Who Needs Web3?

Web 3 is the reverse of web 2 in severals ways, and that ‘flippening’ can be disorienting . Take the usual ordering of consumer usefulness followed by monetization, as one clear example.

3) Yes -- over time, all of the key aspects of Web 2.0, including centralized social networks, will be replaced by web 3-style user-owned and governed protocols.

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 third phase of the internet combines blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and digital ownership with new governing structures with terms prearranged and automated by smart contracts to allow decentralized projects to prosper. Web3 both stands on the shoulders of the open-source ethos that supports the earlier internet phases and threatens to ... See more

The other argument for Web3, one that I think is a bit generous, but worth considering, is that Web3 solves a central problem with the way we’ve made money online for the last three decades: scale. In an internet determined by advertisers, everything must reach a level of scale that is both impossible to maintain, and possibly unhealthy for society... See more

The major themes of this shift are the metaverse and web3 movements. They are two sides of the same coin, creating a new front- and backend of the Web. Where metaverse uses new tech like extended reality and AI to create new ways of digital interaction, web3 is using blockchain and tokenization to build a more distributed data layer into the intern... See more

The Web of the future however will be about individual creators, their creative, and their audiences. It will also be about brands and developers, and their direct relationships with users and consumers. It will not be about gated publisher platforms, ad networks, and middle-men data brokers. That lot will (hopefully) be replaced by open protocols ... See more

While Web3 has the potential to reimagine how we use the internet, it also raises thorny issues around privacy, user experience, and how much control users truly want.