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Comment by mise_en_place | Hacker News Reader

Tired of hearing "web3" everywhere, it's the one buzzword that really disgusts me. Reminds me exactly of the dotcom era. This is what happens when the "ideas guy" grifter infiltrates the OSS community.

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the laser eye types don't even acknowledge the federated social ecosystem either.

you can have decentralization without blockchains. Just adopt the existing standards, or get involved with the W3C / IETF if you want to be part of the process defining the next ones.

we do desperately need a social media protocol. something to replace the twitters and facebooks with an email / rss-like mechanism that's open and

It exists and that's one of the points I was trying to make.

ActivityPub?

It's been there since the 90's and early 00's. It's called HTML and RSS. If you put it on a server that's slightly more under your control than 'the cloud', than you're even more golden. Just try it, it's fun.

I feel like RSS / HTML fail to make easy certain components of the social media experience. They don't do a particularly good job of assisting networking, which I would consider a primary function of social media, nor do they do very well with content discovery. Any implementation that's going to displace the fbs and twits of the world is going to have to have some mechanism to solve that problem.

Perhaps something to augment RSS for discoverability and internetworking is the ticket. It's not a fully-baked thought, though.

A protocol is an API, not frontend (HTML/CSS). You having your own social network amounts to one protocol, but it can’t compete with Facebook unless other people’s custom social network can exchange friends/followers with yours. For which a standardized protocol is needed.

I'm just going to ignore it until it either evaporates away. Web 2.0 was basically sitting on the same stuff as 1.0 (html+Javascript, server, database), just with more moving dynamic parts. Since web3 wants to change this, I doubt it will amount to anything.

I'm only referring to it as web3.0000000000000004 from now on

Can you setup a mailer to let me know when it moves up to web3.0000000000000005 ?

The only thing annoying about the term “web3” is that it downplays the eventual real-world impact of a lot of the capital innovations taking place.

Personal lack of understanding doesn’t mean that something important isn’t taking place (which I am guessing is how you see things since it’s so disgusting to you). Every wave of capitalist innovation is filled with shameless promoters and wannabes, alongside the legitimate stuff... If that bothers you, the messy and chaotic nature of human progress might not be your thing.

I'd love to understand more about these capital innovations. I've done multiple deep dives over the last year into the crypto space and I've come away with the idea that the tech is certainly interesting and that there is potential for it to alter our financial systems drastically but beyond that I haven't made much headway. Do you have any resources you could point me to so I can read up on the innovations you're speaking of?

https://vitalik.eth.limo is an excellent resource. You’ll see that his thinking, and the thinking of people like him, is a lot more advanced than the thought processes of the armchair experts who seem to have dedicated their lives to “exposing” this industry to be “one giant scam.” I can’t think of a better resource off the top of my head.

Thank you for that!

"Capital innovations" is a great spin on business as usual VC control of capital.

Hmmm, but what exactly is web3? I really struggle to understand.

As far as I get is that some people wants to decentralice stuff, but I don't really see how is that going to happen.

No offense but everything that has any relationship with "decentralization" or "blockchain" is fairly difficult to use. And even understanding them superficially is not trivial.

It is, but it still has the potential to change the world : notice how it was the decentralized Internet and World Wide Web that succeeded, not the centralized Minitel. Or the changes brought (for better or worse) by peer to peer software. Or even how Netflix tries to put their servers in ISP server rooms. Or how Element(et al.)/Matrix is good enough now. Or open source software. Or how it was exactly around such a thing : git, that others built easier to use interfaces.

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