested parties. As it is I'd be a little embarrassed if I was recommending their product to a client and had to make excuses for them and tell clients "really there is a good team behind it, ignore that blog positing, it is just a fluke..."
I like how the author repeatedly pointed out how much HN hates web3, and the postings herein reinforce that with hilarious intensity. I mean, hey, guys, I think everybody knows you hate web3. But thanks for the reminder anyhow.
That's because football clubs and players are clambering on the Crypto/NFT bandwagon as a way to fleece supporters of more money. Things like crypto for having your say and voting on club matters. This is ultimately an example of the crux of the argument in the article - the grifters are diverting the possibility of any real constructive discussion so that all that is left is pretty crass comments like comparing HN and Ukraine. Unless that was Boris Johnson who left that comment, then it's standard behaviour.
There may be a place for some of the ideas lumped in under the term "Web3". But the term, as currently defined, is heavily associated with cryptocurrency and blockchains. Which are mostly associated with scams in the minds of people who are aware of them, but did not buy in early enough to have a ton of formerly-worthless cryptocoins become worth absurd amounts of money.
If you want to try and redefine this term to not be about cryptocurrency and blockchains, then good luck with that. Realistically I think it would be better to try and make a coordinated push to make some other term a thing, because right now the instant response to "web3" among the non-believers is, at best, an eyeroll, a sigh, and closing the tab.
I mean, the current top story on HN while this is on the front page? "$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network". That's Web3. Right there.
web3 definitely could be as successful as git if you remove the payments side of it. Without payments web3 starts to look like an interesting and useful idea. Ownership of content, federation between platforms, trustless publishing, etc are concepts the web lacks, and that could definitely be interesting to layer on top of the web.
Adding payments into the mix kills it like every other microtransaction protocol though. git would have been significantly less successful if it cost you a small amount of money to merge a PR, or to fork a repo, or to push something.
Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better.
Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it… and they wish it was you!
Subscriptions and ads have gone together like peanut butter and jelly since the print age.
If you subscribe to The New York Times or Cosmopolitan you have qualified yourself as being interested in the subject, attached to the brand, and not hopelessly penurious. An advertiser would rather pay to get a message in front of a paid subscriber rather than anyone else.
Just to point out, "Web3" usually is talking about smart contract executions; All the smart contract platforms I know of are (or will soon be) proof of stake, so no burning the planet required
How do you get around supplying content without ads or some other metric to pay for network usage?
It would be nice if everything was free, but right now everything has a cost associated with it. Whether that's your attention, your data, or outright paying for the service.
To me the better question in regards to Web3, is it necessary to have so many middlemen? That's my issue with it.
I just don't get web3 and what problems it solves. People say it solves centralization but I see no means of accomplishing this. I can't see how it doesn't end up like email. Sure, you can host your own email, but the service is very centralized. Yeah, gmail, yahoo, and hotmail might only host 51% of emails, but how many of those other email addresses are fake, temporary, or for bots? If you sample from people around you it is hard to find an address outside these domains and so the sampling likelihood doesn't match the model's probabilities. Email is highly centralized. We can similarly see high centralization in browsers. Functionally there isn't much difference between Chrome and FireFox yet people will promote one over the other with such religious fervor that you'd think they offer different functionalities.
Web3 has no mechanism to prevent centralization. There are such things as natural monopolies, and these typically happen through network effects. This network effect is so powerful that everyone uses Google Maps. Web3 does nothing to prevent this (we even have to ask if we want to prevent this). So what is it solving? Hosting monopolies? If that's what it is solving then it seems like there are likely better ways and no need for the blockchain.
I even say this as someone that thinks there's value in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Yeah, a lot of scammers in the area, but I can see some utility in the ideas (but huge noise to signal ratio). I just can't see any signal in web3.
Looking at the author's LinkedIn, I see Luke has no engineering background, and no STEM experience. His expertise before becoming cofounder of Terminus is in diplomacy and marketing. It's weird to be write articles on Git and Terminus being Web3 without a clear understanding of either.
I can only imagine the DMs flying around in their company's slack after this post went out.
Genuine question: How stoppable is "Web3?" Which may be to say -- what is more likely: All the big money idiots come to their senses, or "Web3" definitely happens in some form that has some, but not all, of the stupid weeded out of it?
Big money will probably at least break even. It's your average person throwing their money at the shitcoin of the week who will be left holding the bag. There is no hope for those people unfortunately
I’m happy that the author starts to have doubts and consider being wrong. I hope that in a few moons they can write a blog post titled “we were wrong about Web3” and focus on their main product that sounds promising.
Cool to see terminusdb is majority written in Prolog (Have fond memories of writing Prolog in Uni). Is this the most prominent open source Prolog project
If you are expecting your business to be around in 2023 you should shut up about "Web3".
If you want to have good people for customers, if you want to hire good employees, if you want to have good vendors, shut up about "Web3".
Don't take good free software like "Git" and slander it by associating it with platforms that charge fees on top of fees on top of fees; platforms that charge you fees to pay your fees that make rent-seekers like Visa and Mastercard blush.
It looks like terminusdb is a good product that somebody can use without paying money to grifters. Why slander it? Why put up a big sign on your web site that says "Nothing more to see here move on" to the good people in the world but that will attract evil people, scammers and clueless people blinded by FOMO who will bleed your company dry and leave it a rotten husk?
Terminusdb should fire the person who made this blog post and make a press release about it immediately to protect your investors, your employees and your customers.
It looks like the same internal conflict I've seen elsewhere: Non-technical marketing or exec people demand "web3" and "NFTs" and the engineers tell them it's silly and why does our in-memory json database need blockchain anyway? There's a lot of time wasted, everyone learns something about carbon offsets, and either the project gets dropped or the senior engineers quit and the juniors are bullied into line behind the "vision" (or promised tokens of some kind).
I get your frustration: this piece is a bit "corporate gonzo", to say the least, and I got pretty bored because I prefer hard information and a higher density of it as well. Moreover, if I want gonzo, there are people who do it a whole lot better and more entertainingly[0].
Anyway, beyond the fact that it's a cheap and incoherent attempt to capitalise on the Web3 hype train, I'm also vaguely irked that they confuse Web3, with Web 3.0 - the latter being Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the next iteration of the web (worth searching for if you're interested).
I don't know that I'd say Terminusdb should fire the author, but they should probably take the post down because, honestly, it's not useful and is just contributing to the already deafening noise about Web3.
[0] Actually, now that I think about it, it's incoherent enough that I wonder if it was perhaps generated by GPT-3 or a similar AI, which would possibly mean the whole thing is intended as some sort of joke. Obviously just a hypothesis.
Yep. My first job in tech was with a platform that promised a "Web 2.0" experience that was centered around drag-and-drop. Take a wild guess as to whether they're still around...
There was a lot of web 2.0 hype around the late 90s / early aughts. Lots of companies that tried to cash in on a trend without a solid business model. That said, the situation was appreciably different to now.
Web 2.0, as I understand it, was about increasing interactivity so websites aren't all static, which has the possibility of being beneficial to end users. Web 3.0, as I understand it, is crypto-nonsense.
I agree, and also it's easy to forget how silly "Web 2.0" was
Not the technology itself, that was great, and was already named.
When Web 2.0 arrived as a buzzword the web was already an interactive, dynamic platform with databases, server and client side scripting, user generated content and social networking. All of the technologies involved were in fairly widespread use.
For a minute the term Web 2.0 might have been a way to recognize how cool the natural evolution of the web was, but it was quickly co-opted for use as cutting edge sounding investor bait. Same general principle as Web 3.0, but with useful technology.
Side note: The Web 2.0 hype was mostly a 2000's thing.
Web 3 sounds to me like people who came to the web in the Facebook era, and wish they could have what we had in the good old days. Who can blame them?
The problem is that the solution to centralization is to stop centralizing, which the new approach doesn't seem to do. Perhaps there is a way to have our cake and eat it too?
A lot of Web 2 was about APIs and widgets. Widgets for the most part haven't taken off as some predicted although APIs are very widely used. However, the very open vision of Web2 never fully materialized.
Calling for people to be fired because they wrote a blog post with ideas you don't like is monstrous. Whatever other 'criticisms' you might have, that is beyond the pale and shouldn't be acceptable commentary on this platform.
I don't read anything that refers to "blockchain" the way Apple refers to "iPhone". I don't know what the term for it is but they always do it. "With iPhone, you can enjoy being smug and superior in 8K!"
Anyways as soon as I see that sort of corporate newspeak I immediately close the tab.
Web3 scammers insert meaningless hand-wavy-techno-babble homophone phrases like 'Layer 1', 'off-chain', and 'decentralized' to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware.
Web3 is literally not a real thing. If you want real talk about empowering the users to own the network infrastructure then you better be talking about publicly owned ISPs and data centers; not about bullshit 'smart contract' VMs deployed into the proprietary Cloud environment of one Global monopoly or Another.