WEB2: Distract & Extract

Like many paradigms born within the grasp of unapologetic capitalism, WEB2 is a contradictory and unscalable business model. Of course on a technical level something like Facebook has scaled magnificently. This is a protocol that has enough resources for over a billion people to interact at the same time. Doesn't get much more scalable than that amirite?

However, on a societal level a platform like Facebook or Twitter absolutely does not scale. Think about the business model. What is the product designed to do? Like so many video games out there the goal is to become as addictive as possible. The goal is profit, and turning the userbase into addicts and keeping them hooked on the product is the best way to accomplish this goal.

These products are designed to get you to check in at least every day, and hopefully even more than that. The more attention we give these platforms the more valuable their targeted advertising becomes, and thus the more they can charge for the service. Advertising is a shockingly predictable business model in which sponsors of the platform know in advance relatively exactly what they are going to get given a certain investment package. Become a big enough sponsor and you can 'ask' the WEB2 platform to censor certain content you don't like. Money talks and bullshit walks.

X dollars go in, Y dollars come out.

They know exactly which demographics to target. They know exactly how many eyeballs they're going to get within the attention economy, and they know exact which percentage of those eyeballs from said demographic are going to buy the thing being shilled. It's actually scary how predictable people are on a statistically level. Free will is an illusion. Personally accountability is an illusion. Real changes can only be made from the top down. Ironic that crypto is a bottom-up technology, but we hope that momentum will reach the top and change the very nature of our reality.

WEB2 is not built with productivity in mind.

Facebook doesn't care how much time users waste on their platform. Neither does Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat. In the context of WEB2 people are cattle. People are consumers. All you need them to do is keep them mindlessly clicking on your website without getting bored and wandering off. #towelie

Now compare this paradigm to WEB3.

Here on Hive we strive to empower every user to bring as much value to the ecosystem as possible. If we create a frontend that is distracting and addictive and pointless there isn't much to be gained. Anyone can see that there aren't a lot of advertising dollars to be made here. The model is completely different in every way.

Best example: algorithmic feed

WEB2 has a financial incentive to serve you content that will keep you engaged. They want your attention for a long as possible without regard to any other consequence. More attention means more advertising dollars. This results in "The Algorithm" serving you some very weird content.

For example: Twitter has learned that I like to engage with Bitcoin Maximalists. This is not a healthy engagement. I talk shit and remind them how delusional they are and they parrot the same rhetorical nonsense they've been spewing for years now. Honestly it is mindblowing that these people think they have this ultimate edge on the rest of the world just because they copy/paste the same tired arguments over and over again. There is no critical thinking involved or lesson to be derived. No one learns anything.

It's a totally pointless interaction on both sides.

You think Twitter gives a shit? lol hell no! Algorithm will serve me up Maximalist content all day in the hopes that I go on some tirade and waste my time on Twitter all day. Twitter doesn't care about building value. They care about advertising dollars and that's it. Just like every other WEB2 platform.

The Algorithm

Content algos are very hard to build and are almost artificially intelligent in nature. Most content on Hive is curated and served up by "highest payout" or "most views". This is not an algorithm; this is sortation of a single variable. We are in dire need of something a little bit more complex than this, but who will build such a thing?

Again this becomes a problem of monetary incentive. We want a good feed that provides us with the most relevant and productive content. Unfortunately there is only one entity that has a financial reason to build such a thing. Only the Hive network itself benefits from upgrades to the Hive network (luckily we all own a piece). This is why, even through all its faults, the @hive.fund may become one of our most treasured assets. Other networks without socialized/subsidized funding are likely to be left in the dust on the long term.

Without the @hive.fund paying for things out of pocket we have to hope for development to happen altruistically or by huge stake holders. As we've found out the hard way from previous open-source failures: altruism is not scalable and can't be counted on. Even if there are a lot of devs tinkering with stuff for fun we've all seen how flaky that situation can become. And then on the other side of the coin we have a large stakeholder doing it to increase the value of their stake, which is also another outcome we shouldn't necessarily hope for because it subtlety implies that stake is overly centralized.

Conclusion

The goal of WEB2 is to turn every user into a Matrix battery that will pump out $5-$10 a year on average via targeted advertising. How much money is a Hive user worth? I have no idea but I know it's a helluva lot more than $5-$10 a year. As time goes on a WEB3 user will become worth more and more as they learn and acquire skills that allow them to build value within the ecosystem. In addition to this, WEB3 infrastructure will continue to be built that lowers the bar for creation and opens it up to a larger baseline. Learning to code is difficult, and it would be foolish to expect everyone to eventually become a developer.

The incentives of WEB2 lead to a bunch of wasted time, while the incentives of WEB3 lead to ever-increasing value propositions as time goes on and the space continues to mature. It's not hard to see that eventually WEB3 will flip WEB2 in every regard and siphon that entire user base into its own. This tipping point may be a decade down the line but the horizon is nothing but clear skies. WEB2 doesn't scale on a societal level. Digital ownership is the future.

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