Every time I read about these dystopian deplatforming events on Hacker News, my first reaction is to write a comment on how we could find our way out of this. Then the term "Web3" comes up in my mind, and then I think "Oh now, this is HN, they will burn you alive" and I turn to other things again.
But right now, for some reason I feel so strongly about, I'll give it another try.
Wouldn't it be great if we could tackle two issues with in one go? The annoying interfaces of Twitter/FB/Insta and co and the constant fear of being deplatformed? By publishing our stuff on a decentralized database that is open for anyone to read in whatever way they like?
I fight hard to read the web in my way. When I see a link to Twitter, I manually change it to Nitter. I use an ad blocker. Bookmarklets to remove sticke elements from the pages I visit.
I try hard to publish my stuff, so it cannot be deplatformed easily. Preferably on my own domain.
But it's all crutches.
The web I read still feels aggressive, annoying, mean, dangerous, exhausting.
The most important platforms I write to (where people can like and comment) give me the feeling of walking on thin ice. Every moment, me and my audience might be separated.
I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces.
You want to push content in a decentralised fashion? Run your own website, and provide an rss or atom feed so people can use their own aggregators. We've had this tech since the 90s.
It involves effort, though - not much effort, but a little more than posting on Twitter, Tumblr or wherever; and this, it turns out, is sufficient.
> I fight hard to read the web in my way.
Turns out most people posting content don't want to fight hard to post it, and most people reading content don't want to fight hard to read it, and this is why twitter, facebook et al are big things, rather than everyone just having their own sites and decentralised syndication.
If something else is to take twitter's place, its barriers to entry must be at least as low as twitter's.
It's getting harder to "run your own website" without the risk of the hosting provider pulling you down if you generate too many complaints and are too much trouble for them.
Not really. Kiwi Farms, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc. are all online; pickup artist forums; satan worshipping forums, whatever, they’re all out there.
Remember most hosting providers make a living from customers, and generally don’t pull things down unless it’s super sketchy under their local laws. Dreamhost, Tucows etc. had a reputation for years for being very liberal with their hosting. Pretty much anything goes that’s not blatantly illegal.
And for the many sites with controversy, they probably don’t use a hosting provider.
People used to run entire forums like HN (smaller scale) on their college dorm PC; this is how Slashdot started. It’s not that hard if a college sophomore can do it. As you scale, you probably move to an actual house or building and need more servers and get a leased line from an ISP.
Yes people can appeal to the internet provider(s) but they rarely act. Remember, Stormfront was self hosted for ~25 years and only got torn down because of Charlottesville. Turns out if you actually do things (rather than just talk) with shitty ideas, at least in the USA, this crosses a line.
> I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces.
Spammers and griefers historically conquer that kind of environment. Usenet fulfilled virtually all of your freeness criteria and now it's a cesspool of spam and worse. Everyone worth talking to has left. Moderation is necessary for quality discussion, or selective membership, or more likely both.
You can make a Merkle tree of signed comments but the problem was never the integrity of the messages (I don't recall anyone messing with the contents of existing Usenet messages) or relationships between them (the worst practical problem was bottom-quoting).
The order of a "feed" is adjusted by the rate at which spam is generated; spam will always be the first result in the feed because that is spammers' objective and they have automated resources to achieve it.
Usenet does not have the data needed to filter spam. A system of cryptographically signed follows and likes would.
My client could calculate a "karma" value for each post. How many of my friends follow the poster? How many of my friends friends? How many of my friends friends friends? How many of my friends liked the post? How many of my friends friends. And so on.
This sounds very similar to PGP if everyone had chosen to use it comprehensively for every conversation. Adoption, proper key management, and ease of use were the killers there.
Social karma style scores are trumped by giant clusters of spambots building up a huge collective karma and then infiltrating existing networks at the edges by phishing or buying existing accounts/keys. Also, some people turn nutjob and then you need a way to go back and revoke all your permanently-recorded cryptographically signed likes and follows because anything less would allow censorship. Not to mention the cost of re-running pagerank over the entire internet population on every client for every new (un)like/follow. People who abandon their keys leave permanent positive karma sitting around for exploitation. If karma is only positive then pure abusers have no negative signal and can coast on these abandoned karma edges. If you allow negative signals (publicly signed "block"s, "this is spam" judgements, etc) then spammers have a new weapon to kill off every other high-karma key with negative edges to reduce its spam-fighting effectiveness. Don't forget that this kind of battle will also be waged by otherwise highly-rational political actors whose survival depends on curating high karma keys and cliques to bolster then.
What works is human moderation in highly functional online communities. Read the excellent posts by dang here about his ethos and practices. Human communities are too complex for algorithms or models to manage, at least so far.
> How do you prevent someone from copying your RSS and making it their RSS? Where is the proof that you published it first?
How do you prevent someone from minting their own NFT using your NFT's underlying image file? You could rely on a third-party centralized search engine which looks at the actual content to determine which one appeared first, and the same would apply to RSS.
Many people are laughing at the whole NFT thing right now but I suspect that in 10-15 years people will be laughing even harder when the whole thing collapses.
Yeah you got stuff in a blockchain, but the "stuff" you put in there is a mere link to a service which might not survive so long (most services don't).
So yeah in 10-15 years you'll probably have a lot of former nft owners that only own a broken link (or possibly even less).
ENS (web3 domains), mirror.xyz (publishing), shibuya.xyz (video content), sunflower land (gamefi), membership nfts (bayc). There are more used cases that are experimental. But "broken links" is why I do not take HN users seriously about web3.
I have a problem with this one - the membership is supposed to give you access to events/etc hosted by BAYC, so in this case they are the trusted party and can run a database. The blockchain doesn't seem like it adds anything here because ultimately BAYC can choose to deny entry for any reason.
Furthermore, how do they handle the case where a membership NFT is stolen or acquired illegitimately? Do they still honor the stolen NFT and let the thief in? Do they blacklist the NFT and re-mint a new one to give to the original owner? Etc.
Interaction with real-world state is where all blockchain-based projects break down. Blockchains can only enforce their guarantees on the chain itself - replicating it to the real world requires a trusted party, at which point a lot of the blockchain's perks no longer apply and a database starts making more sense.
> I have a problem with this one - the membership is supposed to give you access to events/etc hosted by BAYC, so in this case they are the trusted party and can run a database.
Ethereum blockchain is the database, BAYC can't delete, modify or censor any BAYC users.
> Furthermore, how do they handle the case where a membership NFT is stolen or acquired illegitimately? Do they still honor the stolen NFT and let the thief in? Do they blacklist the NFT and re-mint a new one to give to the original owner? Etc.
That's a good question and it already happened, I do not have an answer for that.
> at which point a lot of the blockchain's perks no longer apply and a database starts making more sense.
Getting a BAYC is as simple as transfering an NFT from one wallet to another, mint it with a wallet on BAYC website or buy it on a centralized or decentralized market place, anywhere in the world. There is no database with this type of frictionless.
> Ethereum blockchain is the database, BAYC can't delete, modify or censor any BAYC users.
But why does it matter what the blockchain says? The bouncer hired by BAYC to stand at the door of their event can "bounce" you regardless. May as well save resources & complexity by having them run a DB since they can ignore what the blockchain says anyway.
> Getting a BAYC is as simple as transfering an NFT from one wallet to another, mint it with a wallet on BAYC website or buy it on a centralized or decentralized market place, anywhere in the world. There is no database with this type of frictionless.
Getting a brand new BAYC involves "minting it" on their website - no different than buying a ticket on Ticketmaster/etc, and I'd argue the Ticketmaster route is easier as you don't have to worry about safeguarding a wallet/installing Metamask/etc.
Getting a BAYC off someone else involves an Ethereum transaction with its associated fees - in practice those are usually mediated by a marketplace such as OpenSea so decentralization/etc goes away. There's no reason the BAYC website couldn't just manage those transfers directly and skip all of the complexity. There's a theoretical advantage where because it all happens on the blockchain you could transfer an NFT without any third-party involvement (depending on how the smart contract is set up, but I'm assuming good faith and no artificial restrictions preventing that) but how many people do this in practice?
Considering the true value of a BAYC is to get access to their exclusive events (I am ignoring the temporary speculation aspect which is is now on its way out), I still don't see what advantages the blockchain brings compared to them just running an old-school members' club with memberships in a DB, since in practice they can deny entry to the event to anyone regardless of what the blockchain says. If they want to make memberships transferrable they can trivially do so on their platform, since in practice most NFT transfers right now happen on a centralized marketplace anyway.
I think there is a form of exhaustion regarding how crypto and Web 3 is supposed to resolve many things that seem to be working just well enough.
I understand that innovations do happen but the complexities (like smart contracts), the limitations of an append only database (that only store transactions and signatures), the damage done to our environment (CO2), the impact on electronic availability (video card shortages), the criminal uses of crypto and the life savings lost to a gambling like international market does make you wonder if this is all worth it.
I’m open to be proven wrong but I personally think that web3 and crypto, while very interesting, don’t have the attributes required to be a worthy innovation path for humankind
The strangest thing about your list, at least to me, is so much focus on "identity". Firstly, why does this even matter? And additionally, in which way does blockchain demonstrate "identity" any more than a domain name or user account? It demonstrates control over a mechanism, sure, but absolutely not who someone is
For instance, we are all commenting here without "proving" our identity in any way, and it's totally fine. And this is even a far more serious, business-centered discussion context than most of the Internet!
But a true web3 is possible: not through blockchain and things like that, but through things like WebRTC, Bittorrent and protocols of that sort. Peertube is one example of something of that sort.
A revival of a noncommercial, and uncommercializable web.
Are you young? Because, we once had the web3 you're describing about. Back when P2P was a trending technology, we implemented most of the web on peer to peer mesh network. File sharing, forum, web pages, we had it all. The conclusion is, it was so inefficient most people don't want to use it. That's why people of today use Hacker News rather than P2P forum, trusting the central authority that is Y Combinator.
Are you regularly using these P2P mesh network based communication tools? If not, you won't see the web3 future you are looking for. You don't get a future you don't want to use it regularly.
Are you old? You think it is easy to post on Instagram? Haha! Kids go to insane lengths to optimize their reach. They would swim through a lake of piss and puke for a popular post. I now some who sit all evening and "follow, unfollow, like and comment" stuff they are not interested in at all. It's a drag. It's work. It's exhausting. And everybody hates Instagram.
Why do they do it?
Because on Instagram, you can earn social currency: Likes and follows. A currency that gives you an advantage in the real world.
You can't do that with the technologies you mention.
But one could do it even better if likes and follows were cryptographically signed messages. Then a like from a celebrity is something that nobody can ever take away from you again.
Depending on how you define it I think it either isn’t the causal reason for the lack of success, or has actually 10xed. Batteries were more of an ease than a step function as well.
> ...By publishing our stuff on a decentralized database that is open for anyone to read in whatever way they like?
1. Isn't it how web1 work?
2. Who's going to pay for the storage and bandwidth?
3. As long as you hare hosting something on planet earth, the server is bounded to be governed by a country. And I am sorry to say, if a piece of content is considered illegal to the government of the country where the server is physically located, they can shut it down, no?
But right now, for some reason I feel so strongly about, I'll give it another try.
Wouldn't it be great if we could tackle two issues with in one go? The annoying interfaces of Twitter/FB/Insta and co and the constant fear of being deplatformed? By publishing our stuff on a decentralized database that is open for anyone to read in whatever way they like?
I fight hard to read the web in my way. When I see a link to Twitter, I manually change it to Nitter. I use an ad blocker. Bookmarklets to remove sticke elements from the pages I visit.
I try hard to publish my stuff, so it cannot be deplatformed easily. Preferably on my own domain.
But it's all crutches.
The web I read still feels aggressive, annoying, mean, dangerous, exhausting.
The most important platforms I write to (where people can like and comment) give me the feeling of walking on thin ice. Every moment, me and my audience might be separated.
I really long for a future where content is published in a freely available database. Free to read from and free to write to. Where a post is a content addressable piece of data signed by the author. And comment too. And where a like is a cryptographically signed message, "I like this /joe". And where the order of your "feed" is not adjusted by outside forces.