Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
A Breakdown of the Imminent Transition From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0
Block off the noise, silence the buzz. What exact effects does this have on the average internet user?
In this article, we'll briefly discuss the web before 3.0, disturbing issues with the current web, and how the new Web 3.0 handles these issues. Also, if you're looking to dive deeper and learn the newly arriving web technologies and better understand the whole concept of how the new Web has been engineered, I'll be sharing some helpful resources towards the end of the article to help you with that. Let's dive right in.
The 1.0 and 2.0.
First, let's have a quick history class by describing the previous two generations of the internet leading up to this point, Web 1.0 and 2.0. Web 1.0 was solely on the primary purpose of the web which was: making information available across the globe, with almost no other benefits as the web contained just plain static pages served over a network and any resources to be shared on the web needed to be placed in a file system that lives on a server, where they are served just as they are, to online visitors who couldn't be called users at the time as their relationship with the web was pretty much a one-way thingy, more like "view-only".
Web 2.0 saw this one-sidedness as the main problem it needed to tackle and brought about user interaction amongst other features. At this point, we could say that the web was way more user-driven, with tailor-made content for each user through a bit of AI and an unmeasurable level of consented and sometimes illegal collection of user data. Asides from the better interaction between users and the web, Web 2.0 also brought about improved interaction between users, from the multitude of messaging platforms to online communities, E-commerce, and all of that. This generation of the web was labeled community-driven.
The new 3.0 (Web).
Now to the new guy in town, the "next big thang" as they say. Web 3.0 has come in with a bang, and if you're an old-fashioned web user like myself, you could be wondering "what big improvement could be introduced to our already almost-perfect Web 2.0 ?", with questions like "can't any improvements be built on the already existing Web 2.0 but as a service rather than a whole new web ?", which brings us to our main discussion here, what is this transition about? what does this "whole new web" have to offer?
For context, Web 3.0 has been labeled individual-driven. We'll start by identifying some of the big problems with our beloved web 2.0 that may have been hiding in the shadows for far too long.
Underlying issues with Web 2.0
First, privacy. Currently, when it comes to privacy, we can only take the words of the administrators of every website we visit for it, and even the most-trusted website administrators have proven not trustworthy by being exposed at some point for illegal use and/or disclosure of user data, and a lot of these times, for profit.
Content ownership and distribution. Over the years, content creation and distribution have been major driving forces of the web, even before the birth of Web 2.0, but the actual ownership of these content is questionable, you would think plagiarism solves the problem of taking credit for someone else's content, but what about taking profit off some else's content or owning control over its distribution. As it stands, your content isn't exactly yours as it could get lost in censorship or other administrative processes that you probably have no say in, biased or non-biased, plus the platforms where your contents are distributed tend to make more profit off it than you do anyway.
User-representation and cyber-security. This one is pretty much the bigger problem that gets overlooked or simply isn't emphasized enough. On the web (2.0) right now, users are nothing but accounts that are at most, verified by an active email address or phone number which in themselves do not exactly represent a user in any way, I mean, it could be anyone behind a user-account on a platform like Twitter, from bots to actual humans who may be in-charge of infinitely many other accounts on the same platform and harboring malicious intent, giving rise user-threatening web disasters like impersonation, misinformation, and cyber-fraud generally.
Solutions with Web 3.0.
Now, how does Web 3.0 solve these problems, we'll start with the last one which I considered to be the more urgent issue as even before the introduction of Web 3.0, there had already been significant progress made on its preceding versions to reduce the risk of cyber-fraud. In Web 3.0, rather than have users represented by mere accounts on various platforms, each user at any point in time, regardless of what part of the web they're surfing, will be represented as a single, same entity, identified on the Web usually by a "token" or an "address".
Next up, the problem with proper ownership and distribution/sharing of content will supposedly be a thing of the past in the new Web 3.0, your contents will now be linked to your user across the whole internet through metadata that promises to be more prominent on Web 3.0 contents. Also, your content will live directly on the web, owning its own portion of it, rather than on a Web platform owned by some administrators willing to rip users off.
Finally, in the case of privacy, since users will now be anonymously represented on the web, rather than as data in some administrator's database, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder without consent from the users, you can at least be rest assured that you're now almost impossible to track on the web and no humans nor machines will know more than they should.
The bigger picture in a nutshell (summary).
The primary goal of Web 3.0 is to make our connection to the web a direct one, cutting off administrators that act as the only mediums to the web and making the web accessible to anyone and everyone. In this new envisioned web (which is pretty much active already), users can share experiences and resources on the web without requiring third part "applications" like Google or Twitter as usage mediums, allowing user content to be fully owned and distributed by themselves (the creators). This new primary development on the web will also mean that no organization can gather user information through its platform/application anymore, as all available data will now live on a blockchain rather than on privately owned databases.
Helpful resources.
- To learn about this new web, Blockgames organizes an interactive, free, remote BootCamp with the primary aim of educating people from across the world on this new web, and how to use it to your advantage n solving problems. This Bootcamp is organized by the Zuri team, in collaboration with NestCoin