Thread by @andrestaltz

The Web, 3 decades from now

Yesterday @jaydson was interviewing me and asked me a really difficult question: how will the Web look like 30 years from now? (Optimistically)

Thread ⬇

To give a realistic answer, I had to split up the years in decades, and take some insight from the past.

🎨 The first decade of the Web was characterized by an artistic exploration of how far we could take the idea of static HTML pages with hyperlinks.

💥 The second decade of the Web was Web 2.0, server side apps or client side web apps, and an immense amount of innovation, companies and products. Google rose up, Facebook was born, Cloud became a thing, thousands of startups emerged. This was the golden era of the Web.

🚀 The third decade was marked by platform consolidation, when a few key companies became tech giants. They acquired many startups, discontinued several products. Other startups failed. Smartphones boomed. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook became almost synonym of Web.

⚖ The next decade will probably be marked by heavy regulation. EU's GDPR was an important event, but more will come (the EU has more planned). USA is already following suit. China's separation is the symbol of internet balkanization. The Web will become less wild (+ less fun).

🕶 Tools for circumvention, such as Tor, VPN, cryptocurrencies, new decentralized protocols, are not mainstream today, but maybe in 2030s. Regulation will not work to make the Web "behave", so users will begin to use new tools for what used to be normal and legal in 2010s Web.

🌷🌿 Harmony. After a lot of struggle with regulation, governments will make peace with the internet's unique nature (also because we will have younger politicians who grew with the Web), and internet usage will respect some few important legal and ethical guidelines.

Like other technologies, such as fire, we learn what's dangerous, and what's safe usage, and after a while these guidelines become built into us, and we stop thinking about it. Safeguarding against it becomes automatic.

This will be the "boring substratum" phase. We won't debate about data privacy or centralization corruption or government control anymore. Those will be solved, and we will actually take it for granted.

Our attention will be focused on something else, I don't know what, though.

It could go wildly differently, maybe more dystopian, but hey, I was asked to give an optimistic estimate. 😊🌱