191–200 of 269 posts
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I’m sure they would be. You ship your org chart, so large organizations that move quickly will ship bulky applications. It’s very hard to make those applications smaller without slowing development considerably. Moreover, it’s not like there was a dearth of system administration experience at Google around the time GMail was conceived.
I read the GP's "big" as popular, not bloated.
They are misnomers because of the word "web". The original meaning of "web" was for it to be one of many applications on the underlying internet. Another application could be FTP, telnet, Gopher.
As such, web2 is an imprecise term because it is a conceptual change not restricted to web technology. It's the internet becoming a two-way street, rather than mostly read-only for the typical user. When you post some content using a mobile app, that's "web2", even if not a single web technology is used end-to-end.
And to add to the confusion, "web3" is specifically a response to the 2nd phase of "web2": the centralization of content discovery and monetization. The well known big tech gate keepers that slurp up all content, your private data, put ads on them, and this way become filthy rich whilst content producers get nothing. Some content producers may get a piece of the pie, but terms may change or they may just kick you off the platform. Not even by a human, by AI. And they won't even bother to tell you why. Likewise, app store owners can just take 30% of your business, dictate how you do business with them, and get sole access to your customers' data. Gatekeepers may also arbitrarily decide what is allowed speech and what isn't.
I could go on, but the issues that come from "web2" monopolies are well known, and nothing new. Most people are in agreement that they are serious issues, all the way up to governments.
As such, it's sad that a movement that has the potential to make somewhat of a meaningful change, namely "web3", is met with such ridicule. Just because it has the trigger word "crypto" associated with it.
It's truly anti-intellectual and lazy to not even acknowledge the problems with "web2" and to just decide in a heartbeat that "web3" is a scam. Because you read the word "crypto".
Meanwhile, "crypto" adds 100M new users every year, and accelerating. VCs, including the ones behind this website, are throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it. Whilst you laugh at NFTs, musicians, car manufacturers, event organizers and sports teams are embracing it. Crypto-assets backed gaming is about the enter the hype phase. Facebook is throwing tens of billions into the metaverse with the idea to make it compatible with leading blockchains. Twitter is integrating Bitcoin payments and verified NFTs, as well as working on some decentralized social network.
At what point do you stop to wonder...maybe something's up with this crypto thing? I'm not here to sell you crypto, as clearly this community has made up its mind and thinks it's about "too much javascript". I'm here to tell you that you dramatically underestimate the speed at which it develops, is normalized and becoming mainstream.
Be skeptical, but not a fool.
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No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.
The obvious question is why should these things be a pain in the ass.
The problem is psychological, not technical.
Ah, yes, I remember this from web0: Trying to make web3 go away is just as pointless as trying to make web2 go away. It's here, it's going to stick around. Yes, there's a lot of hype, it probably won't look the same in 10 years, and yes there's a lot of charlatans, but I think ignoring its importance is myopic.
> It's here Can you post a link to a place where I can interact with some web3 content directly then? Not an article about what web3 will be, but something I can play with? Back in the early web 2.0 this is pretty easy, just point to twitter, myspace, stumble upon etc. I'm genuinely curious what web3 really even looks like since all the pages that talk about it mostly sound like marketing pitches without a single rea…
Starting to figure out Clarity.so, which is a project management tool kind of like Notion but with some web3 features. Haven't done too much with it yet, but an organization I'm working with is using it.
Metamask is a browser wallet that also serves as your login and identity for these sites.
If you want to learn some code and concepts in smart contracts in a really friendly way (while providing a lot of good information), you can go through the tutorials at https://cryptozombies.io/, which works like FreeCodeCamp.
Smart contract code has some similarities but also a few things you need to do differently because of the nature of the blockchain. Like random number generation you have to be careful with since your code is public, and people could potentially game it unless you do it a certain way, also function visibility is very important because it might allow other apps to call your contract and/or certain types might cost gas (i.e. tokens) when you don't need it to. Also a smart contract is immutable once it's published, so you need to be very careful you get it right, or you will have no choice but to point people to a different contract (and even still that other contract could still do some damage). Also the way string comparison is done is to make a hash of each of the strings and compare those to see if they're equal. Just a few examples of many.
So it actually feels like I'm learning something different, and not just "okay, what do I need to call/integrate to add authentication on this new platform" for the tenth time, or "Oh, the coordinates for drawing to the screen start from the top left instead of the bottom left for this tool, good to know."
I mean it's not as different as learning something like Prolog, but still fairly different.
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CanIuse should have a page that lists all of the browser features that are supported by all browsers and in the same way. Of course it's not as simple as that, but in short, what has a green square across the current versions of all browsers? Green-green, not half-stepping green.
What would that presentation be useful for? They certainly have the data, but I have trouble thinking of a situation where I would want that kind of list.
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I am a backend engineer by trade, and I have been trying to learn me a little React because I decided I should learn new tech (not the stuff I use on a daily basis, which is Python) on side projects. So the backend is being done in Rust, and frontend is using React. I had this moment where I thought "well, I need Typescript, because I want nicely typed interfaces and contracts, and I need React". Turns out it's not e…
Why do you need types to learn React? You really need a compiler to tell you when you have made a mistake that bad? Your first mistake is trying to add typing on a dynamic language that works just fine without types. You won’t really learn the underlying language that well that way, and you therefore won’t have a good understanding of it. TypeScript makes sense in large projects, with many developers where you need t…
Sorry, but this is a rant. I am deeply saddened by the current state of affairs in the web today. in Javascript right now there are so many layers upon layers upon layers of DSLs and mannerisms on top of questionable language features which 'must be used' because the former language features are not cool anymore since a few days ago. The whole ecosystem is turning into a meme of itself. In a few months someone will r…
JavaScript framework churn (on the frontend) ended 6 years ago. The only thing keeping this meme going is commenters on HN.
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No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.
Of course there's issues, that's why it didn't happen! But solutions do exist: open-source focusing on UI, standardisation, free static IPs, more open operating systems, etc
Consumers don't want to do it. They're tired. They want to sleep. They want to watch TV or Netflix or TikTok or YouTube or listen to Spotify. They want to turn off their brains in most cases. Maybe spend time with their kids. Or go to the grocery store, or football practice, or holiday shopping, or browse Amazon or eBay, or fret about bills, or prepare their taxes, or fix the sink, or mow the lawn, or play with the dog.
They want someone else to be responsible for the thing. They want a central entity to blame, or complain to, and to pay to take it all off their plate. They just want to send Netflix $14 / month and click a button and never have to think about running their own systems. That's what they want. That's what they will always want, so long as the price is even slightly reasonable.
No amount of wishing by techies is going to change that reality.
Nothing you mentioned alters the fundamental problem: consumers don't want to do it, they're never going to want to do it. They're also not going to suddenly want to do all of their computing by bash. They're not all going to run out and teach themselves JavaScript. They don't want to run their own email servers. They don't want to run their own media servers. They don't want to take total control of their privacy and run their own decentralized social software. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, and that's all there will ever be, slivers of exceptions.
They want to be able to walk away from Facebook or Instagram or YouTube for three weeks or three months and not worry about whether the server ate itself, or needs updates, or a new power supply, or has a critical security vulnerability - those things all become the consumer's responsibility. If they use Facebook they can shake their fist at Zuckerberg on the rare occasion the service is down; he's to blame for X Y Z; and it costs them nothing whether they use it once per day or once per year (yeah but privacy, they're the product; right, well, step into the average consumer's mindset and out of your mindset).
The majority of consumers could change their own oil too. They don't want to because it's a big hassle to them. They don't even want to sew their own clothes, imagine. Bring back decentralized clothing.
I'm endlessly baffled by the inability of most techies to put themselves into the shoes of the average consumer and just get it, get their point of view, grasp their mindset. It's extraordinarily easy to do. Just try it sometime, with practice it gets easy, I promise. No matter how many decades go by, none of this changes, and yet the techies persist with the decentralized fantasies. One day human nature will change, just you wait!
But with that said, I do find it interesting how many Web 3 things are just more complicated ways to solve problems already solved in the 80s and 90s.
I remember when I first heard Web 2.0 in a conference by Tim O'Reilly. I wasn't a fan but it became a convenient way to describe a new web that was driven by user generated and dynamic content. With the help of this new thing called Ajax and mirror effect, lots and lot of mirror effects on graphics and 12 pointed stars.
Web 3 is not an evolution of the web but rather a side show. A side show that will definitely have some useful things come of it but it lacks the spirit of Web 2.