A primer on decentralized social media
This article is meant to inspire you to think about the intersection of blockchain and social media. It introduces the topic briefly and gives some recommendations for further reading.
Most people first heard about the blockchain because of bitcoin, a payment system that allows you to send money directly to anyone else in the world without a bank or financial intermediary in between. This helps the people at both ends because they don’t have to pay hefty fees to middlemen anymore.
But when we transfer information rather than money, there are also middlemen involved: When you communicate with your friends online, you do not directly communicate with your friends. Rather there is a company — most prominently Facebook — in between that takes your data, rearranges it and then passes it on to your friends. People do not want to pay money fees to Facebook for providing this service, so instead Facebook levies attention fees: In between the valuable information from our friends, Facebook places advertisement that we do not really want to see, just because someone paid them to make us see it. In exchange for allowing us to to communicate with our friends in a fun and informative way, we accept that Facebook takes some of our attention and sells it to advertisers.
This deal is problematic, because it harbors a significant conflict of interest: Once a social media network has built its user base and extinguished its competition it is tempting for the company behind it to exploit the monopoly power to make as much money as possible. The company earns money from people being on the website, not necessarily from people having a happy social life. So the company might not act in the best interest of the user. This is the reason that lots of social apps are intentionally engineered to be addictive. Huge commercial powers are effectively shaping our lives and our culture in their narrow business interests.
Blockchain technology is disrupting this system. It enables us to replace the social media operator company with open-source software protocols and publicly accessible data infrastructures. But there is then a difficult question to be answered: Who will organize the abundant mass of information and show everyone what is most relevant for them, when there is no central authority doing this work (and financially benefiting from it)?
Meher Roy believes that there will be organizations of people whose job it will be to go through content and create signals for what people should pay attention to. The ownership and signalling power in these organizations will be represented by a token. If these signal generators do a good job at identifying valuable information, they will benefit because their token will become a trusted signal for high-quality content.
An earlier iteration, but nevertheless very insightful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYp6Rz5NKrA
Maciej Olpinski takes these principles and builds the very first implementations with userfeeds.io:
Simon de la Rouviere talks in detail about how the tokens of these curators could get designed and distributed:
https://medium.com/@simondlr/continuous-token-curated-registries-the-infinity-of-lists-69024c9eb70d
The white paper is a difficult, but very rewarding read: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VNkBjjGhcZUV9CyC0ccWYbqeOoVKT2maqX0rK3yXB20/edit
And if you actually want to see the code of one of the first implementations, we recommend this article by Slava of Relevant: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-bonding-curves-for-continuous-token-models-3784653f8b17
