There are lots of more compelling ways to reboot the internet that we're currently neglecting. I think we should begin by enacting government regulation to strip more power from the big tech companies, and transfer that back to the hands of everyday users. GDPR was a step in the right direction. We should go one step further, and actually enact the data portability promises that GDPR failed to deliver. We should develop internet-wide schemas for ubiquitous concepts and then require companies/governments to use them as their public-facing data representations. Data rights should be extended to ensure that users can migrate that data around. And no, I'm not talking about transferrable NFT's. I'm talking about internet standards and protocols that are designed for interoperability.
We're going to end up with interoperability standards one way or another. The alternative is to just roll over and let the tech companies build them to their satisfaction and enforce them on us instead. That sounds very Web 2.0 to me.
Your plan is to achieve technological progress through regulation? I'm very, very skeptical the result will be anything other than grinding progress to a halt.
Just take a look at at computing systems within highly regulated industries such as consumer banking or medicine. Do you find either inspiring? How about nuclear power plants still using technology from our grandparents' era because doing so was legislated?
I'd bet that if such regulations came to pass in a country or market, in 15 years the internet there will lag considerably behind the internet in freer places.
It isn't technological progress I'm after. It's social progress. I want to live in a world where it's easier for different groups to exchange information using a well-defined set of semantic data standards. I'm not advocating for the imposition of any new technologies here. Everything I outlined is readily achievable using technology we have at hand today. It's just a question of holding organizations accountable to the good of the people on this planet instead of just to their own bottom line.
I don't think the purpose of consumer banking should be to inspire us with technological wizardry. It should be to provide a stable suite of services to customers, with protections to safeguard those customers where appropriate. If 50-year-old Cobol mainframes are serving that goal, well and good. If they're not (say, because they're more susceptible to breaches), then those companies running outdated software should be penalized until they upgrade their shit.
For each of your points, there are counterpoints to be made where government-imposed regulation had a positive effect on the citizenry. Do you find Teflon-induced cancers inspiring? What about marketing cigarettes to children? Should we get rid of all FDA labels on food products? More pertinently, should we do away with Sarbanes-Oxley and give corporations free reign over how they manage their financial affairs?
Restrictions on liberty are a fundamental part of living in a society, whether we're talking about individual or corporate liberties. This isn't to say that all regulation is perfect, or that there won't be some bumps in the road. Far from it. But I consider it a hallmark of our immaturity as a society that we see the regulatory landscape in such black-and-white terms as "regulation kills innovation".
Of course, entrenched industries spend tons of money trying to convince the average person that this is the case, so perhaps it is excusable that so many people feel that way...
There's no point in our history where I'd like technological progress to have been halted. We live longer, healthier lives than our ancestors ever did.
It would be a terrible gamble to assume we've reached the pinnacle and should stop or even slow down here.
When do you know "Web3" isn't going to meaningfully change anything? When the same powerful people who benefited from web2 are pushing it as a "revolution".
everyone needs equal access to public data. right now only big tech can download the many web pages (without thottling or being ip banned) on linkedin (microsoft), youtube (google), facebook, github (microsoft) and billions of more pages. this also leads to a gap on AI training sets to give big tech even more entrenchment. for instance, only microsoft can build that ai coding application they did because other companies can't access all of github without being throttled or ip banned (last time i checked - but i could be wrong now)[microsoft owns github]. regardless, we need some sort of bot 'bill of rights' to ensure equal access going forward. perhaps the answer is legislation or perhaps it is some massive p2p proxy net. i think it is legislation because the p2p proxy net is too hard to implement, and it would have to solve turing tests.
but perhaps web 3.0 (dweb) can just bypass all this nonsense and make its own versions of these popular services with baked-in accessibility for all.
access to public data doesn't really mean much. A lot of training data already is public. Increasing computational resources and reducing the cost of communication always has a centralizing effect, for basic economic/energy/efficiency reasons, it increases the benefits of division of labor and returns at scale.
The history of technological process is a history of agglomeration and if web3 reduces barriers all it does is creates more, not less leverage for centralization, the same way the internet did after a short phase of disruption, or even book printing for that matter.
telescript was kinda of weird, but wildly ahead of its time. the idea was decentralized services and commercial activity, but centralizing computation due to power/energy efficiency.
it was like a inverse jvm born at the transition from arpanet->nsfnet->internet, which greatly deregulated commercial activity.
it was also born when mobile devices were almost tractible, though 14 years before the iphone.
it almost birth the idea of an app store, except "apps" would be decentralized services people send/recv.
Except web3 won’t actually fix those problems. Switching to blockchain won’t decentralize the web because centralization is an unavoidable emergent property of large complex systems.
Right now this Web3 "solution" seems completely divorced from the problem. Right now the big "problem" we have is that the big tech companies hold way too much power to control speech. I don't understand how Web3 is supposed to solve this problem.
The real solution IMO is the Metaverse. Rather than a centralized authority with control over all the content, everyone would contribute to a protocol, much like email works. This I feel will kill the debate (as in, resolve it forever) over speech online. It's not that censorship will go away, I'm sure some providers will try to censor content, but it will be a non issue, cause you can just go and get the same content from another provider.
>The real solution IMO is the Metaverse. Rather than a centralized authority with control over all the content, everyone would contribute to a protocol, much like email works.
The Metaverse will be controlled by Facebook, which will define the protocol and control all of the content. If you want some kind of decentralized, Mastadon-like network for VR, that would be a completely different thing which (as far as I know) no one has actually made yet, not the Metaverse. But the Metaverse everyone will use will absolutely be controlled by Facebook, and if not them, Microsoft or some other centralizing entity.
_A_ Metaverse will be controlled by Facebook. One will be controlled by Microsoft, one will be controlled by NVIDIA, many will be decentralized using blockchain technologies like Web3. I see no reason to give the term to Facebook, just because they announced their product first. It's an arms race and Facebook merely fired the first shot.
No one was even talking about the "metaverse" until Facebook mentioned it. After Facebook mentioned it, no one was talking about anything other than what Facebook (or Meta) would do with it. Anyone looking to provide services or create content for the Metaverse is focusing on Facebook. All of the discussion on Hacker News about the metaverse is relative to Facebook.
There is no arms race here. There won't be many "decentralized" versions "using blockchain technologies." Maybe there will be one, and as with all other decentralized alternatives to social media, most people won't care about it. Everyone else will be using Facebook's version because everyone is already using Facebook and they already own the cultural mindshare. No one cares about NVIDIA's Omniverse.
Maybe Apple or Microsoft or Google also offer versions, but all of them will be centralized.
Sorry, you've already lost. And Web3 is just a scam.
Dorsey's arm wavey Block is a reboot of Nelson's Xanadu dream. Replace transclusions and zippers with blockchains.
Though Nelson never pretended Xanadu would or could be democratic, explicitly stating it'd be a new rent seeking regime. Eschewing ads for fees.
I wonder if Dorsey feels any contrition over Twitter.
Square (SQ $77b) runs on fees and uses ML to mitigate fraud and protect commerce.
Twitter (TWTR $36b) runs on ads and uses ML to amplify fraud and sabotage civil discourse.
Imagine if Twitter had been run like Square. Would Twitter's market cap be more proportional to it's cultural impact? Or would it have simply ceded the parasocial mediums to the other amoral profiteers of fear and outrage?
Stretching my capacity for both creduality and principle of charity, I hope Dorsey is trying to find out with Block.
And if DeSo, DeFi, FyFoFum, or whatever other magic beans fiction serves the end goal of restoring civil discourse, the suspension of disbelief would be a small price to pay.
Billionaires never want to revolutionize the system that made them billionaires in the first place. It would be tantamount to admitting their gains were ill-gotten.
At best, they're just figuring out new ways to transfer more wealth in the existing frameworks. At worst, they're pulling up the ladders they climbed up after them so none may follow (and challenge) them.
This is what crypto believers always miss. No way in hell will powerful people and organizations allow us little people to threaten their power in any way. That's why "Web3", if it happens, will only serve their interests. Or rather, it will only happen because it serves their interests.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] threadedit: hcump, indeed
Just take a look at at computing systems within highly regulated industries such as consumer banking or medicine. Do you find either inspiring? How about nuclear power plants still using technology from our grandparents' era because doing so was legislated?
I'd bet that if such regulations came to pass in a country or market, in 15 years the internet there will lag considerably behind the internet in freer places.
I don't think the purpose of consumer banking should be to inspire us with technological wizardry. It should be to provide a stable suite of services to customers, with protections to safeguard those customers where appropriate. If 50-year-old Cobol mainframes are serving that goal, well and good. If they're not (say, because they're more susceptible to breaches), then those companies running outdated software should be penalized until they upgrade their shit.
For each of your points, there are counterpoints to be made where government-imposed regulation had a positive effect on the citizenry. Do you find Teflon-induced cancers inspiring? What about marketing cigarettes to children? Should we get rid of all FDA labels on food products? More pertinently, should we do away with Sarbanes-Oxley and give corporations free reign over how they manage their financial affairs?
Restrictions on liberty are a fundamental part of living in a society, whether we're talking about individual or corporate liberties. This isn't to say that all regulation is perfect, or that there won't be some bumps in the road. Far from it. But I consider it a hallmark of our immaturity as a society that we see the regulatory landscape in such black-and-white terms as "regulation kills innovation".
Of course, entrenched industries spend tons of money trying to convince the average person that this is the case, so perhaps it is excusable that so many people feel that way...
It would be a terrible gamble to assume we've reached the pinnacle and should stop or even slow down here.
but perhaps web 3.0 (dweb) can just bypass all this nonsense and make its own versions of these popular services with baked-in accessibility for all.
The history of technological process is a history of agglomeration and if web3 reduces barriers all it does is creates more, not less leverage for centralization, the same way the internet did after a short phase of disruption, or even book printing for that matter.
telescript was kinda of weird, but wildly ahead of its time. the idea was decentralized services and commercial activity, but centralizing computation due to power/energy efficiency.
it was like a inverse jvm born at the transition from arpanet->nsfnet->internet, which greatly deregulated commercial activity.
it was also born when mobile devices were almost tractible, though 14 years before the iphone.
it almost birth the idea of an app store, except "apps" would be decentralized services people send/recv.
The real solution IMO is the Metaverse. Rather than a centralized authority with control over all the content, everyone would contribute to a protocol, much like email works. This I feel will kill the debate (as in, resolve it forever) over speech online. It's not that censorship will go away, I'm sure some providers will try to censor content, but it will be a non issue, cause you can just go and get the same content from another provider.
The Metaverse will be controlled by Facebook, which will define the protocol and control all of the content. If you want some kind of decentralized, Mastadon-like network for VR, that would be a completely different thing which (as far as I know) no one has actually made yet, not the Metaverse. But the Metaverse everyone will use will absolutely be controlled by Facebook, and if not them, Microsoft or some other centralizing entity.
There is no arms race here. There won't be many "decentralized" versions "using blockchain technologies." Maybe there will be one, and as with all other decentralized alternatives to social media, most people won't care about it. Everyone else will be using Facebook's version because everyone is already using Facebook and they already own the cultural mindshare. No one cares about NVIDIA's Omniverse.
Maybe Apple or Microsoft or Google also offer versions, but all of them will be centralized.
Sorry, you've already lost. And Web3 is just a scam.
> "Sorry, you've already lost. And Web3 is just a scam."
Generic dismissals like that aren't helpful.
I'm no wiser as to what this reboot might consist of.
Though Nelson never pretended Xanadu would or could be democratic, explicitly stating it'd be a new rent seeking regime. Eschewing ads for fees.
I wonder if Dorsey feels any contrition over Twitter.
Square (SQ $77b) runs on fees and uses ML to mitigate fraud and protect commerce.
Twitter (TWTR $36b) runs on ads and uses ML to amplify fraud and sabotage civil discourse.
Imagine if Twitter had been run like Square. Would Twitter's market cap be more proportional to it's cultural impact? Or would it have simply ceded the parasocial mediums to the other amoral profiteers of fear and outrage?
Stretching my capacity for both creduality and principle of charity, I hope Dorsey is trying to find out with Block.
And if DeSo, DeFi, FyFoFum, or whatever other magic beans fiction serves the end goal of restoring civil discourse, the suspension of disbelief would be a small price to pay.
Billionaires never want to revolutionize the system that made them billionaires in the first place. It would be tantamount to admitting their gains were ill-gotten.
At best, they're just figuring out new ways to transfer more wealth in the existing frameworks. At worst, they're pulling up the ladders they climbed up after them so none may follow (and challenge) them.