Web1 to Web3, a brief history
Read, Write, Own
TLDR:
Web1 = Read. Websites were passive with users running their own servers.
Web2 = Write. User-generated content with centralisation on a few major players.
Web3 = Own. Ownership of digital assets and a push back to decentralisation.
Writing a weekly blog has been very fulfilling and enjoyable so far! It’s great to be able to share knowledge with others that I’ve accumulated after almost 7 years in the space and over 15 years in Tech. However, my posts have been really long recently and that makes it hard for people to read in today’s fast paced world.
So I’m going to try switching up the format and try to make these posts are lot shorter so that people can pick them up and read in 3-5 minutes.
To kick that off, today I want to go into a brief history of the Web and discuss how its evolved through from Web1 to Web3 using a framework that I like: “read, write, own.”
Web1 - Read
The very first website was created in 1991 by Tim Berners Lee when he created the World Wide Web. The Web was built on open source protocols that defined the Internet such as TCP, IP and HTTP. With these free to use protocols and software languages like HTML early web users created and hosted their own websites.
However, at the time you needed a lot of technical knowledge to do even basic things, building was challenging and there were limited software frameworks available and even software engineers working in the space.
Also, the Internet of 90s had limited infrastructure with slow download and upload speeds using telephone modems running at a fastest of 56Kbps, over 1000 times slower than todays 4G speeds.
Compound all this with limited creativity as people didn’t really know what to do with the technology yet. This meant that in the 90s most websites were passive places where your only interaction was just to read and click on links over and over again.
Many websites were just direct copies of what was done in the physical world brought to a digital format. Even forward thinking companies of the time like Wired would simply replicate their own magazine’s news stories online in a very basic format. Using the wayback-machine the image above shows the Wired website in 1999.
Web2 - Read-Write
Over time Internet infrastructure improved with the advent of broadband and cellular networks, and developers began creating new software tools and frameworks. Through the combination of open source software and private company innovation the Internet evolved to allow more complex things to be done.
Websites like Digg were some of the first to allow for user-generated content. It began with up votes and down votes and over time the content on the website was entirely created by users. Curiously Kevin Rose was a Web2 pioneer having founded Digg in 2004 and is now a Web3 pioneer with Proof and Moonbirds. Below is an example of what Digg looked like in 2007, the red box I added highlights how ‘user-powered content’ was a big deal then.
Blogging text, posting images, and creating videos on the web became more and more common. Fast forward to today and almost all users on the internet are generating content daily. Whether through WhatsApp messages to their family, Instagram posts to their followers, or LinkedIn posts for their business contacts. Facebook alone has over 2 billion profiles that’s 1/4 of the world’s 8 billion population.
The web became social, as Web2 introduced the ability for people to write and generate content. Another important shift happened too though. Rather than maintaining our own servers we shifted control over to these Web2 companies as users created the content on platforms provided by them.
Web2 companies facilitated our interactions over the internet but in exchange they created silos of user data, behaviour, and actions. For many of the larger companies we the users are the product ourselves, companies learn about us and sell our data to the highest bidder. Convenience gave way to centralisation and we gave control away to some of the now largest companies in the world like Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft.
Web3 - Read-Write-Own
Bitcoin ushered in a new age with a strong movement against the centralisation of the Internet and towards a more free, open and decentralised one. The Web3 space is built on these principles of decentralisation and a counter-culture to the modern centralised Web.
One of the most important innovations of Bitcoin was that it allowed us to attribute ownership to assets on the network through the magic of cryptography. No single party owns the Bitcoin network, but in return for updating the ledger and securing the network, participants are rewarded in BTC a scarce digital asset that only they own. Ethereum took this to another level with smart contracts and tokenisation, concepts that are so new that its hard to predict all the innovation that will arise from them.
Even new governance models that are not necessarily the same as our standard companies or nation-states have arisen such as DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations). Examples of which can be categorised by the decentralised governance of Bitcoin and Ethereum themselves.
Ownership in Web3 means that the builders, operators, and users of a platform own a piece of what they use. Web3 takes away the control of data and users from large Web2 platforms and allow the user to be at the centre again. The grand vision is that participants of any network will be able to own a piece of the products and services that they use everyday.
Web3 is such a significant shift that it can change the way we look at hugely significant societal concepts like: money, identity, ownership, governance, data security, and the list goes on. But to keep this post from getting too long we’ll leave these topics for future posts!
One final crucial point to remember here is that the terms Web1, Web2 and Wb3 are ultimately just rough lines in the sand. They make it easy to rationalise about the evolution of the Web but in practice one does not replace the other, rather they build on what came before. When using these terms we are discussing the maturing of the technologies that we know as the Internet and the Web.
So if anyone asks you why is it called Web3 and what its all about, you now know how to explain it to them!