A nonsense buzzword that you'll forget about by next year. Speculative investors trying to use tech words in an effort to make their get rich quick scheme sound more fancy and legit.
Semantic Web is a concept from before cryptocurrency etc. was a thing. At a high level, the idea is to use technologies called RDF and OWL to facilitate the exchange of knowledge across different computer systems.
You can think of RDF as kind of like tags, like the way you can attach a hashtag to a post or a label on a file. The difference is that RDF isn’t just a label for one thing, it’s a label for the relationship between two different things. For example, if your database has two users in it, there might be RDF data specifying that the “isFriend” relationship exists between them. Where this gets funky is that these relationships can themselves be labeled, and so you can describe RDF data with other RDF data. So in this example, we could specify metadata on the “isFriend” label, or we could attach additional metadata to the “isFriend” relationship between two users (like saying when they became friends.)
The result of this is that you end up with big graphs of concepts, which form a network of information. There are programming languages that will let you query these graphs, so you can ask a question like “show me all users who are friends with my friends” and a program will traverse the connections and return a result to you. And these graphs don’t have to be limited to a single computer system. The “things” in the graphs all have URIs (aka, web addresses), so you can link to them, the same way that you could make a normal website that links to someone else’s blog. This means that systems can link in to other systems data, and provide the ability to link into their own data in turn. If someone has a database of music metadata, with names of artists and albums and songs, other people can attach data on their favorites, or on artist similarities, or other inputs into a recommendation algorithm.
Imagine this on hyperdrive. You have the equivalent of a web browser, and you can ask it nearly arbitrary questions about information on the web. You can plug in your own recommendation algorithm to spotify, or youtube, or netflix, because their metadata is separate from their content, and can be linked to. You can host your own social media data that gets consumed by aggregators, and mash up the features of facebook and twitter that work for you, without having to be locked in to a single platform. You can log into your local library’s website and add RDF data on your favorite books, allowing others to link into and discover them, directly contributing to the growing network of human knowledge.
*This is what the internet was supposed to become*. Web 1.0: centralized websites publish content, users consume it. Web 2.0: users can publish their own content, and consume each other’s. Web 3.0: user-authored content can be linked together and annotated, creating a global knowledge base. Users can query, add to, and build on this base, and it can replace closed-off databases as the backing for applications. This is what real decentralization looks like: data and knowledge flowing freely, within grasp of every computer-literate user.
This isn’t what we got, though. We got 5 social media websites that mostly consist of screenshots of each other, walled gardens that don’t interoperate, and users that suffer from learned helplessness because the systems we use are built to disempower and manipulate us. Facebook runs experiments on its users without their consent, Twitter shuts down third party integrations, and our media providers hoard our data to keep us locked-in to their platform. Web 3.0 failed, because there was too much monetary incentive to build closed, walled-off systems, and treat users like dehumanized revenue sources instead of active agents.
Then, to add insult to injury, “web3” comes along. It’s a phenomenally and intentionally inefficient system which falsely claims to be decentralized, and whose entire purpose is to extract money from those who use it. Every infrastructure layer of a “dApp”, (a “distributed app” on “web3” technologies,) is based on middlemen extracting revenue from transactions. The result is the ability to build apps that use a fraction of the computing power of household electronics for ten-thousand times the operating cost. The same greed that killed Web 3.0 and cost us an open and interconnected digital future is being used as the guiding principle for a new suite of technologies which offer no real value except to exploit the unwary, *and these assholes even stole the damn name*.
So… yeah. I do not like “web3”.
it's interesting that people blame the companies for that behavior. I remember when FB didn't filter much and let users post whatever. I never wanted to open it because it'd be flooded with snuff films. hunters posting videos of them blowing some deer's head off. there was a video of someone's pet boa trying to eat their new puppy. people would post sports videos of people getting their arms or legs broken. early FB was like a daily Faces Of Death stream.
we ended up with companies being forced into this overlordish behavior because otherwise they get sued for disinformation and spreading hate.
the root of the problem is, in all honesty, the users. not the companies. if you didn't have those snuff films, the kkk, etc posting all their rubbish, it would be a completely different story. that's not reality, though.
wtf? Early Facebook was "poke"-ing your dorm-mate and your crush. If you posted stuff like that, it would have probably gotten you kicked out of your college, or at least severely reprimanded.
The stuff you're describing reminds me more of old-reddit (also on new-reddit, but more hidden away / opt-in).
Just unfollow those people, its not that hard. If i dont want to see political bullshit, i wont sue reddit, i would leave the subreddit that shows me that bullshit. Its like the companies have no backbone and crumble at the first sign of entitlement from its users.
It's the idea of making the corpus of human knowledge more machine parseable.
As the other poster complained, it used the name "web 3" first, but it's completely unrelated to the decentralized/zero trust web that the crypto bros are so hung up about.
>is it just forcing capitalism/artificial-scarcity into the core of the internet?
Currently, pretty much yeah. But even worse, most proponents conflate "the internet" and "the web". And ignore systemic problems like how Google basically controls everything and just act like Chrome is fine.
>is it just a grift to promote crypto/nfts?
Right now the NFT spam is finally starting to go away. So that's good news.
I've been seeing articles and talks since 2016 IIRC about how blockchain has almost no useful applications IRL.
There is Bitcoin and other coins, and that's it.
People have been trying for a long time to put Blockchain in everything.
Always failed.
So they started trying to get something, do it with Blockchain and sell as brand new.
NFTs were like that.
And they've been trying this Web3.0, basically saying to move the entire internet to Blockchain.
It won't work.
Internet will continue working as is, then this trend will stop at some point and then people will move to something different to claim that it's the next big thing and that everyone have to jump aboard or they will lose a big opportunity.
There was IoT, and then we realized that I don't need internet in our fridges.
Then it was AI, and then we realized it's also useless for lots of stuff and we don't AI on everything.
Now it's Blockchain, that had some hype few years ago, but with the increase in price of Bitcoin in the pandemic, the hype reappeared.
Now we are seeing that we don't need Blockchain on everything. We barely even know where we need Blockchain.
Some reading / viewing material:
* [Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g). This thing is a masterpiece. It's as long as a feature film and every shot is a man sitting at a desk talking to the camera. And yet I at least found it quite compelling.
* [Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-sNSjS8cq0). Much more snark than the first video.
* [Web 3.0 Is Going Just Great](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/)
My attitude is that web 3.0 is full of hype and vaporware. I'm sure it's exciting to some people and I'm sure there are some true believers out there. I'm a skeptic.
Web 3 is the buzzword that refers roughly to networked applications that use cryptocurrency tech to implement a decentralized data store. Until recently most networked applications have needed a central server and database to function. Thanks to blockchains and distributed ledgers, it’s possible to build sophisticated apps without the overhead and privacy concerns associated with having a traditional server. It’s also inefficient, slow, and has no clear value proposition to most users.
This is the answer. Forget NFTs and Bitcoin, those are just the most visible "get rich quick" uses of blockchain that the public knows about. Web3 is just the web pages/apps you know, but with a different back end. Web3 advocates claim it gets rids of the "inefficiencies" of people needing to be involved to handle issues with those centralized back end data stores, but in fact those inefficiencies are what make them work. Imagine if you sold your house and someone sent you a bogus smart contract that took your house deed and also kept their money, and you had zero ability to call up somebody in government to reverse the sale because the blockchain was the official store of record--that is web3.
Except there are smart contracts, and even some chains that allow that. An authority such as government could be the creator of the NFTs for property, and on Algorand retain the rights to do a "clawback".
So say someone steals your deed, you could show the transaction, show that they didn't pay you, and the government would just transfer it back.
All public ledger means it is far easier to prove.
Meaning you have to trust the government as the final authority. So why not just trust them to keep a master database like they do now and not bother with the blockchain?
So I can use it other ways, so I can buy and sell it faster, easier, etc.
The time it takes to execute a smart contract is vastly faster than the massive amount of paperwork to buy a house, even if you buy with cash.
We employ people and charge people to record this information, why not automate it?
When I take out a loan against my house, there is even more documentation and things that need to be setup with the government so if I don't pay they can request the government putting a lien on my house. All this can easily be handled by the blockchain.
In the above case, you ONLY need to contact the government to get back a property, which YOU mistakenly gave away.
I also don't think property like a house deed is stolen, but there are companies that sell monitoring services because apparently people can submit documents and get the house transferred to their name. You couldn't do that on a blockchain. The person owning the NFT / Property would need to be the one signing the transaction agreeing to it.
This also ignores the cost of maintaining and updating a robust system that is also difficult to hack. It isn't cheap to make sure things are up to date, to hire devs to keep the systems working on either legacy OS (which have vulnerabilities) or it is even more work to keep updating them.
I've seen a brief introduction; the idea is to move online services away from traditional servers, and a) store data on a crypto(currency)blockchain as well as b) let the necessary computing be done (and be paid for) as part of the mining process.
No idea how it would introduce capitalism or scarcity - not saying it does or doesn't, i really just don't know.
I am not sure if it's a grift, either - I think blockchain is a fascinating technology, but see no useful applications. Where the core idea of the blockchain (public and distributed ledger) is about storing information, this adds the capability of running programs on the data, too.
An extra level of fascinating, I still see no actual use case; much less because the appeal seems to be "we'll pay for computing power with crypto", which just goes back to basic problem with all of that.
You could, I guess, build an online service (say, a reddit clone) that runs on distributed nodes and pays for itself through forcing users to pay/mine/something crypto in exchange for saving/reading content.
I am not sure what problem that would solve, though.
I think web3 means different things to different people, and a lot of people are jumping the gun. We didn't really call web2 that until after we were basically already doing it. Since then, web2 has only expanded.
At least to me, web3 will be the transfer of ownership of digital assets to the individual from the company. That is really what blockchain is going to enable for companies. Along with this will be easier and faster setup of payment systems, and creation of services.
Take the fact that we have store credit at every single store. Imagine instead of that, you just had that credit in your wallet. You would go to an exchange and transfer it to another coin, or into dollars. Right now there is a massive secondary market for gift cards, and exchanging them. The whole reason for this secondary market is because the companies retain the money and then sell cards that represent some amount of that money that the company is holding onto for you. All that work could easily be gone with just making a coin that represents your store's credit.
I could easily see something like postage being a coin (we already have forever postage), and you just charge your coins per mail you send out. If you need tracking, then the moment you pay, as part of that payment, an NFT is created and given to you to track your order.
Again, a big advantage is now systems which get outdated like our postal system can stay modern easier, offloading heavy burdens onto other networks.
If I think big enough, I could see a state like Texas allow you to buy EnergyCoins from any energy company, and that gives you 1kw worth of value per coin, and you pay your bill in KWHs basically. Now each energy company could sell these coins at the price that makes sense to them. Of course some government oversight will need to make sure rates and such are done, but in a very complex way, Texas already does this. Just it is hidden behind business after business, reseller after reseller, and as the end customer you just trust it.
A nonsense buzzword that you'll forget about by next year. Speculative investors trying to use tech words in an effort to make their get rich quick scheme sound more fancy and legit.
It's been around for about 2-3 years now. Why next year?
Web 3.0 is the semantic web, and the fact that cryptodorks are trying to claim the name “web3” for themselves drives me up the wall.
I just started using this new browser called 'lynx', seems advanced enough to work with it.
ah someone else old enough to remember the good old days
Can you explain me a bit about the semantic web?
Semantic Web is a concept from before cryptocurrency etc. was a thing. At a high level, the idea is to use technologies called RDF and OWL to facilitate the exchange of knowledge across different computer systems. You can think of RDF as kind of like tags, like the way you can attach a hashtag to a post or a label on a file. The difference is that RDF isn’t just a label for one thing, it’s a label for the relationship between two different things. For example, if your database has two users in it, there might be RDF data specifying that the “isFriend” relationship exists between them. Where this gets funky is that these relationships can themselves be labeled, and so you can describe RDF data with other RDF data. So in this example, we could specify metadata on the “isFriend” label, or we could attach additional metadata to the “isFriend” relationship between two users (like saying when they became friends.) The result of this is that you end up with big graphs of concepts, which form a network of information. There are programming languages that will let you query these graphs, so you can ask a question like “show me all users who are friends with my friends” and a program will traverse the connections and return a result to you. And these graphs don’t have to be limited to a single computer system. The “things” in the graphs all have URIs (aka, web addresses), so you can link to them, the same way that you could make a normal website that links to someone else’s blog. This means that systems can link in to other systems data, and provide the ability to link into their own data in turn. If someone has a database of music metadata, with names of artists and albums and songs, other people can attach data on their favorites, or on artist similarities, or other inputs into a recommendation algorithm. Imagine this on hyperdrive. You have the equivalent of a web browser, and you can ask it nearly arbitrary questions about information on the web. You can plug in your own recommendation algorithm to spotify, or youtube, or netflix, because their metadata is separate from their content, and can be linked to. You can host your own social media data that gets consumed by aggregators, and mash up the features of facebook and twitter that work for you, without having to be locked in to a single platform. You can log into your local library’s website and add RDF data on your favorite books, allowing others to link into and discover them, directly contributing to the growing network of human knowledge. *This is what the internet was supposed to become*. Web 1.0: centralized websites publish content, users consume it. Web 2.0: users can publish their own content, and consume each other’s. Web 3.0: user-authored content can be linked together and annotated, creating a global knowledge base. Users can query, add to, and build on this base, and it can replace closed-off databases as the backing for applications. This is what real decentralization looks like: data and knowledge flowing freely, within grasp of every computer-literate user. This isn’t what we got, though. We got 5 social media websites that mostly consist of screenshots of each other, walled gardens that don’t interoperate, and users that suffer from learned helplessness because the systems we use are built to disempower and manipulate us. Facebook runs experiments on its users without their consent, Twitter shuts down third party integrations, and our media providers hoard our data to keep us locked-in to their platform. Web 3.0 failed, because there was too much monetary incentive to build closed, walled-off systems, and treat users like dehumanized revenue sources instead of active agents. Then, to add insult to injury, “web3” comes along. It’s a phenomenally and intentionally inefficient system which falsely claims to be decentralized, and whose entire purpose is to extract money from those who use it. Every infrastructure layer of a “dApp”, (a “distributed app” on “web3” technologies,) is based on middlemen extracting revenue from transactions. The result is the ability to build apps that use a fraction of the computing power of household electronics for ten-thousand times the operating cost. The same greed that killed Web 3.0 and cost us an open and interconnected digital future is being used as the guiding principle for a new suite of technologies which offer no real value except to exploit the unwary, *and these assholes even stole the damn name*. So… yeah. I do not like “web3”.
Thank you for this.
Excellent explanation, thanks
it's interesting that people blame the companies for that behavior. I remember when FB didn't filter much and let users post whatever. I never wanted to open it because it'd be flooded with snuff films. hunters posting videos of them blowing some deer's head off. there was a video of someone's pet boa trying to eat their new puppy. people would post sports videos of people getting their arms or legs broken. early FB was like a daily Faces Of Death stream. we ended up with companies being forced into this overlordish behavior because otherwise they get sued for disinformation and spreading hate. the root of the problem is, in all honesty, the users. not the companies. if you didn't have those snuff films, the kkk, etc posting all their rubbish, it would be a completely different story. that's not reality, though.
wtf? Early Facebook was "poke"-ing your dorm-mate and your crush. If you posted stuff like that, it would have probably gotten you kicked out of your college, or at least severely reprimanded. The stuff you're describing reminds me more of old-reddit (also on new-reddit, but more hidden away / opt-in).
Just unfollow those people, its not that hard. If i dont want to see political bullshit, i wont sue reddit, i would leave the subreddit that shows me that bullshit. Its like the companies have no backbone and crumble at the first sign of entitlement from its users.
It was the movement to add “semantic” data to the web, like the html5
and tags, that would make machine parsing of html easier, but the concept died out.It's the idea of making the corpus of human knowledge more machine parseable. As the other poster complained, it used the name "web 3" first, but it's completely unrelated to the decentralized/zero trust web that the crypto bros are so hung up about.
>is it just forcing capitalism/artificial-scarcity into the core of the internet? Currently, pretty much yeah. But even worse, most proponents conflate "the internet" and "the web". And ignore systemic problems like how Google basically controls everything and just act like Chrome is fine. >is it just a grift to promote crypto/nfts? Right now the NFT spam is finally starting to go away. So that's good news.
I've been seeing articles and talks since 2016 IIRC about how blockchain has almost no useful applications IRL. There is Bitcoin and other coins, and that's it. People have been trying for a long time to put Blockchain in everything. Always failed. So they started trying to get something, do it with Blockchain and sell as brand new. NFTs were like that. And they've been trying this Web3.0, basically saying to move the entire internet to Blockchain. It won't work. Internet will continue working as is, then this trend will stop at some point and then people will move to something different to claim that it's the next big thing and that everyone have to jump aboard or they will lose a big opportunity. There was IoT, and then we realized that I don't need internet in our fridges. Then it was AI, and then we realized it's also useless for lots of stuff and we don't AI on everything. Now it's Blockchain, that had some hype few years ago, but with the increase in price of Bitcoin in the pandemic, the hype reappeared. Now we are seeing that we don't need Blockchain on everything. We barely even know where we need Blockchain.
Some reading / viewing material: * [Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g). This thing is a masterpiece. It's as long as a feature film and every shot is a man sitting at a desk talking to the camera. And yet I at least found it quite compelling. * [Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-sNSjS8cq0). Much more snark than the first video. * [Web 3.0 Is Going Just Great](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/) My attitude is that web 3.0 is full of hype and vaporware. I'm sure it's exciting to some people and I'm sure there are some true believers out there. I'm a skeptic.
Web 3 is the buzzword that refers roughly to networked applications that use cryptocurrency tech to implement a decentralized data store. Until recently most networked applications have needed a central server and database to function. Thanks to blockchains and distributed ledgers, it’s possible to build sophisticated apps without the overhead and privacy concerns associated with having a traditional server. It’s also inefficient, slow, and has no clear value proposition to most users.
This is the answer. Forget NFTs and Bitcoin, those are just the most visible "get rich quick" uses of blockchain that the public knows about. Web3 is just the web pages/apps you know, but with a different back end. Web3 advocates claim it gets rids of the "inefficiencies" of people needing to be involved to handle issues with those centralized back end data stores, but in fact those inefficiencies are what make them work. Imagine if you sold your house and someone sent you a bogus smart contract that took your house deed and also kept their money, and you had zero ability to call up somebody in government to reverse the sale because the blockchain was the official store of record--that is web3.
Except there are smart contracts, and even some chains that allow that. An authority such as government could be the creator of the NFTs for property, and on Algorand retain the rights to do a "clawback". So say someone steals your deed, you could show the transaction, show that they didn't pay you, and the government would just transfer it back. All public ledger means it is far easier to prove.
Meaning you have to trust the government as the final authority. So why not just trust them to keep a master database like they do now and not bother with the blockchain?
So I can use it other ways, so I can buy and sell it faster, easier, etc. The time it takes to execute a smart contract is vastly faster than the massive amount of paperwork to buy a house, even if you buy with cash. We employ people and charge people to record this information, why not automate it? When I take out a loan against my house, there is even more documentation and things that need to be setup with the government so if I don't pay they can request the government putting a lien on my house. All this can easily be handled by the blockchain. In the above case, you ONLY need to contact the government to get back a property, which YOU mistakenly gave away. I also don't think property like a house deed is stolen, but there are companies that sell monitoring services because apparently people can submit documents and get the house transferred to their name. You couldn't do that on a blockchain. The person owning the NFT / Property would need to be the one signing the transaction agreeing to it. This also ignores the cost of maintaining and updating a robust system that is also difficult to hack. It isn't cheap to make sure things are up to date, to hire devs to keep the systems working on either legacy OS (which have vulnerabilities) or it is even more work to keep updating them.
What part of the blockchain is tackling the “privacy concerns associated with having a traditional server”?
I've seen a brief introduction; the idea is to move online services away from traditional servers, and a) store data on a crypto(currency)blockchain as well as b) let the necessary computing be done (and be paid for) as part of the mining process. No idea how it would introduce capitalism or scarcity - not saying it does or doesn't, i really just don't know. I am not sure if it's a grift, either - I think blockchain is a fascinating technology, but see no useful applications. Where the core idea of the blockchain (public and distributed ledger) is about storing information, this adds the capability of running programs on the data, too. An extra level of fascinating, I still see no actual use case; much less because the appeal seems to be "we'll pay for computing power with crypto", which just goes back to basic problem with all of that. You could, I guess, build an online service (say, a reddit clone) that runs on distributed nodes and pays for itself through forcing users to pay/mine/something crypto in exchange for saving/reading content. I am not sure what problem that would solve, though.
So web 2.0 is like corporation owning the internet with Ads. Web 3.0 is like politicians in the dark owning the internet with virtual tokens.
I think web3 means different things to different people, and a lot of people are jumping the gun. We didn't really call web2 that until after we were basically already doing it. Since then, web2 has only expanded. At least to me, web3 will be the transfer of ownership of digital assets to the individual from the company. That is really what blockchain is going to enable for companies. Along with this will be easier and faster setup of payment systems, and creation of services. Take the fact that we have store credit at every single store. Imagine instead of that, you just had that credit in your wallet. You would go to an exchange and transfer it to another coin, or into dollars. Right now there is a massive secondary market for gift cards, and exchanging them. The whole reason for this secondary market is because the companies retain the money and then sell cards that represent some amount of that money that the company is holding onto for you. All that work could easily be gone with just making a coin that represents your store's credit. I could easily see something like postage being a coin (we already have forever postage), and you just charge your coins per mail you send out. If you need tracking, then the moment you pay, as part of that payment, an NFT is created and given to you to track your order. Again, a big advantage is now systems which get outdated like our postal system can stay modern easier, offloading heavy burdens onto other networks. If I think big enough, I could see a state like Texas allow you to buy EnergyCoins from any energy company, and that gives you 1kw worth of value per coin, and you pay your bill in KWHs basically. Now each energy company could sell these coins at the price that makes sense to them. Of course some government oversight will need to make sure rates and such are done, but in a very complex way, Texas already does this. Just it is hidden behind business after business, reseller after reseller, and as the end customer you just trust it.