The question remains, will the scales ever tip the other direction?
I believe it can. Network effects work in reverse. As more activity is taken away, it has a greater than 1 impact.
But you need people to start pulling away, especially who are who essentially hubs.
True. But I think the time it will take will be longer than it took to move from Web1 to Web2, which was essentially 8-14 years depending on when you pinpoint the beginning of Web2. I would say the transition was culminated with the advent of YouTube in 2005.
If we begin counting when the bitcoin whitepaper was published and count 21 years from there, we're looking at 2028 at the earliest but most likely sometime around 2032-35 before we start to see a mass migration over to Web3. The beginning of the early mass adoption phase.
The other likely date is the first use of Web3, in 2014. That's about the time there was any real consensus developing in the crypto community that a new layer of the web was on the rise. Counting from there, it could be 2034 at the earliest before the early mass adopters start to make the move.
To me, I would say the start date for Web3 was smart contract technology. That was the real game changer (after decentralized consensus from Bitcoin).
Hard to create much with those contracts.
We're pretty close to the same time period. Smart contracts were created in the 1990s, but they didn't start becoming useful until Ethereum launched in 2015. So, that could be the date when we start counting. Still looking at 2030-2035 time frame for early mass adopters to begin to migrate.
That would make sense based upon history.
One question is whether acceleration could accelerate. The general public is more technologically advanced as compared to 20-25 years ago. While human tendency is slower than technology, it might be closing somewhere.
While it's true that people are more technologically advanced, there is much more resistance to Web3 than there was to Web2. In fact, there was hardly any resistance at all to Web2. Everyone knew that user-generated content was a step up. But Web2 brought us massive siloes and those who support the siloed web system are going to resist anything that threatens to tear down those siloes. That includes the silo owners, shareholders, and end users who are making money from those siloes. That's a lot of people who were very pro Web2 in 2004 and 2005 when Facebook and YouTube came online. In general, people will always resist any threat to their entrenched power structures.