The vision of web3 is that we get all the same innovation of today’s web, but with the new benefit that we can “own” our data in a public and immutable blockchain, using this data across multiple apps. It’s a great vision, but might be harder than we think.
Why? Because data nearly always works in the context of an app. Twitter social graph, YouTube channels, Spotify playlists, Airbnb listings, Shopify stores: these develop over *years* within the context of a product and APIs that moved quickly to build value and trust over time.
Most of the time a product manager or entrepreneur gets started, they don’t know what the future use cases will be. But for data to be useful to other apps, you have to decide what goes on/off chain. This sounds simple, but is very hard for any dynamic fast-moving product space.
Why? Most apps release features weekly. Now, to ensure major updates are supported by other clients, you must go to the ecosystem to ensure others adopt the improvements. What if they won’t? Remember these are competitors! Now you have to reach consensus.
Further, one user or app’s definition of “important” data to put on chain might be different from another; and because the tech is trustless and immutable, you may have use-cases that aren’t appropriate for other untrusted apps. All of this means more negotiation not innovation.
Harder: with web3 ideals, we’ve likely added community governance and tokenomics into the mix, which adds a new negotiation vector. Not all parties may believe the same thing as you, and now you’re essentially debating feature releases with *shareholders* that may bail. Slow!
Fine, so let’s say you can’t build consensus and decide to fork your app. All of a sudden you’ve lost a major benefit of everyone being on the same universal protocol, and the value of the network drops. Further, users get confused and fatigued with this friction.
Ultimately, knowing everything we know today about consensus building, agile development, economic incentives, and humans, it seems we would end up with either: 1) dominant centralized platforms again, or 2) relatively shallow apps with low innovation rates.
These are hard problems about human coordination, not about software or blockchains. And it’s the reason why web3 works with *simple* predictable data like money or JPEGs. The challenge is, a *small* subset of today’s software shares that characteristic today or in the future.
I could be totally wrong! But history tells us quite a bit about tech. The ideals of web3 seem great, and we should push to have more open source, more protocols, more data portability - but we should discuss the trade-offs of the solutions to get there.
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