A popular analogy for explaining web3 vs. old web paradigms goes like this:

Web1 = Read

Web2 = Read & Write

Web3 = Read, Write & Own

In Web1, the average internet user could, for the most part, only read content online. It involved going to the AOL or Yahoo homepage and checking out the latest news, or some other activity that was simply just consuming content. Like radio or television, information was beamed down to the end-user by third parties (usually large companies) that could afford the resources to broadcast on this new medium.

Web2 represented a sea change in how the average person could interact with the internet. Starting with forums and eventually ending with mass social media, the user could now broadcast their own messages directly to other internet users, or the entire world if they wished. Social media such as MySpace, Facebook and others now allowed the average person to easily create their own content and curate a following.

The downside, though, is that those social media companies actually owned that content at the end of the day. Whether by a terms of service agreement (which nobody read) or by the practical matter of all the data being stored on a server, users did not actually own their content, posts, or following -- the company could ban them or remove content at any time.

The latest change now possible thanks to web3 is that users can now finally create content and actually own it themselves. Instead of content existing on a company’s server, it can now be hosted on a public, decentralized blockchain which is maintained by thousands of computers across the whole world. Instead of a list of followers being proprietary data controlled by a company, that list can be a set of tokens which are carried by the user from one service to another.

We are still just at the beginning of this paradigm shift -- think Facebook circa 2005. It’s impossible for us to know where such a huge change will lead in 10-15 years, just like it was impossible for early Facebook users to imagine the platform being influential in elections. How will internet users change their behavior now that they unequivocally own the digital goods they produce? Only time will tell.