I've recently begun a training at Blockgames, which is organised by Nestcoin in partnership with Zuriteam. This current cohort is closed for new entries, but you really should check them out using the links. As the title says, this post will be comparing and contrasting Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. I hope it will be simple enough for even newbies to understand. Also, writing helps to articulate one's thoughts and establish what one has learnt – or so I'm told. Anyway, here goes!
What most people call the web is really a set of different services and applications running over the global network that's properly called the internet, and while most people don't care about the difference, it kind of matters a little bit for the purpose of this article, because while there haven't been so many strides in the underlying network itself, as for services and applications running on top of that, things have changed quite a bit since the early days of the web. These changes, while not formalized per se, have been grouped into the categories (or eras, or "versions", if you will) tagged Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
In Web 1.0 (the earliest), content was mostly static (except mostly for animated GIFs and the now dreaded and shunned <marquee> element), there were (relatively) few content creators. For the most part, one had to be technically savvy to have or maintain a website. And yes, that was when the job title "webmaster" was a thing.
For Web 2.0, there is a lot of user-generated content (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and other social networks are great examples of this), there's a lot of interoperability (I remember linking my Facebook and Twitter back then, and I think I also got something in place to automatically publish posts on this blog to Facebook) between systems, things are quite usable (from a user's perspective – front-end tooling got a huge boost here), and there is way more interaction by users than there was for Web 1.0 (This is a good time to remind everyone that Gangnam Style forced YouTube to increase the limit on the number of views for a video a long time ago). Web 2.0 really democratized things a lot when it came to content on the web. It also saw the rise of silos of content (any of the above social networks are also examples – anyone recollect Twitter banning former US president Donald Trump? Imagine you were a historian who wanted to preserve Trumpisms. You'd need to request access from Twitter for his tweets (assuming you hadn't had a separate record of all of them)). Silos are centralized (there's one source of truth). If Twitter goes out of business tomorrow, you lose every single tweet you've posted.
With Web 3.0, the web becomes a database, if you will. Specifically as it relates to blockchains, the big feature is decentralized apps that run on the blockchain. Since the blockchain is distributed, there can be several sources of truth, and the blockchain enforces eventual consensus (so there aren't several versions of the truth, just one).
To further illustrate the difference between a centralized (one single source of truth) and permissioned (someone has to let you in) system (Web 2.0) and a decentralized (distributed, many sources of a univeral truth), permissionless (no gatekeeper) system (Web 3.0), let's look at some not-so-savoury incidents in recent times. After the End SARS protests in Nigeria in 2020, an acquaintance was one of several people who had their accounts restricted. In Canada, people who donated to the truckers' protests suddenly found that they could no longer perform financial transactions. In the more recent Russia-Ukraine war, some Ukrainians have found themselves cut off from the regular financial system, and Russians have been cut off from the global financial system, for the most part. Governments control the flow of fiat and the financial systems around them, so that is a centralized and permissioned system. In contrast, cryptocurrency only requires people willing to exchange it, and the internet, or as the cool kids say, "crypto fixes this".
Thanks for staying with me through this.
