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"Every new advent of the web is at first baffling," he said. Pop Culture What's An NFT? And Why Are People Paying Millions To Buy Them?ĭryhurst admits that trying to explain Web3 can be exasperating, since it's a loosely-defined term that takes on a slightly different shape depending on who is defining it but, he said, that's the case with all new frontiers of technology. Web3 is about grabbing some of the power back. Critics say over time those companies amassed too much power. Platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter emerged to bring order to the Internet by making it easy to connect and transact online. Then came Web 2.0 starting in the mid-2000s. It was pretty disorganized and overwhelming. The web was seen as a way to democratize access to information, but there weren't great ways of navigating it beyond going to your friend's GeoCities page. Think of it this way: The nascent days of the Internet in the 1990s were Web 1.0. In this new era, navigating the web no longer means logging onto the likes of Facebook, Google or Twitter. It's an umbrella term for disparate ideas all pointing in the direction of eliminating the big middlemen on the internet. Conversations are now peppered with it, and you're not serious about the future until you add it to your Twitter bio: Web3. There's a buzzword that tech, crypto and venture-capital types have become infatuated with lately. Web3, short for web 3.0, is a vision of the future of the Internet in which people operate on decentralized, quasi-anonymous platforms, rather than depend on tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
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