How will ordinary people navigate through a decentralized web 3.0?

This article was first published on Medium on May 21, 2021

The internet as we know it today will change. Rather invisible to the public eye, the technological foundations for a future version of the internet are defined today, and the two keywords are #blockchain and #decentralization.

Photo by Launchpresso on Unsplash

The internet 2.0 that we all use today is designed around central platforms that connect individuals. These platforms act as middle people for all sort of interactions. When a person buys something from another person, eBay sits in the middle and defines the playground as well as the rules of the game. Same for social interactions (Facebook, WhatsApp) and financial transactions. It’s the banks that define the rules, ask for fees and enable two people to transfer money. An early glimpse of a peer-to-peer transaction system was offered by PayPal, allowing two individuals to send money back and forth with no bank or time delay in the middle.

But the web 3.0, built around blockchains, wants to go one step further and aims for true peer-to-peer transactions, no eBay, no PayPal needed. Smart contracts, small software packages that include triggers and actions, could replace insurance contracts or loans - even Kickstarter, because they fire automatically once a trigger is pulled:

Today, Kickstarter is an example of a replaceable centralized platform. Two parties (supply side and demand side) come to the platform because they either want to collect money or provide money. This transaction is attached to a trigger – only when a minimum threshold of money is collected, the money will be sent from the supply side to the demand side.

Another example is insurances and the question, under which circumstances money will flow. All such trigger–action combinations could be coded into smart contracts, reducing manual effort, delay, costs, and, most importantly, fraud.

As a UX researcher, working for and working with centralized platforms every day, I start wondering what a potential future user experience for the web could look like. How will people have a sense of place, how will they interact online, how do they find their way through the web?

Will all of these changes remain technical details that ordinary people won’t feel? Or will the battle between centralized and decentralized web lead to significant changes in the way we experience the internet on a daily basis?

This article will raise more questions than it provides answers. No one knows yet. But we can learn a few things from the past that allow us to predict the future.

1. Convenience always wins

Looking back at the previous ten online years, we can see that high adoption rates go along with high convenience. The most successful platforms on the web are intuitive to use, easy to understand, and just convenient. And while all technical details around blockchain and smart contracts sound extremely complicated, I am sure we will find ways to offer pleasing and simple experiences to the users. If it will be expected from an ordinary person to write their own smart contracts in Solidity, deploy and publish them onto the blockchain – no one will adapt to the new technology, no matter how much more privacy comes with it. So how can you offer convenience, so that you don’t cut off the majority of non-technical people on this planet?

2. People follow recommendations from others

The reason why only one relevant social network exists on the internet has to do with convenience, as much as FOMO – you just go where everyone is. You won’t bother communicating with two friends on this platform and another three on that platform. After a while, the community will agree on one platform, that is what happened with Facebook and later WhatsApp.

A similar trend can already be observed on Mastodon, a Twitter alternative based on blockchain technology: New users must decide, which of the plenty of decentralized servers within the network they want to join. Choosing out of cryptic sounding options like dizl.de can be complicated, so it can be observed that people join these networks which already have a lot of members.

Now, what does that mean for a decentralized internet? You want to avoid these clusters, these monopolies. You want to avoid that a few corporations have all the data and all the power. That is the central idea around blockchain. I am not sure how you will avoid that people gather around the most convenient offer, just like they do today.

3. People no longer want regulations – or do they?

The essential idea of blockchain is that no central institution controls your behavior. Web 3.0 will be democratic at its core. Everyone who wants can contribute, the code is public, everyone has the same information.

I am wondering whether this potential increase in decisions to be made, this new level of responsibility might overwhelm people, or at least our generations. Apple did allow you to restrict app tracking for a while, but only since it is turned off by default you can actually measure the effect. Countries in which their population is organ donors by default (with the right to opt-out) have a significantly higher share of people supporting organ donations than people in countries in which by default they are not (with the right to opt-in).

What I want to say is: People like guidance. They like being told what the rules are. Maybe not all, but certainly many people appreciate that decisions are made for them and they just need to follow along.

How the web 3.0 will actually feel like – no one knows yet. As said, maybe the main changes will happen behind the curtain, invisible to everyone who does not read code. But potentially it will indeed lead to another evolutionary step in how we engage with others online, how we make decisions online and how we take responsibility for our actions.

I can’t wait to see what will happen…