Is Web3 a revolution or merely a “marketing buzzword”?

We are currently experiencing what is thought to be the internet’s third major version or Web3. What does this mean though, and how will it affect our lives?

Web 1.0, the first version of the World Wide Web, which is generally acknowledged to have existed from 1990 to 2004, today seems antiquated. Users had read-only content on this static version of the internet. The admittance requirements were stringent; in order to browse the internet, one needed a desktop computer and pricey Internet access. Linking across pages was one of its distinguishing features, allowing users to move quickly between them.

A crucial aspect of Web 1.0 was its decentralized nature; in essence, it “belonged” to everyone.

However, the social web or interactive online, often known as Web 2.0, which predominated from 2004 to 2014 (and beyond), will completely alter everything.

The admission requirements for users were drastically lowered, to begin with. One could read and write on the web using a smartphone or other device, which would allow them to both consume and produce information. During this time, social media truly took off, connecting people all over the world.

However, Big Tech firms, including Meta (at the time still known as Facebook), Amazon, ByteDance, Alphabet (up until 2015, Google), Advance, Microsoft, and others, also started to control and centralize the web. They currently have extraordinary power over online content.

An excellent example is Meta, which is the owner of three of the most influential social networks on the planet: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Most significantly, users have turned into the “product,” giving the information and materials that belong to these networks. The issue is, astonishingly, that social media platforms are starting to run out of users to sign up for their services.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Web 2.0 did not completely replace Web 1.0. Instead, they coexist and strengthen one another. A successful 1.0-type offering, such as Netflix, is one that merely offers people material in exchange for money.

However, Web 2.0 also brought with it a number of significant worries, such as surveillance (which was sensationally revealed in 2013 by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden), the monetization of user attention (a.k.a. advertising), polarized online discourse, censorship, and who owns data.

Web 3.0, a term coined by British computer scientist Gavin Wood (Web 3.0 is also occasionally used to refer to Tim Berners-prior Lee’s promise of a “semantic web”), has existed since 2014 while Web 2.0 continues to exist.

In essence, Web3 differs from Web 2.0 in a number of significant ways. For one, it returns control of data ownership to users rather than Big Tech. For another, it aims to decentralize the internet once more by doing away with centralized authority that might restrict access to data.

Additionally, Web3 is permissionless and trustless, allowing for transparent data transmission and transactions that are impervious to outside interference. The internet of things, where the web is everywhere and everything is connected and there are no hardware or software constraints, is characterized by connectedness and ubiquity.

The semantic web, which Berners-Lee defined as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,” is the final component of Web3.

Fundamentally, as machine learning (ML) and natural language recognition (NLR) technologies progress, computers will be able to comprehend and interpret context, emotion, and linguistic nuance, connecting data the way that humans can.

Supporters of Web3 assert that it has significant advantages over Web 2.0 in terms of tackling Big Tech’s over-centralization of the internet and providing enhanced data security, scalability, and privacy.

But it also has a lot of critics. For instance, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, claimed that it “looks more like a marketing phrase than a reality right now.” Jack Dorsey, the creator and former CEO of Twitter, calls it a “venture capitalists’ plaything” and claims that it will just centralize control of the web away from Big Tech and into the hands of venture capital firms.

Web3 does have several shortcomings. The amount of energy used by blockchain computations is a major concern. It is more difficult to govern decentralized services than centralized ones. Because they frequently use centralized services to access blockchains, most are not as decentralized as they promise to be. Furthermore, a lot of the implementations still revolve mostly around cryptocurrencies.

I am aware of how crucial it is to plan for the future and stay on top of the game in the quickly changing online environment, which brings me to the following query.

What impact does Web3 have on us and is it a revolution?

I think that various Web3 concepts will continue to be incorporated into the internet, including self-sovereign identity, where users are in charge of the data they use to prove their identities across platforms, non-fungible tokens, and the blockchain for ownership and license declarations, cryptocurrencies for transactions, and ML and NLR for connecting data and chatbots.

A revolution though? In my opinion, no. Web3 won’t fundamentally alter the internet as we know it, much like Web 2.0 is to Web 1.0, complementing rather than replacing it. Then, rather than being a revolution, it will be an evolution, and we will change along with it.

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