What is web 3.0 in simple language?
Before we start the article about web 3.0, first let me clear this there is no official term that is called web 3.0. But the internet is filled with this term and it is getting more attraction due to the sudden trend in the cryptocurrency community.
Now what I understand by the term web 3.0 is that it can be divided into three decades or 3 main points on the internet one was web1.0 and the other was web 2.0 and current web 3.0 and no one knows about the future. Now we have our checkpoint in the internet history let’s deep dive in.
Web 1.0
Let’s start with 1.0, an initial overview of what the internet was.
Between the years 1991 and 2004, The internet was mostly a bunch of static pages, meaning when you loaded them, they just showed some stuff and that was it. Some called it ‘read-only’. There wasn’t any logging in or interacting with posts or viewing analytics. Most of the early internet wasn’t even profitable by ads. It was mostly just like one big Wikipedia hyperlinked together. Of course, with time slowly we made improvements, and things like Flash and Javascript added many different new features. However, during that time, the users of the internet were consumers, they went to the internet to consume information.
Web 2.0
Next, we have Web 2.0, from around 2004 until now.
During this time, the web evolved a lot, but one of the biggest changes was the interactivity of the internet. This meant that not only did we get information from the pages, but the pages started getting information from us. As we viewed Facebook and Youtube and performed Google searches, these centralized companies started collecting data about us to serve us better content so that we would stay on their websites longer.
This meant more money for them, but eventually, they realized they could package up all the data they had on us and sell it to advertisers. Web 2.0 is the age of targeted advertising and the lack of privacy for users. To be fair, we willingly gave up this privacy too, for cool apps like Facebook and Twitter.
In web 2.0, I and you could both view Facebook and see two very different news feeds because the page depends on who is viewing it, which is important to note for a difference in web 3 we will talk about in a minute. That is them sorting data by the information you know you gave them. If you look at the ads they show you, that is them sorting data by the information you didn’t know you gave them. When you went to eat Tacos last night… they knew that. When you drop your kids off at school every day at 8 am except Fridays, they know that. And there was one article that said machine learning started showing a guy some parenting ads because they knew he was going to be a father before he did. If it wasn’t machine learning, it was probably because his girlfriend used their public IP to do a search on her symptoms, and the machine learning algorithm probably already knew when she was ovulating, anyways. Whatever the case, one centralized company controlling this data whether we want to or not is scary.
Web 3.0
Next up is web 3.0, which you came to this article to learn about.
Web 3.0 is the next evolution of the internet, probably utilizing blockchain technology and the tools of decentralization. In Web 2.0 you were the product as you were browsing social networks, but in web 3.0, some believe that you will be the owner of your content, the stuff that you post online. This is kinda true, so if you want a post to stay up, it’ll stay up, but if you want to take it down, they say you can control that… but not really, because as we know usually when something is on the Internet, it’s always on the Internet.
Here’s one example that’s already real. Odyssee is a blockchain alternative to Youtube, where videos can be posted and creators can earn LBRY tokens as a reward for enticing viewers. The thing about Odyssee though, is that they can’t really stop any video from being posted. If someone posts it, and someone else in the network wants to share it, they technically download it and then let others watch and download, kinda like a big torrent network, if you know what that is.
To expand on this, your post couldn’t get taken down because your post wouldn’t just be on 1 of Facebook’s servers… it would theoretically be on thousands of computers around the world ensuring that the blockchain social network you’re on isn’t attacked or censored. Theoretically, this means that there would be a lot of illegal or hateful things posted, but it would be in the name of freedom, of which the users of the networks could probably decide on a system to reduce that content.
In Web 3.0, experts say we will reach a point of the internet when every company is run by a decentralized group called a DAO, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, and if you want to learn more about what those big words mean, Be a follower so that when the article comes you are notified. However, DAOs mean there are no CEOs or Presidents to impress, only shareholders decide who to hire to work on the company they own tokens of. Those with the most tokens get to vote on how the company changes, not limited by the government or some family tradition. This means no censorship of social networks like Facebook or Twitter.
Lastly, one of the biggest things in web 3.0 is that your digital identity is not 100% connected to your real-world identity. This means I can view pages, download things, make purchases, and any other activity on the internet without being traced to the real me. There are many ways we can anonymize ourselves online.
So these may be long-term ideas of those who think about web 3.0, but in reality, what web 3.0 really means for us in this decade is that you can buy Amazon gift cards with metamask and pay with ethereum, or that you could anonymously leave a like on your friend’s posts using one of your hidden wallets, nothing life-changing all at once. It’ll likely be a series of ideas that grow together until centralized companies like Facebook and Google are disassembled by the legislature while decentralized, unregulated DAOs grow to replace them.
Thanks for reading the article, I hope you enjoyed it reading, I really hope you learned something.
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