Dovey Wan, co-founder of Primitive Ventures: The flip side of Web2 is not Web3
Perhaps Web3 will ultimately find its own way to address the evils of Web2.Original author: @DoveyWan
This is probably the sentence I've repeated the most this year. Maybe I'm wrong; after all, it's hard to imagine what Web3 will specifically look like. Before the iPhone, no one could envision the current mobile internet. Here are some scattered thoughts to be proven or disproven in the future, both are good.
For a long time, much of the Web3 logic has repeatedly emphasized the problems of Web2: data silos, privacy and security, monopolies by tech giants, and so on. During the bull market cycle in 2017, a large number of projects that are now undoubtedly Web3 emerged, and there was a fleeting brilliance (in market value) from DID to Data Marketplace to Social to de-Ads.
After all, the highlight moment of ICOs back then was the $BAT ICO, which was also the first time gas wars were used.
$BAT, as a full-stack product, from a dream team to a traffic entry point (browser), to the entire design of decentralized advertising distribution and creator economy, still seems quite relevant today. I still remember the excitement I felt when I first saw BAT: Attention is currency, and whoever prints it should be rewarded.
Almost all Web2 traffic-related Web3 mappings follow this big logic.
The Brave browser boasts over 50 million MAU, but the usage of $BAT (its circulation within the advertising economy) and user payouts are quite insignificant in comparison.
Brave is a very good entry point, including various collaborations with other projects in Web3. However, the conversion of its Web2 utility to Web3 economics faces many challenges. Brave's main revenue model remains traditional advertising.
Now, many projects claiming to be "web3," various fi, various verb-to-earn models, still follow the path of 2017: distributing tokens, acquiring users, decentralization, community autonomy, and reaching the peak of Web3. It seems that having tokens guarantees users, and decentralization ensures spontaneous growth and self-circulation. As long as we eliminate the aspects of Web2 that are criticized and disliked by users, Web3 will succeed.
Another common path is:
First, use the mature customer acquisition system of Web2 to buy traffic, achieve retention, create a small application with a few hundred thousand users, issue tokens, and become the largest DAU application in the crypto space, declaring the completion of the Web3 revolution. This script was repeated in 2017, and the outcome is now clear.
Attempts are good, but the approaches seem a bit forced.
The internal combustion engine changed the principles of energy generation and consumption; putting a hardtop convertible on a horse-drawn carriage won't turn it into a car.
Perhaps Web3 will ultimately find its own way to address the evils of Web2, but simply creating a de-twitter, de-uber, or de-this and de-that, and making the "bright side of the web" is unlikely to be the evolutionary path of Web3.
TikTok became a giant under the noses of Facebook and Tencent, which surely far exceeded Zuck and Allen's imagination; this is still just an internal struggle of Web2.
Real Web3 applications are likely to emerge from relatively marginal use cases, rather than directly targeting the heart of the enemy. Looking back at the earliest forms of today's giants, they were random and comical.
What defeated Google was not de-Google, and what defeated Facebook was not de-Facebook. Not to mention that the underlying technologies, tools, and architectures have not kept pace with the beautiful visions of "data economy" and "community autonomy." How can we de-these giants?
If you are a builder in Web3, please do not be constrained by the inherent paths of DAU, duration, conversion rates, etc., from Web2. Those are not important.
We do not need to create a headline with tokens, or a Twitter with tokens; what we need is something that might only have 100 people who are crazy about it, 1,000 people who find it fun, and 10,000 people who think, "What is this?" but seem to find it somewhat interesting.
If token distribution in your product ecosystem is merely a "customer acquisition channel," a "growth method," or if the product can operate more efficiently without the token economy using traditional internet methods, then congratulations, you are a qualified Web2 application developer.
Innovation often comes from marginalized groups and edge cases, whether it’s the first generation of internet pioneers in the early 90s accompanied by the wave of technological libertarianism, or Satoshi Nakamoto and other crypto punks fulfilling their dream of "occupying Wall Street" through mathematics and computer science. Native innovation is always random and strange. Remember the first Bitcoin transaction, the first use of an AMM-based DEX; it was roughly this kind of strange feeling.
The opposite of Web2 is not Web3.
