In a world where tech giants like Google and Facebook possesses more power than our government, privacy has become just a myth. With Data taking the top spot among the most precious resources available, those who controls them remains the market leaders. As these giants has the ability to manipulate and sell user data, does the name of “Social Media Platform” really fits them well? Or should they be designated as “Data Marketplaces”? Rise of decentralized systems built on top of blockchain provides a good alternative from these central systems. It solves the most important problem of trust as the system itself is transparent. Decentralized social media platforms are growing at a steady rate but most of the users are still unwilling for the change, feeding as prey to those centralized systems.
Monetized social media platforms has existed in the past, but neither of them succeeded in gaining a consistent userbase. Decentralized platforms like Steemit has attracted some attention , but they are eventually being destroyed by spam attacks which by itself is due to the flaw in their core structural design. Many more projects came later with a better claim but still are struggling for attention. The key flaw with these systems resides in the fact that they all focuses on quantity rather than quality. Being monetized the inflow of users at some point could be high with some of them being bad actors. Sybil attacks are quite a headache and aren’t easily avoidable. Also The early users here have an unfair advantage and even if majority of them are supporters a very few bad players can significantly impact the whole ecosystem. “Relevant”, yet another but unique decentralized social media platform grabs some attention here. Relevant put forwards an innovative approach, their reputation system removes the root problem faced by majority of decentralized social media platforms. Within Relevant, a set of trusted experts are initially assigned with reputation scores who later passes on Rep scores to whomever that adds values to the ecosystem. Also, reputation scores can only be earned here by certain activities like by sharing quality comments rather than spamming the feed by sharing links and upvotes hence avoiding bot attacks to a great extent. Users are rewarded based on their rep scores and not according to token stakes thus providing an equal opportunity for everyone and removing the unfair early user advantages. Stake based curation systems like one those used by Steemit gives large holders more power and doesn’t promote content quality. Relevant proposes a model that removes this problem.
One possible counter question here could be, what if the pre-selected trusted experts turns out to be malicious actors? This indeed is a very significant one. To tackle this the team put forwards a Reputation Governance system which proposes a voting model to remove or add trusted users if such a situation arises in the future. Voting power would be weighed according to both rep score and token holdings thus ensuring a balanced ecosystem. The monetization structure is also quite unique as it uses a model that considers user reputation for monetization. Users are rewarded for upvoting quality articles and are paid out according to the total activity the article achieves in a period of 3 days. It follows a predictive model which enables users to bet on articles with certain amount of REL tokens along with upvoting. The ability to find quality contents early on and upvoting them incentivizes users with potential higher rewards provided the articles get a good number of total upvotes. Thus this design promotes an ecosystem with quality contents which is the end goal for almost all social media platforms.
A change may not take place immediately, but definitely. Users who values their data and privacy will eventually switch to decentralized platforms. Which among of them to choose depends on what makes it unique and Relevant is one among to look out for.
