Web3 is a new iteration of the Internet, involving token-based economics, decentralization, and blockchain technology. 

Web3 is the Next Stage of the Evolution of the Internet

Web3 is generally regarded as conceptual, and follows the principles of centralization and decentralization. In information technology, data is said to follow cycles of centralization, in which all data tends to travel towards a singular source, and decentralization, in which data disperses to a smaller subset of sources. If you think about the way the Internet began, with many individuals breaking away from the US economic systems of the 1990s and forging a path forward with their "brand new website," represents a kind of decentralization from the information systems present before the age of the Internet. Let's take a brief tour of the history of the Internet to go into depth.

Web1.0 (1991-2004)

During this early era of the Internet, most websites consisted of "static pages," often composed of rudimentary HTML code, and operated by individuals and small businesses. In the mid 90s, commercial use restrictions on the Internet were lifted and the birth of services such as AOL, Google, and Amazon were born. These businesses decentralized from the brick-and-mortar style business that had historically been the status quo.

Web2.0 (2004-2020)

With the birth of social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, and other websites which allowed users to upload files and data to a website's server, the process of centralization began again. This is where issues such as data privacy, personal identity protection, and other more modern problems arose. This period of Internet history is dominated by "Big Tech" companies which benefited from the decentralization period of Web1.0 and profited from their earlier work.

Web3.0 (2020-Today)

With social media sites gradually losing their popularity in the last few years, many users are undergoing another period of decentralization. One such factor in this decentralization process is cryptocurrency. This "digital money," characterized as game tokens in the gaming industry, allows for new pathways to wealth to be built by those brave and willing enough to lead the way. Technologists and journalists have described Web3 as a potential solution to modern issues such as over-centralization of the world wide web.

What Does That Mean for Creators?

Creators and artists are individuals, people who thrive on expression and community, many digital natives have always known what it means to live by passion alone and struggle financially to accomplish their goals. There are some in the creative industry who thrive only because they depend on an entity such as a large media corporation to keep them employed.

As community builders, digital creators have the ability to form a decentralized autonomous organization, sometimes referred to as a DAO. This organization is constructed by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, and controlled by a community's members, much like a Discord Server or other IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Such communities would have internalized economies based on "community tokens," often as rewards for community events, or to be exchanged for digital assets of value between community members. They would be governed by the same standards set out in these DAOs terms and conditions in the rules encoded into these communities.