Hype or future?
This article is the written version of my YouTube video:
Many people think Web 3.0 is going to be a big deal, and it could have a huge impact on our world, not just in the crypto field but also on the whole tech industry, including even finance.
If you look at the news, you can see a lot of hypes about web 3 — huge publishing companies writing about it.
To understand something, I like to put things in context. To understand web 3 and why it’s important, we briefly need to talk about web 1.0 and web 2.0.
Tim Berners-Lee, invented the world wide web back in the 90s. Back then, he even mentioned Web 3, but it was called the semantic web. He imagined that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will solve problems. We can see this is kind of happening already; just think about Tesla, the self-driving car.
But we don’t need to go that far; we can think about writing tools already powered by AI.
Tim Berners-Lee came up with an efficient mechanism to share resources between scientists all over the world. And that’s what web 1 was.
It was the dial-up slow internet, the era of AOL, the period of the static, read-only, single-page websites people couldn’t interact with.
Then web 2 came. This is our current era.
Webpages and applications are common and widely used. This is when lots of large e-commerce and service companies came to the market, e.g. Amazon, Uber, Google, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc.
People not only interact with the content, but they also create the content. However, the creators do not own the content. For example, when I create a video and put it on TikTok, TikTok owns it. They can decide to delete it anytime without telling me. And I have no say in that.
Web 2 impacted our life and our world so much. It affected how we do business at the local and global levels. Web 2 shaped how we communicate and share things online.
However, one of the most significant flaws in web 2 is the centralized environment. Large companies own our creations and control the online platforms. And that’s why web 3 can be super exciting, especially for creators.
It’s still shaping what web 3 will look like, but one thing that we already know is, it’s moving toward decentralized internet control.
What does that mean?
Well, as a non-native English speaker, I had to google it, so here’s the best definition I could find:
Decentralization means the Internet is controlled by many. It’s millions of devices linked together in an open network. No one actor can own it, control it, or switch it off for everyone.
What does it mean for us internet users?
It means, or at least the promise, that we’ll have more power. It’ll support our freedom, and it’ll (possibly) affect data collection privacy laws. Because at the moment, we all know that if the software is free to use, then we are the product. Our data is the product. Companies might sell our data to other companies or use it for targeted advertisements.
So far, what I see is web 3 will have a larger impact on the back-end side of the internet, on the technology. Because things will live on a blockchain…and the blockchain is decentralized (compared to our current web 2 system).
I wonder, what’s your take on web 3?
What are the issues you can see?
Are you excited about it or do you think it’s only hype?