this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
42 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1490 readers
31 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dgerard@awful.systems
42
Web Three will succeed if we have to trick you into using it (awful.systems)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by fasterandworse@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The decentralised finance club needs to make their core values poster bigger and easier to understand

We’re here in 2023 and they still forget that the core value of “not your keys not your wallet” is the equivalent of putting your cash under your mattress instead of using a bank and the complexity that comes with that is unavoidable.

You can get more people to use a mediocre product/technology by making it easy to use

People will use complex products/technologies if they are useful enough.

But these people can’t make it useful so they keep banging their head against the wall trying to make it more simple.

It is inevitable that they will try the even lazier route of deceiving people into thinking it is simple.

Nitter: https://nitter.net/evanvar/status/1699032296870015232

edit: changed title to reduce keyword matches in lemmy fediverse searches

all 36 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Flyberius@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I remember a few years ago getting all these webdev articles about web3.0 decentralised apps, and all I could think during and after reading was how fucking inefficient it all was. How insanely slow, inefficient and wasteful.

Are there any examples of web3.0 apps that actually do anything? It's all a fucking scam, isn't it...

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

flat fuckin zero

most of this shit doesn't exist

NFTs exist

lol

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just a whole bunch of cranes trying to lift themselves

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

listen, 99% of projects trying to make a self-lifting crane fail. but can you imagine the money you could make if you invested in the 1% that succeeded in spite of physics and common sense? send your investment to the following monero address (SEC enforcement agents do not have my permission to view this post!)

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

Fortune favours the brave!

[–] maol@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

(I might be paraphrasing Folding Ideas here, I'm not sure)

The developers of these apps didn't use blockchain or crypto because they were the best way to build the app. They used blockchain and crypto because they love them and think everyone should be using them. In fact, the only reason these apps exist is to encourage people to use cryptocurrency.

So no, there are no examples.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can extend this thinking to see how so many projects are just blockchain enthusiasts struggling with the “nothing is born on the blockchain” problem. That’s why they embrace the metaverse and also, imo, a big part of why they are open to transhumanist ideas.

[–] maol@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Blockchain is a solution desperately in search of a problem.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

It solves very real imaginary problems

[–] jet@hackertalks.com -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The haveno decentralized exchange looks interesting. I don't even know if that counts as Web 3.

https://haveno.exchange/

But even those crazy guys aren't expecting you to attach your wallet to a web browser.

I think there are some valid options for micropayment distributed systems around social networking, message passing, especially with lots of spam in the environment. Like I'm willing to pay a fraction of money to send a message and support the network I use.. like Lemmy

Like imagine if every post on Lemmy cost a fraction of the penny, and the money went to support the The hosting instance. That could be interesting.

But the vast majority of things that claim to be web3 distributed applications aren't. They're centralized, they just use crypto as a way to centralize the money.

[–] beeng@discuss.tchncs.de -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

PoolTogether a no loss lottery.

Essentially a savings account that enters you in daily and weekly draws to win. Prize draw is funded by the pools "interest" made in that week.

Need your savings again, pull it out and spend it.. .

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de -1 points 1 year ago

I don't think most people would consider it web3 but there's stuff based on IPFS and related/similar projects that for example let you chat with people without need for any sort of server (technically, you need some "server" to bootstrap yourself into the network but it's very much a small detail and you can just store a list of peers you've seen and hope that they'll be enough to bootstrap you.)

The whole "web3.0" and blockchain thing is such a damned shame because it has tainted projects like IPFS by association, and IPFS (really mostly libp2p which ipfs is built on) mostly actually lives up to the hype around decentralization, at least for networking nerds.

I think my favourite example of how libp2p/ipfs can revolutionize things so far is https://hyprspace.io, one guy was able to put together a VPN that is so much nicer to use than stuff like wireguard, you just run it on every device, configure the IP you want the devices to have, and so long as they can discover each other over some connection (switching between connections is still janky sadly) It Just Works. Yeah the average person is probably bored to tears but to me that's.. magic, that's how networking should have been for the last 20 years!

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I find it insane that people would expect you to connect your crypto wallet with a website. The levels of trust there are crazy.

Best practices maintaining crypto are keeping it offline, air gapped. Definitely not in the browser.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago

That's what I find incredible about this community. We're here in 2023 and they still forget that the core value of "not your keys not your wallet" is the equivalent of putting your cash under your mattress instead of using a bank. The complexity that comes with that is unavoidable. It is essential that you know you are in control of an entity that is there or is not there, and no insurance can bring it back because it is fully decentralised.

You can get more people to use a mediocre product/technology by making it easy to use

People will use complex products/technologies if they are useful enough.

These people know they can't make it more useful so they keep banging their head against the wall trying to make it more simple.

It is inevitable that they will keep trying to deceive people into thinking it is simple.

[–] Astroturfed@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Don't you know, the best way to make the decentralized wave of the future, new money, money work best is to give third parties access to it and centralize it.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

here's a stupid meme that might explain my post

freeway exit meme: "make it useful" straight ahead "make it seem simple" freeway exit that "web3" car is taking

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nobody even knows what the fuck web 2.0 actually is. CSS? JS? SPAs? Flash? No flash? Rounded corners? Ad blocker blockers? Sevice workers? Sans serif fonts? Lack of "under construction" gifs?

Web 3.0 is inevitable, not because blockchain or machine learning shit is revolutionarily useful, but because whatever becomes popular will end up being called web 3.0 anyway.

Also annoyed at the .0 BS. Maybe it sounded cool and techy in the 90s but if the major versions are already nonsense, how the hell are you gonna have a minor one?

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago

I never recognised web 2.0 because my first encounter with it was a PM walking up to my desk and asking if I could code in web 2.0

[–] TAG@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Web 1.0: You put some contents on the Internet and monotise people who want to read it.

Web 2.0: You put up a public forum and monotise people both contributing content and reading content.

Web 3: Cryptocurrency (the use of the World Wide Web is optional).

Web 3.0 as defined by the author of Web 1.0: Sematic Web: Everything is linked to everything else with an explanation for how they are related. Instead of learning information, we all play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago

I've been thinking about this reply for some time now, and while I think you're being tongue-in-cheek (in which case, good sneer!), I resent this. I reject the noxious characterization of the web and its supposed generations as being defined by their method of monetization and the concept insults and saddens me.

It also doesn't match the usual way people use phrases like "web 1[.0]" and "web 2[.0]", which generally boils down to approximately whether a site looks more like it's Geocities Angelfire academic homepage HTML written in Windows Notepad or like a typical Squarespace Dreamveawer Wordpress Django Drupal Framework de jour fuckness.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

Monotise = monetize?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, odd. I’m already (oh god kill me) old enough to remember when because “semantic web” was a term thrown around even before web2 got to be known as web2 (and this wasn’t even that long ago)

Don’t think I’ve seen the thing of “3.0 as per author” as you mention here, link?

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

check it out, it's kind of interesting as a sort of way to treat web technology like a database (and some bits feel surprisingly close to Prolog in semantics, which tracks) but it's been pretty spectacularly unsuccessful at gaining any real adoption (which gave the cryptobros ample opportunity to hop in and parasitize the term, leading to their also spectacularly unsuccessful version of web 3). see also solid, which is an implementation of a bunch of Semantic Web ideas (and it barely works, and I'm fairly certain I remember seeing a bunch of folks quit the project all at once recently), and note that the web, semantic web, and solid are all Tim Berners-Lee projects

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Semantic Web was TBL's Xanadu.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago

my god, it exactly is

[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 6 points 1 year ago

@self @froztbyte

"conceived the Solid project ... as a way to give individual users full control over the usage of their data"

"Berners-Lee's research team collaborated with the Qatar Computing Research Institute "

I see a potential problem.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

Oic

I hadn’t actually realised it was a stolen term (although in retrospect, uh, that tracks)

At each recurrence of running into shit like this, I’m glad (and optimistic(?)) that the average coiner shitbird tended more greedy than clever, and that that by itself would help self-shorten the period of awful

(There’s still the remainder, of course, and they have to be kept watch on as usual)

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think Heydon Pickering summed it up well https://briefs.video/videos/what-is-web-3.0/

[–] UlyssesT@hexbear.net 10 points 1 year ago

But Web3 will revolutionize the world!

... by making it that much worse with even more rent-seeking. doomer

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

a delicate reminder now that @fasterandworse@awful.systems has undeleted this thread:

we know what a crypto shill looks like and we are watching

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t wish you work

But I will probably enjoy seeing what happens if they show up, no lies

[–] LeylaLove@hexbear.net -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean they're making a semi-valid point. If you don't get charged for it, it's not Web 3.0. Specifying that you're paying for it is redundant. This is more of a dig against web3 than anything

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

wot?

you would give any website your credit card details just for authentication?

[–] LeylaLove@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

Coin wallet, but that's what Web3 requires. Writing to the blockchain costs money, it doesn't matter what you do, it costs money. If it doesn't cost money, it can't be Web3. Easiest way to tell if someone is just using it as a buzzword, Web3 cannot be free of charge.

Would I personally do it? Fuck no. But that's what Web3 requires.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com -2 points 1 year ago

I pay for my VPN, mullvad, with crypto monthly. €5 a month. Is that web 3?