DfinitySZ AMAs Review｜Nuance — Dfinity Ecosystem Web3.0 Blogging

The first batch of Grant projects in the Dfinity ecosystem: Nuance is a decentralized Medium built entirely on the Dfinity chain. Nuance provides users with a seamless end-to-end Web3 Mediumd experience. DfinitySZ Community’s first AMA event (DfinitySZ X Nuance)!

Q1. What is Nuance？What kind of product do you want to build?

Nuance is a web3 blogging platform built on, and for, the new web. We want to build a publishing platform that is owned by its community.

Although it has been possible to build a web3 blogging platform using a blend of existing technologies or purpose built blockchain, we believe that soon we will be able to do all of this on the IC.

All on-chain.

We are proud to be one of the first recipients of the grant （25k）from the foundation and we have just completed our final milestone. Combined with our pre-seed round we have a few months runway before we raise seed.

Q2. Why IC, what’s the advantage of IC?

From bulletin boards via a telephone line to the beautiful and simple Medium, blogging has come a long way. Today almost anybody can create a beautiful article and post it to the world for free.

But for the authors driving this evolution, three problems persist:

1/ Risk of censorship — the monopolisation of the internet has created CEO censorship

2/ Lack of ownership — ownership of their work is foregone or unclear

3/ Unfair monetisation — authors have a right to a fair share of the value their
work creates (as do all contributors)

The IC solves these problems.

1/ Community ownership (DAO) provides censorship resistance

2/ NFTs provide clear (fractional) ownership of work

3/ Token economics provide fair monetisation for all contributors

Q3. What’s the reason for build this platform ?

The Internet Computer can scale to make decentralised social (DeSo) possible for the first time. With a background in publishing, a “Web3 Medium”, was an obvious choice. Along with Distrkt, OpenChat and DSCVR we make up the pillars of DeSo on the IC.

Q4. What’s the project’s phase now？

Alpha release to get early feedback. Beta release in December. We have over 5000 people sign up for the alpha and so far we are getting very positive feedback.

Q5.What type of content do you hope to attract?

We are all aware of the current problems with centralised social (CeSo). Nuance will be a platform for decentralised opinions to combat the current polarisation of opinions which are due to the advertising driven business models of CeSo. We hope to encourage thoughtful contribution and

We start with blogging and then expand into books, magazines and local newspapers. We want to be the world’s must trusted platform for long form content.

Q6.How will ensure quality content?

We plan to build incentive mechanisms and features for moderation, including fact checking. We also have some feature ideas such as ‘full text response’ which will be a long form ‘response’ to another article. We think that “comments” does not provide the space for a thoughtful response, so we plan to provide our users with the opportunity to provide a thoughtful response. We are also establishing an ethics committee to help us draft our first policies with the intention for this committee to be a good candidate for delegate ethics related proposals when we setup the liquid democracy.

Q7. What are your biggest concerns? What keeps you up at night?

Nuance will eventually become a DAO, and that means that the platform, content and policies will be determined by the community via a liquid democracy. The legal system in which we live in the physical world is necessarily behind technology development which means the laws which we all must abide, are not yet clear in this area.

Q8.What’s the hard part by now ? (Any advise for the developers）

The hard part right now is building the team to increase our capacity. I am not an engineer so can’t advise engineers, but I would say that its still an immature stack but has a very collaborative community. The only advise I would have for engineers is that this is likely to be the future of software. And we are hiring :)

The foundation is very supportive of entrepreneurs and their grants program/team, especially Alexa, have been a huge support for us. The grants program is still running so check it out.

Q9.Tell us about the team?

We are a team with 4 pepole. I am a product manager. I have a publishing background. My co-founder Paul, and our two engineers Megha and Pranil all have CeFi (centralised finance) backgrounds. We are all experienced in shipping enterprise grade software at scale but this is our first product built on blockchain. It has been a steep learning curve but we are now starting to build momentum.

We are seeking talented crypto obsessed software engineers. Go to www.aikin.io/careers to let us know you are interested.

Q10.What’s the blueprint about this platform？ Whats the plan for the future?

We want to take full advantage of the service composability potential of the IC and we will be working with other teams to build out Nuance capabilities such as NFT minting, content moderation, contributor reputation and tokenised governance.

Q11. What does the roadmap look like?

We first build out the standard blogging features including Tags / Comments / Bookmarking / Reporting / Upvoting / Sharing, then we move into the unique capabilities of the IC, including NFT Minting / Native Token / Demand and Release / Tipping / Tokenised governance (liquid democracy) / Moderation (including fact checking) / Reputation.

Eventually the product roadmap, and platform policies will be in the hands of the community!

We are still at the earlier stage, but we believe that we are on the forefront of mass adoption of Web3 and brining the power of the internet back to the people.

Q1: What is the difference between this project and steem?

Nick: Steem is a purpose built blockchain. The IC enables us to build a web3 blogging platform out of the box. The interoperability with the rest of the IC makes this easier for us to build. For example, we can use an existing service for NFT minting.

Q2: There is already dscvr on the IC, and the development of this app is pretty good. How does our project compete with dscvr? They have the first mover advantage.

Nicl: DSCVR is indeed a great platform. But it is web3 Reddit. Distrikt is web3 social network. We are web3 Medium.

Q3: Is the data storage of the project decentralized and is it safe?

Nick:Everything is on the IC. All storage, front end, back end. Everything.

Q4: If tokens are issued in the future, have you considered airdropping tokens to early users?

Nick: We will indeed airdrop to early users to help overcome the cold start problem (ie no authors because no readers and no readers because no authors.

Q5: Can a blog support multiple people editing at the same time? Similar to Google Docs.

Nick: Co-editing is not on the roadmap right now.

The above is the review content of the first AMA event of DfinitySZ. If you are a community user of DfinitySZ, you can participate in DfinitySZ’s treasure hunter activities and submit your favorite IC treasure projects. Treasure project submission entrance: https://forms.gle/DFhRbXimgxxfDynHA, the submitted project will have the opportunity to participate in our DfinitySZ AMAs!