Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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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.

"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"

There's nothing 'slanderous' about 'charging fees' for something, and that has nothing to do with why it's 'Web 1' vs. 'Web 3'.

'Web 3' is a nebulous concept bordering on ridiculous, and Git really isn't part of it by their own definition.

People should stop talking about 'Web 3' because it's mostly a marketing term that's based on a meme, not some kind reality.

The article is not fully unreasonable, it's nuanced, your reaction to it is over the top.

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 wish I could upvote this twice.

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