Comment by armada651
21 days ago
> It’s obvious there’s a “there” there with LLMs (in a way there wasn’t with, say, Web 3.0, or “the metaverse,” or some of the other weird fads recently)
There is a "there" with those other fads too. VRChat is a successful "metaverse" and Mastodon is a successful decentralized "web3" social media network. The reason these concepts are failures is because these small grains of success are suddenly expanded in scope to include a bunch of dumb ideas while the expectations are raised to astronomical levels.
That in turn causes investors throw stupid amounts of money at these concepts, which attracts all the grifters of the tech world. It smothers nacant new tech in the crib as it is suddenly assigned a valuation it can never realize while the grifters soak up all the investments that could've gone to competent startups.
>Mastodon is a successful decentralized "web3" social media network.
No, that's not what "web3" means. Web3 is all about the blockchain (or you can call it "distributed ledger technology" if you want to distance it from cryptocurrency scams).
There's nothing blockchain-y about Mastodon or the ActivityPub protocol.
web3 means different things to different people, much like how AI-powered means different things to different people.
All that matters is that the moneyed class is able to choose a slightly related definition of it that generates speculative value.
The fundamental idea behind web3 was decentralization. Of course the blockchain was seen as the primary method to drive that decentralization. Mainly so people could drive up the valuation of their crypto currencies.
Cryptocurrencies themselves could also serve as a example of a grain of success for web3.