Have no idea what it is about, other than being decentralised. Some basic search results suggests that its a sham, scam and riddled with crypto ideas. Or is it apart of something noteworthy? Geuinly curious what the general consensus is of the Web3.
It's a marketing term. It means nothing. It was invented to sell scams. Just like Web 2.0, nothing changes in the underlying tech stack or the technical capabilities of the infrastructure. Unlike web 2.0 which was coined post-hoc to describe a qualitative change in the way the web was being used, web 3.0 was invented as a copycat term. A gimmick to create the illusion of technological progress.
There are very few use cases where an append-only database (like the blockchains that web3 are supposed to be based on) is a good idea. So the idea web3 is most focused on is artificial digital scarcity. That's about as anti-web as I think you can get.
"The term "Web3" was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, and the idea gained interest in 2021 from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies, and venture capital firms."
Web is by definition decentralised. I can run a website on my home PC and it's part of the internet. Web3 is about running Blockchain. They are two independent concepts imho. When it comes to Web3, my opinion of it is "meh". It's a buzzword more than anything.
The term has been embraced and extended by the bandwagon of popular "journalism" in exactly the same way as "artificial intelligence", "block chain" and plenty of others before then, "interactive multimedia", "internet ready", "plug and play", "desktop publishing" and "turbo" to name a "few".
There was this idea that instead of having the web powered by large data companies like Google and Meta you could keep all your information in the blockchain. It was an attempt to "take back control".
However, most of the proponents kinda forgot that the web is already decentralized and only portions are controlled by Meta and Google.
Then, of course, we had the grifters come in.
The whole thing was built on a misunderstanding of how the web actually works.
I think most proponents/engineers got distracted by number go up and forgot about the decentralization of the Web part. The little bits that are good about it just can't seem to figure out the UX problem.
I think the creators of web3 did understand how the web works, but wanted to change it and sold the change by gaslighting people about how web3 actually works.
The original idea was simply for people to control their own data on decentralised networks, I don’t think anyone had a problem with that definition. The term seems to be mostly crypto related now though.
The original idea was simply for people to control their own data on decentralised networks, I don’t think anyone had a problem with that definition.
That is how the web has worked since its inception. The fact that people choose to primarily go through a limited number of effective monopolies doesn't mean the underlying structure is centralized.
The DNS system is inherently centralised, so is IP address assignment. In both cases you have to got through a centralised agency or their intermediaries.
But people aren't using the web the same way they were at inception. These big companies have built closed source, centralized systems on top of the decentralized infrastructure to serve new use-cases that weren't envisioned in the original standards. People like these new use-cases, so we need new standards, etc., to facilitate a re-decentralization of data and features in these new use-cases if we want the most used parts of the web to maintain their openness.
I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on the common user for the centralization of their data, when only the centralized systems have been providing the capabilities they want until very recently (where the open alternatives have arisen partly because of new standards like ActivityPub).
Some people decided that they needed a buzzword for something that have absolutely nothing to do with the web, and they decided to use Web3.
Anything "web3" you can think of is a regular webservice, that have no technological difference with "web2" (whatever this was), and may or may not behind the scene communicate with some form of blockchain (which may or may not be a real one too).
That's web3. And note that I didn't even bother to go check what happens on the blockchain side, that is already so removed from the web it's insulting people calls this web3.
Web3 is a marketing term for Web2 sites that usually involve crypto/decentralized crypto-driven "metaverses".
Web4 was employed by Meta/Facebook as a marketing to their "metaverse".
Web 3.0 is a real term meaning an evolution of Internet oriented at establishing a universal framework for machines to easily process Web data, while keeping it fully human-readable.