On Web 3.0, capitalism and money

Back in the 90s, there was Web 1.0. It was a simpler era, dominated by personal sites and forums. Centralisation was not a thing yet and money was not really part of the equation. People were not on the web to become rich and content was shared just for passion and for fun. Web 1.0 was dominated by content and content alone. It was a lot more pure than the mess we have right now. It was simply a place for curiosity.

Then in the early 2000s Web 2.0 descended upon us and that's where things started to shift. It was the beginning of the social media era. People slowly started to abandon personal sites and self hosted forums in favour of social media platforms. It's the era where online marketing really took off, where engagement and time spent on platforms started to become important factors. It's the era where we started focusing on the wrong things imo.

And that brings us to today, where in the midst of all the social media chaos, dominated by fake accounts, bots, complete nonsense and rampant advertising, the world of the web has decided to collectively move to the 3.0 phase.

As is often the case, these are nebulous terms and their definition is somewhat vague but Web 3.0 is supposed to be focused on decentralisation and its tool of choice should be the blockchain. Which sounds all good in theory.

What's happening though is that people are going batshit crazy over things like random crypto currencies and fucking NFTs. We've reached the point where NBA players are doing rug pulls to steal a few million dollars on shit NFT projects. This is millionaires participating in online scams to earn a few more millions.

Now, before some of the crypto/blockchain/NFT enthusiasts start yelling at me, I know that there are potentially some legit use cases for those technologies. I get it. But the current reality is that everything is either another avenue of investment for people with money to invest or a giant waste of time and resources.

And what's even sillier in my opinion, is how people online love to complain about capitalism and billionaires—for good reasons—while simultaneously having no issues getting involved in the same shenanigans at a smaller scale.

You might be wondering what prompted this rant. There's a person I used to follow online. He's a creative human being and has done some interesting things in the past. This person has a story worth sharing, the kind of content that was going up regularly on personal sites in the Web 1.0 era. For free. But now this person has decided that in order to post this content online we first need to collectively pay some random amount of ETH on this new writing+funding+crypto platform.

And to me that's just fucking depressing. We're slowly turning the web into a place where people only do things if it generates money and that is so sad to see.