The Great Internet Reset - Why I joined the open internet

The early days of the World Wide Web, which now bears the retronym Web 1.0, gave us a promise of a decentralized and democratized way of sharing information. Web 1.0 was truly revolutionary; it stood in stark contrast to any other information sharing mechanism in all of human history. The idea was simple: people who held information could make that... See more

The internet was created in 1989 with the intention that it would be completely decentralized. This means it would be owned by the people who used it. It’s a good idea in theory, but in practice, it created a poor consumer experience. You had to be highly technical to use the internet. It was largely read-only. We can call this version of the inter... See more

This heightened attitude of censoriousness has led many to believe that the internet is no longer the free and open platform it once was. And while this may be true to some extent, there is still one corner of the internet that remains relatively untouched by censorship: The decentralized web, or Web3.

This is, admittedly, a very powerful idea. The challenges of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 around ownership, censorship, and digital rights are highly nontrivial ones. For web3 enthusiasts, these issues are existential threats to the web, threats that web3 will eradicate simply by eliminating the question. There can be no debate on the power or responsibilit... See more

"Now, that vision is fraying. The social fabric of the internet is built on very specific assumptions, many of which are giving way. Licklider envisioned the internet as a patchwork of decentralized networks, with no sense of how it would work when a handful of companies wrote most of its software and managed most of its traffic. Licklider conceive... See more

Web2 was a rebuilding period. Entrepreneurs started to realize you could do more things instead of being just read-only. 

Web1: the web was read-only. Web2: the web was read and write. 

Web3 is an opportunity to own a piece of the internet. 

Governance in the metaverse: who should control it? Having one company control it is not the

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The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our... See more

But while in many ways more limited, the early web also provided a far more level playing field to its early settlers. As there were no “cities” yet per se, the most valuable virtual real estate hadn’t yet accreted to a small cabal of gatekeepers.