Web 3.0 — why Twitter is divided on the 'internet of the future'

As more and more people familiarise themselves with the concept of Web 3.0, tech industry leaders are taking to Twitter to show their support for what they call “internet of the future”, while others use memes to show otherwise.

The third version of the internet or Web 3.0 is the age of content generation, where services run on decentralised networks or blockchain, unlike its previous versions. Here, the data is not owned by a few strong players like Facebook (now, Meta) or Amazon.

Why is this moment important for internet businesses?

Because internet applications have to be developed for user behaviour of the future.

Remember what happened to MSN and Yahoo in Web 2? They were unprepared for the interactive web, where YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Uber and Airbnb grew fast — and thrived.

Any startup or large company needs to have a working plan to be relevant for the user behaviour of Web 3.

But what is Web 3.0?

“Web 3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens,” tweeted Chris Dixon, American entrepreneur and General Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He explains why Web 3.0 matters here. 

In Web 2.0, the service is managed and run in a centralised system, where a company or an organisation has control over what happens to data. In contrast, Web 1.0 — the early days of the internet — was where people shared information on the internet for it to be accessible to more and more people. 

Twitter, which is a part of Web 2.0, is already divided over it. 

In Web 3.0, no one company or business is the owner of your data or content. Every person, in turn, can feel that they own their own content.

“Everyone is an owner and contributor as opposed to just a user. There is something very intrinsically powerful about this.” tweeted Aditya Agarwal, Partner at South Park Commons Fund, an early-stage venture firm and former chief technology officer at Dropbox.  

Elon Musk, Co-founder of Tesla, however is not impressed.

Earlier this month, he shared a meme.

Still, a lot of entrepreneurs are excited about the opportunities that can come up when a central regulator does not control their experiences.

“Web3 offers the prospect of shared prosperity outside the state,” Balaji Srinivasan, a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor, wrote.

“At its core, web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony,” writes Stephen Diehl, Software Developer at Continuum.

Blockchain has technical limitations around compute, bandwidth and storage, he argues. You can read more about it here in the thread.

Benedict Evans, foremost analyst of technology trends, asks an important question.

As Twitter debates on whether Web 3.0 is in fact the future of internet, there are already companies and entrepreneurs working on projects around it.

This tweet thread by Polygon Daily lists the projects based on Web 3.