What Web 3.0 is?

There is no proper definition for Web 3.0, but by comparing it with Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, we will understand well about Web 3.0.

Explanation of Web 1.0

It is an initial overview of what the internet was between the years 1991 and 2004. The internet was remarkably a bunch of static pages, meaning that at the time you loaded them, they just showed some stuff. Some called it Read-Only. It doesn’t require any logging in or interacting with posts, or viewing analytics. The majority of the early internet wasn’t even profitable by ads. It was just like one big Wikipedia all hyperlinked together. With time, we eventually made improvements, and things like flash and javascript added many exciting features. However, in this case, the users of the internet were consumers. All of them went to the internet to consume information.

Explanation of Web 2.0

This internet from around 2004 until now has evolved a lot. One of the most significant changes was the interactivity of the web and the internet. It meant that not only did we get information from the pages, but the web pages started getting information from us. As we opened Facebook and YouTube and performed google searches, these centralized companies started collecting data about us to serve us better content, which would make us stay on their websites longer. This meant more money for them, but with time, they realized they could package up all the data they had gathered on us and sell it to advertisers. Web 2.0 is the era of targeted advertising and the lack of privacy for its users. Now we willingly give this privacy too for cool apps like Facebook and Twitter.

In web 2.0, you and I could view facebook.com and see two very unique news feeds because the news on the page depends on who was considering it, which is an important note for a difference in web 3.0 we’ll talk about. The content on your news feed is the company sorting data by the information you gave them, like likes and how much you watched a video. Still, if you look at the ads, they show you that it is them sorting data by the information you didn’t know you give them, i.e., when you went to eat tacos last night, they know that when you dropped your kids off at school every day at 8 a.m. except for Fridays and they even know that. Even that one article said machine learning started showing a boy some parenting ads because they knew he would become a father before he even became. If it wasn’t machine learning, it was merely because his wife used their public IP address to search for her symptoms, and the machine learning algorithm probably already knew when she was ovulating. Anyways whatever the case is, how do they predict this one. A centralized company controlling all of this data, whether we want to or not to, is scary.

Explanation of Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the upcoming evolution of the internet, probably utilizing blockchain technology and decentralization tools. In web 2.0, you were considered the product because you were browsing social networks, but in web 3.0, many people believe that you will be the owner of your content and the stuff you post online. So if you want a post or something to stay up, it will stay up, but if you’re going to take it down in web 3.0, you can control that. Because we all usually know when something is on the internet, it’s always on the internet.

Odysee is a blockchain alternative to YouTube where you can post videos, and creators can earn library tokens, a reward for enticing viewers to watch their videos. The thing about Odysee, though, is that they can’t stop a video from being posted. If someone uploads it and somebody else in the network wants to share it, they download that video and then let others watch it and download it, which is a kind of extensive torrent network. If your post couldn’t get taken down because your post wouldn’t just be on one of Facebook servers, it would theoretically be on thousands of computers worldwide, ensuring that the blockchain social network you are on is not attacked or censored. This means people would post many illegal and hateful things, but it would be in the name of freedom and privacy, of which the users of the networks could decide on a system to reduce that harmful content. In web 3.0, experts say that we will reach a point on the internet where every company is run by a decentralized group called a DAO, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. DAO’s mean there are no CEOs or no presidents to impress. Those with more tokens get to vote on how the company changes, not limited by a government. In web 3.0, there will be an absence of censorship of social networks like Facebook or Twitter. And one controlling authority cannot shut it down.

At last, one of the biggest things in web 3.0 is that your uploaded digital identity is not connected to your real-world identity. This means you can view pages, download things, make purchases and perform any activity on the internet without being traced to the original one. Now there are many ways we can anonymize ourselves online.

The reality of Web 3.0

In the next decade, you might be able to buy amazon gift cards using metamask and pay it with Ethereum, or that you could anonymously leave a like on one of your friend’s posts using one of your hidden wallets. It’s not going to be a bunch of life-changing stuff all at once. A series of ideas will grow together until centralized companies like Facebook and Google are disassembled by the legislature while decentralized unregulated DAO’s growth will replace them.

Web 3.0 Foundation

A company called the web 3.0 foundation supports projects for increasing decentralization on the internet. Their three big projects are the Blockchain Polka dot, Polka dot’s Test Chain, and the Web3 Summit, but it isn’t a good overview of what web 3.0 is. Still, they also offer some grants that many of them have to do with supporting and using the polka dot blockchain, so it seems the polka dot team used the web three name as a brand to push their agenda. It means that polka dot is a blockchain and web 3.0 is an idea. One doesn’t own the other.