I don't know about you, but I'm getting real tired of seeing all of these web2's enter web3 but only looking to turn it into web2 as much as possible. Okay weird sentence so let me elaborate a bit more on that.
If you've followed TechCrunch on Twitter in the past you'd always get these "new start-up "raises" x million for their idea" and "company x raises x million more in funding round b for their product at an evaluation of x billion", you may have been wondering how many normal people are involved there other than possibly being employed and earning the average amount a person in that line of work would. I suppose there are some companies that also offer "shares" to certain employers but that's definitely not the norm.
Now we're seeing all these tokens do pretty much the same thing. New tokens, even blockchains are being launched with initial funding coming from VC's, angel investors often even just being sister companies of bigger ones all mostly going to funnel profit to a few. I'm not even going to get started on the equity shares the company/founders give themselves compared to these VC's but if it's already quite enormous at the start and these VC's are just getting a tiny portion of it for their initial early and cheap funding, you can maybe imagine what that will mean for the public who think they may be getting in early once those tokens hit the exchanges on a paid listing, with the exchanges being part of the initial investors often themselves.
Where does that leave the public? Where does it leave the fairness we once strived for?
I remember when the shittiest shitcoins would get blasted on forums for there even being so much as a 10% premine and this most likely was also a reason many ignored Steem back in the day and rightly so, except for a few who stuck with it either way due to its uniqueness and potential. Luckily a lot of that unfairness is now gone with Hive but it feels like the people lost most of the power after that era when the "real money" started to come in.
I'm even seeing galleries become walled gardens in #web3 too where you have to attain a certain hype until they'll accept you to mint works on their platform, take a cut from you and who knows what goes on behind those curtains since power is held by a select few.
Something people don't seem to grasp is that power will eventually always be misused. It's something I've talked about in the past concerning Reddit and their centralized database that is unknown to outsiders. You can't know what's happening there, who's pulling the strings to feed you information they pick and choose. When Elon took over Twitter, one thing I loved about that is that he started publicizing the shady things that went on there before his acquisition.
Things like employees doing backroom deals on who gets a verified sticker. Imagine that, you're paying an employee a bonus just so he can unfairly push you in front of an unknown waiting list to give you a verified sticker that may increase your influence on the platform. Something you'd think the employees should work in their regular working hours towards ensuring as many who deserve the sticker get it. Aside from that all of the censorship and soft-shadowbanning by not allowing certain tweets from certain authors to trend or get visibility because someone else asked them to.
Now stop for a moment and wonder, do you think Twitter is the only place this happens on? Out of all the platforms, employees and attention that's directed towards them there must be an insane amount of shady activity occurring daily because the hidden actions on #web2 infrastructure allow it to happen.
Now I'm not saying #web3 is perfect, there's plenty of abuse the tech allows to occur here too, things like wash-trading through sock accounts, hacks and scams, etc. Right now though it seems like most projects that enter the space look to just drain as much value as they can similar to how they've been doing in forever on web2 at the cost of its users/fans. While you some times get a chance to be an investor in these projects now in #web3, that chance only seems to be made of smoke and mirrors when the intention was never there to provide something of long term value anyway.
I don't know, I just think we can do better and I'm a big proponent myself of creating value from fair early distributions. Some other projects in this space give me hope that I'm not the only one, for instance 
I'm quite over it but the general market doesn't seem to be and the ICO craze has shifted from the early days to another similar method where the odds of regular folks being able to invest and see nice returns has diminished and gotten a lot harder, way harder than it need to be considering what this tech enables if done right and most importantly done with the right intentions.
