Web3's Current State and Improvements
Where the stack is actually shipping, and where it's hand-waving
Mirror Protocol is a decentralized alternative to publishing apps like Substack and Medium. It stores posts on Arweave, uses ENS for identity, and lets writers tokenize their work through crowdfunds and editions.
The layers that are actually working
Three stacks have matured past vaporware:
Storage. Arweave and IPFS+Filecoin have shipped real permanence for real content. Publishers and indexers rely on them daily. The UX is still fiddly, but the primitive works.
Identity. ENS reshaped how wallets present themselves. "Send to vitalik.eth" is a better UX than "Send to 0x..." and the name service doubles as a lightweight profile layer.
Publishing. Mirror, Paragraph, and friends let writers own their distribution list (a wallet subscription, not an email) and monetize without a platform gatekeeper.
The layers still hand-waving
Social graphs remain mostly centralized. On-chain reputation is more demo than product. "Decentralized compute" still means "expensive single-machine verification" in nearly every live system.
The pattern: Web3 wins where permanence and ownership of an asset matter. It loses where low-latency coordination matters. That's not a permanent limitation, but it's the one to plan around in 2022.