We Are All Slaves to the Tech Giants But Blockchain Will Free Us
This article was written by the ONO core team.
On January 22nd, 1984, hundreds of millions of viewers felt the jolting impact of Steve Jobs’ 1984 Apple ad for the first time.
In order to promote his first computer, the Macintosh, Apple played a 60-second ad called 1984 during the half-time break at the Super Bowl. The advertisement was drawn from George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name. At that time, IBM monopolized the computer market, and 1984 was Jobs’ battle against the tech giant.
1984 expresses Apple’s philosophy and goals: let the people control the technology themselves, instead of the government or big companies. Make computing so user-friendly that literally anyone will be able to master it.
Technology and business have giants in every era and our current era is no exception.
In the world of giant corporations, business interests are always first, and after a company has monopolized a certain market, most users just become silent dolls.
“Blockchain technology is poised to disrupt this rule of business history,” Ke Xu said.
As a millennial entrepreneur, Xu Ke has been a pioneer in the field of science and technology for several years now.
Ke Xu started a business in 2014 and successfully developed and operated a social media app called ERA, which was based on cognitive surplus. The monthly transaction amount was over 8 million and it became a very popular app with 10 million users at its height. In 2017, Ke Xu successfully developed and operated the blockchain-based game Cryptodogs which sold over a thousand ETHs on the first day (worth about USD $500k).
Today, Ke Xu is building the world’s largest free and decentralized social network called ONO.
This social network is based on the EOS blockchain. The ONO dApp launched on April 15th, 2018 and will be the first social dApp on EOS, when the EOS mainnet is launched. ONO is a social network that is fundamentally different from others as far as its philosophical roots.
ONO Founder and CEO Ke Xu
“First, we are slaves of the technology giants.”
When Weibo split up, its CEO was proud to tell Wall Street that they had 143.8 million monthly active users, so Sina Weibo thought it should be valued at more than US$5 billion, with a single active user being worth USD $50-$100.
This is the rule of the monopoly giants: assign a monetary value for each user and a value for the market. And then rely on the user’s attention, UGC and PGC (content production) to make money. But the users on these platforms gain absolutely nothing of this value. Zero. Zilch.
WeChat, Taobao, Sina Weibo… these platforms have hundreds of millions of active users, and people are flocking to them like sheep. People spend a lot of time looking at ads and getting caught up in low-quality clickbait material that is pushed to them.
99% of users contribute activity, attention, and content production to the platform without receiving anything in return. 1% of Big V makes money on Weibo, WeChat and other platforms. However, without these users, what is the value of these giant platforms?
Users do not have the right to speak, no one cares about the user’s feelings, and even the users themselves are not aware of this.
Thus, we find ourselves in this current situation of centralized social media platforms that are not actually even created for users. They are only created for advertisers.
Revolutionary blockchain technology will redistribute value.
“The giants have become the central funnels of technology that reach the masses: e-commerce, social networking, search, reading, funneling users through ad systems, and then profiting through information monopolization and selling user attention and data to the highest bidders.”
In 2017, Ke Xu decided to give users full autonomy and return value to the people who create it. Blockchain plus social media will enable Xu Ke’s vision to flourish. Thus, ONO was born.
What’s interesting about ONO is that it defines the value of attention, and all the data is owned by the users themselves. Additionally, users are the ones who receive income from their own content. In ONO, users can freely share and obtain valuable content, chat, study and exchange, and participate in building the ecosystem. While creating traffic value, they are incentivized to earn ONOTs, and also have referendum rights.
Freedom of Information
Centralized social giants such as Facebook can arbitrarily change, delete, and censor user information because all of the user’s data is stored in the giant’s database, and they are also free to dispose of it. The data in ONO does not belong to the ONO platform. Instead, it uses the blockchain distributed ledger solution to allow all users to have control over their own data. Ultimately, the information cannot be tampered with, and this ensures immutability.
The transmission of user information is done via end-to-end encryption, which means that the transmission of user information is completely private.
While in the process of operating Cryptodogs, Ke Xu discovered that the public blockchain was easily congested and the underlying technology was difficult to support high-traffic dApps. ONO will process information on a private chain to optimize the experience and only record the necessary integrated transactional results on the public chain.
The Value of Attention
The more users click on the article, the more ONOTs the content creator can obtain.
ONOT is a resource for all members of the ONO community to trust and hold. It has flowable, shareable, extremely valuable use cases, traffic value, and user attention value. ONOT will be exchanged in ONO’s content, referendum, mini app, and trading market to realize its commercial value.
Nowadays, vaporware crypto coins in the blockchain space is out of control, and many entrepreneurial projects rely on ICOs to raise money.
Xu Ke said:
“Now most entrepreneurial projects do not need to send money at all, because a lot of projects have no need for currency. Most ICO’s are just vaporware.
The issue of currency must be inextricably linked to the project being created. Entrepreneurs should focus on putting the blockchain into practical use instead of thinking about making quick money.”
Xu Ke is practicing blockchain in the social field. She said: “We don’t plan to issue a token when users don’t understand the value of attention and don’t understand their rights. The blockchain industry needs time to experience healthy growth. The biggest enemies of the blockchain are those who use blockchain technology to create vaporware projects.”
ONO Belongs To Everyone
“Using blockchain to create a decentralized social network, this community belongs to all users.” — Ke Xu
Based on blockchain development in ONO, all data is owned by users. The source of all revenue is the user’s attention. Ke Xu believes that there is no need for centralized management such as Facebook and Twitter, and she also thinks it’s not necessary for a few people to decide what hundreds of millions of users should do or see.
In addition, third-party developer teams can also create free decentralized games or applets based on ONO’s SDK. Developers also have all rights to process data, and they can gain a lot of revenue.
“Ultimately, ONO is not exclusive, but belongs to all participating users! The blockchain will break the unspoken rules of monopolies who enslave users and the change has only just begun.” -Ke Xu
