“Mashable" APIs and UIs were a core tenant of the original web 2.0 vision, but that project failed – not because the APIs were not open and permissionless, but more so because web2 never provided a fractal collaboration incentive structure.

The dream of an interoperable web2 was exposed as idealistic in light of their economic incentives – proven by Facebook and Twitter’s decisions to deprecate their developer APIs after an enthusiastic start. The problem seemed to be inherent to internet capitalism and the dream nearly died.

Web3 protocol incentives emerged as a fractal phenomenon that has revived this dream. Whereas Facebook and Myspace were in a zero-sum race for attention and network, web3 project that hold the same underlying token are inherently collaborators. Web3 allows projects to be collaborators in a way that web2 did not, and thus tends to be positive-sum by default.

This means that token-based web development will compound faster, and we should see greater exponential growth in digital development as a result of web3.