Web3 myth collection (1): What problems did I encounter in Web2?
Original Author: Knight Zhang
Original Source: Uncertain Thinking
Related Reading:
Web3 Myth Collection (2): It is very important for users to own Web3
Web3 Myths (3): The 3+1 Model of Web3
Original Author: Knight Zhang
Original Source: Uncertain Thinking
secondary title
Related Reading:
Web3 Myth Collection (2): It is very important for users to own Web3
Web3 Myths (3): The 3+1 Model of Web3
What is web3, I don't feel that there is a relatively accurate definition at present. After all, new things are constantly becoming clear in the process of evolution. If they can be accurately defined, it means that they have basically taken shape, and the relative opportunity space will not be very large.
At the U.S. Congress hearing last week, Brian Brooks (CEO Bitfury Group) directly gave the definition of WEB3: readable and writable, and can be owned at the same time. Compared with WEB1’s read-only and WEB2’s readable and writable, ordinary users can listen to it at once. Understand concepts. This is currently the most widely accepted explanation.
It is an epoch-making milestone for the audience to understand intuitively on such a high-level occasion and directly lead to the WEB3 revolution happening in the United States.
What problem am I having in Web2
I am not very clear about what web3 should look like. However, for traditional web2 applications, I personally have many shortcomings, and I feel that it is difficult to solve in the current Internet application ecology.
Take my personal content output as an example. I will output articles on the WeChat official account. These are all free, and I will record some of my thoughts.
It is difficult to build a paid community based on the official account. It does not have the concept of a group, and can only pay for a single article, and there is no membership system. Therefore, I chose Knowledge Odaily to create a paid community.
The problem with Odaily is that tolls are very expensive. They charge a 20% handling fee. If you are an Apple user, you will be charged an additional 30% handling fee. Half of the membership fee is earned by the merchant!
Knowledge The content publishing interface of Odaily is not very good, and it cannot support various format optimizations like professional content publishing websites. If you post the tutorial directly in Odaily, it will look very unfriendly.
Therefore, we still need to find a relatively easy-to-use content publishing platform with an authentication mechanism. Currently, we choose notion.
The above three tools solve three problems:
The official account solves the problems of content access channels, publicity and drainage
Odaily solves the problem of membership-based community communication
notion solves the problem of content publishing and browsing with authentication mechanism
For paying users, multiple applications are involved in maintaining different accounts. For fee-payers, it is difficult to realize automatic account system association and automatic authorization to maintain member information in different channels, identify membership period and authorization, etc.
Because the data between different systems is not connected, only the fee-payer can maintain it by himself.
Is there an application that can meet the above requirements at the same time? Personally, I haven't found a more perfect application yet, and even if there are some, they are all unsatisfactory in one aspect.
Most of the applications of web2 are good at one direction. If they are to be used in combination, the walls between them are very high, and there are many restrictions on the reference of content.
Most of the paid communities I have participated in have seen similar problems in form. For example, in some paid communities based on WeChat, most of the content is posted in the group. In fact, climbing stairs is very hard.
Hardworking friends will put the content in shared documents such as graphite, which also brings new problems. If the document is shared, those who do not pay can still view it. If you want to authorize, there is no way to automatically read the group members, and it takes too much energy to do it manually.
To be honest, I feel that the payment community based on WeChat is all about monetizing traffic, earning money from new users, and attracting new users every issue. It is really difficult to do a good job of serving old users. After all, such a carrier does not Possess continuous service capability.
Possibilities of WEB3
Still taking the example of knowledge payment I mentioned above, the most basic elements of a knowledge payment community include: paid content, paid user accounts, unpaid user accounts, paid information, etc.
In my case, the paid content is in notion, the paid user account and payment information are in Odaily, and the unpaid user account is in the official account. The data between these applications is not interoperable.
If you use the idea of web3 to do this, users can directly use encrypted wallets as accounts. Payment can be made in the form of NFT or token. After the content carrier interacts with the user's wallet and signs, it verifies whether the account has a corresponding NFT or token, and if there is one, it can be browsed, if not, it cannot be browsed.
Through the above decoupling, paid content can easily realize member management and automatic viewing of paid content. As long as the application supports wallet verification and specific token authorization.
This method first gets rid of the binding of specific platforms to users. Take Odaily as an example, you have already paid here, and these fees cannot be transferred to other platforms. Even if you are not satisfied with the platform, it is difficult to give up, after all, there are fees in it.
If this solution of web3 is adopted, the actual payment is recorded on the blockchain, which does not belong to specific applications, and the value layer can be recognized as long as all applications that support the underlying blockchain.
This is more conducive to the competition of new applications. As long as the product is well done, there will be creators who can directly migrate over at any time.
In this example, the user has autonomy over the payment information, and it can follow the user's wallet to access different applications, not just limited to a single application.
To give another inappropriate example, if ofo used this method of charging at the beginning, user deposits would actually be in an NFT. Other bicycle companies can also use this NFT as a basis for deduction. Ofo cannot be used, but it can still be used in other applications.
Possession, the most basic right is the possession of identity information such as account numbers. Almost all the accounts of Internet applications we use now are not owned by us personally, and all the data is owned by Internet companies.
In web3, the encrypted wallet is currently the most intuitive account, we have the private key, so we have our own account, which cannot be deleted and forged by the application.
how to change
The most likely change should be to directly graft metamask authentication. The authentication method of web3 is relatively easy to transform. For example, various authentications in the discord channel can directly verify the wallet address and whether there is a certain token in the wallet.
Complicated is the native compatibility of the application side, such as directly adopting the native authentication method of web3, adopting the token-based authorization system, etc., which needs to be considered in the design of the application. It is relatively difficult to transform old web2 applications.
In the web3 world, I personally think that there will be many small and beautiful applications. They are organically combined through encrypted wallets. According to the different needs of users, many different usages can be customized. There is no need to wait for a new version of a large application to meet the new needs of users.
