To understand Web 3, it helps if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. Not because that book has anything to do with the web, but more because it gets into market disruption and why it happens. In a nutshell, innovation gets things started, then adoption happens … and happens … and happens … until it is just a BFD and there isn’t room to innovate anymore, and so people decide “I can do this simpler/better/faster!” They abandon the big, stable thing in order to get back to innovation. And then the innovation is successful, and adoption happens … and happens … You get the idea.
Web 3 is like that. It’s a reaction to the fact that Web 2.0 is this thing driven by a few successful, ginormous platforms, leaving little room for out-of-the-box innovation. The market is pretty darn stable compared to where it was even a decade ago. And there are people out there who desperately want to innovate. It’s cool and fun, after all. And maybe, if they innovate well enough, their ideas will grow and grow and grow, and they will be wildly successful and everyone will throw money at them.
There’s nothing wrong with a desire to innovate and to break a market apart to support new ideas and technologies. The main challenge with understanding Web 3, though, is that the marketing of what it means to be Web 3 doesn’t match the reality of what people want or can be expected to do. So let’s take a step back and look at what the web was initially, what it is today, and what Web 3 promoters say it’s going to be.
In the beginning, there were a few computers networked together, starting the Internet. It looked a lot like this:
(Source: nasa.gov)
Just a couple of computers, connected to a couple of other computers, mostly with black screens and green text. The thing that became the Internet (the Arpanet) started in 1969, and it looked a lot like that for a while. When the World Wide Web kicked off in 1993, it was based on that model where people were in charge of their own computers and everyone was able to share content everywhere. This is called a “decentralized” environment. No one in charge, cats and dogs living together, it was glorious anarchy. OK, maybe not anarchy. But there really wasn’t anyone particularly “in charge” leaving a greenfield ready and waiting for innovative ideas to happen.
Here’s the thing, though. My mom does not want to do all the stuff on a computer that’s needed for it to share content like that. She’s not going to run server software (and make sure it’s patched). She’s not going to set up a dashboard so she can clearly see and manage who has been allowed the different bits of information about her. But that’s ok! Innovation happens, and suddenly there are companies willing to make it easy. To do the value-add of hosting a computer for you. Heck, they’ll do EVERYTHING for you, so all you have to do is throw money at them, upload your cat photos, and you’re good to go! There used to be a lot of those companies, but a few became really, really successful. And a trend towards fewer, bigger companies is centralization and that’s at the heart of Web 2.0.
So if a decentralized model was Web 1, and centralized was Web 2, then what’s left for Web 3? Well, here’s where it gets a little complicated.
The promise of Web 3 as made by the people motivated to make it a thing is the promise of decentralization. It’s power to the people! Innovation in everything from finance to personal records to digital identity! People will be able to take control of their own online experiences in ways that haven’t been done before thanks to new technologies like blockchains. Think of it as a reaction against “you’re not the consumer, you’re the product” as companies sell information about you to other companies, leaving you with advertisements and them with money. If you have ultimate control over your own information, then the world can only be a safer, more personally profitable place.
Doesn’t that sound lovely?
Now step back from the lovely picture and think for a minute about what that actually requires. Let’s start with the “you control all the information about you” (like your name, your phone number, your email address, your age, your location, your preference for cats instead of dogs, your sexual orientation, your political orientation, and so on and so on and so on) and therefore who gets to see it. That means you need to keep on top of that information, sometimes making sure it’s verified by a third-party (e.g., a government agency). You need to respond to every request for that information by companies that are offering you stuff. You not only have power, you have _responsibility_.
Let’s be honest, that gets really tedious. It gets worse if part of the power means running stuff on your own computer, which, back in Web 1, used to be pretty easy. It’s not like computers went anywhere. They were these big things that plugged into the wall 24/7. Now, ‘running stuff on your computer’ could mean your phone, or your tablet, or your laptop, or your desktop, or even your watch.
And here’s where innovation tends to strike. There are people out there who, for a small (or medium, or large) fee, would be more than happy to make this easier for you. To build a platform that would take care of lots of the details for you so you could get back to your cat photos. At first, there will be lots of little platforms, all trying to differentiate themselves with various value-add features to the underlying technology to improve their own adoption. And adoption will happen … and happen … and happen… until the most adopted wins, innovation is stifled, and how on earth did we get back to this part of the cycle again? What you’ll have is some strange combination of centralized platforms supporting decentralized technologies, combining the best and worst of Web 1 and Web 2.
Since we’re at that point in the cycle where we have really big, successful players AND a really solid attempt at disruption by lots of innovative little players, this is a space that’s filled more with hype and ideals than solid services and market definition. It’s different from the same point in the cycle that was the difference between Web 1 and Web 2 because there are so many more people online today and computers are capable of so much more. People like my mom have expectations about what her user experience is going to be like online, and not a whole lot of patience with technical details. There are people who are ‘born digital’ that are more comfortable with technology and yet have an expectation that much of the hard work of offering online services will just be … taken care of. So, yeah. It’s not the same world as the first major shift in the nature of the web. It’s a world where literally everything is promised, and anything can happen, but the thoughtful human will take a moment and really think about the implications of the hype before they dive in.
If you’d like to dive a little deeper into thoughts on Web3, you might find Fabio Manganiello’s blog post “Web 3.0 and the undeliverable promise of decentralization” and Moxie Rosenfeld’s (more commonly known as Moxie Marlinspike) “My first impressions of web3” interesting, though a bit more technical.
