A Deep Dive into the State of Decentralized Social Graphs and Creator Economy Projects ✍️

Published in

Coinmonks

12 min readJun 6, 2022

As technology, particularly social media, advances, our digital lives are increasingly gaining precedence over our social ones. We value our digital presence more than ever before, and even web3 is accelerating this trend, particularly Metaverse, PFP NFTs, and other similar technologies.

We are all aware that these social media platforms are owned by large corporates, which expose humanity to numerous risks.📵

In real life, I can’t think of a better example than Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, Trump’s Truth Social Network, or Facebook’s Data Breach to demonstrate how important Decentralized technology is.

Difference between Social Network and Social Graph 🤔

A social graph is a structure used for the representation and implementation of a social network.

Eg:- A rooted tree.

Whereas, A social network 🗣️, on the other hand, is a structure represented by a social graph that pertains to all the relationships and entities at a specific point in time or a specific category or audience.

Eg:- Tree consisting of nodes representing a particular kind like Linkedin which is used to connect with people regarding your business/work💼.

Defining the layers and evolution of web

Web 1:-

Web1️⃣ is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network with symmetrical clients and servers. Also called the Information economy. It is one client, one server model.

Regarding media and Social graphs, this is considered to be the Old information Landscape. Newspaper networks📰 controlled this period as they were the only source of information for people. Academia and media were considered to be upstream of the state and it was an information-controlled economy.

Web 2:-

Web2️⃣ is a Model view controller(MVC) with gigantic centralization & huge clients. The experience was better, in that it onboarded a huge number of clients to the platforms. It uses a client-server paradigm with numerous clients. (many clients & one server).

This was perceived as a new information landscape. Everyone had a voice here, yet power and voice🔇 were controlled by centralized social networks, and one couldn’t express themselves fully on such platforms.🤐

Modern political systems were predicated on the illusion of voice, not the reality of it says balajis. Here academia and media were arguing for censorship of content & Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and others manipulated and played around with the content they want people to see.

Web 3:-

Web3️⃣ is a client Blockchain client (CBC) with many clients and many servers model. It is considered to be the latest information landscape.

Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains are presently propelling this web3 ahead by allowing users to circumvent censorship and reclaim ownership. This is accomplished through open sourcing and decentralizing the internet that surrounds us.

Many protocols are built🏗️ on top of these blockchains to decentralize everything around us, including media and social graphs. Here the information is verified and controlled by people 👥 themselves and not by huge companies.

Problems with web2 Platforms

Centralized Authority

The platform or government could easily take down your content when they don’t like your work or if there is something mentioned against them. This might lead to a regulated content consumption economy by concealing data from consumers.

Furthermore, living in a world with less data openness is quite perilous.☠️

No Data Ownership and misusing them

We are all aware of, and despise, the fact that corporations like Facebook sell our data and offer us customized advertisements that we may not like😑. The problem would be under control only if we had control over our data.

Manipulated Content discovery leads to less reach

The unnoticed effort by a Creator is perhaps one of the most difficult things to accept, especially when your stuff is extremely outstanding. These are manipulated by AI built by these corporations, who decide to filter and present just what they want people to see.

And a lot of other problems as well :(

Billionaires💸 holding media companies

Probably you might be happy when Elon after twitter’s takeover said that he is going to open source everything for the sake of free speech, but a few left the platform as they might be against him and it seems fishy only when you realize that a lot of media companies are owned by billionaires🤯.

Furthermore, the platform’s judgments are based on his preferences rather than community requirements, which contradicts the reality that people make decisions in web3 protocols since these platforms have their own governance decisions. Also, Will, you be surprised to learn that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which has a substantial stake in the media industry🎙️? For additional details, visit this Forbes article.

The role of legality or Ideology layer( L0) in Web3

We all are well aware of the existing layer 1s(Ethereum, Solana) and layer 2s (Polygon)in the blockchain space as of today.

But there is another layer 0 which balajis call the Ideology or Legality layer. He insists that this layer is more important than feasibility + Scaling combined as this Ideology enables technology and its feedback loop. The ideas in people’s mind💡 and action of people’s bodies🧠 is what enables these L0s. The change can be brought not just by Computer Software and hardware but people’s mental software, their philosophy, their presence, and willingness to pick up stakes in this new space which can bring a turnaround for web3 as a whole.

How is web3 shaping the Creator Economy?

An influencer, artist, musician, gamer, or anybody with a fan base is termed a creator. Web3 empowers individuals to become creators by encouraging, owning, and sharing their material, allowing them to pursue their passions rather than their professions😎.

One of the most effective uses of smart contracts has been to own and sell a piece of material while paying royalties to the original creator. One might also assert intellectual property/commercial rights ©️ over their content. Airdropping and offering governance value are two more qualities that can be carried. Any allegations about bogus content will be worthless. The value is determined by the people rather than a centralized service, as is common in web2 platforms.

Web3 brings network participants together to work toward a similar goal: network expansion as value, money💰, and power are distributed to all.

A creator’s content in web3 will have a better reach as audiences are also incentivized for consuming your content. When writing about creators and the web3 economy, I can’t overlook NFTs (Non-fungible tokens).In short, any Non-fungible (Unique) work of yours can be an NFT. Be it an article, a song, a meme, or something else.

Below is a flowchart on the use cases of NFTs.

NFTs also serve as an investment for those who are betting on your content in the long or short term. This motivates creators to bring out better content in the future.🥳 You could easily procure some capital💵 rather than depending on someone(VCs) else with these NFTs.

The above tweet compares how web3 is bringing managerial skills directly to the hands of creators.

Here are a few insights below from the a16z state of crypto report📜 2022 on how much you can make as a content creator in web3🤑.

The analysis counted 22,400 web3 creators compared to 3 billion web2 creators which are not so comparable. However, web3 is still in its early stages, and new ways to monetize your material are emerging📈, which can keep up with the development and onboarding of web3 artists.

According to the analysis, web3 paid out $174,000 per creator, while Meta paid out $0.10 per user, Spotify paid out $636 per artist, and YouTube paid out $2.47 per channel. Web3 is tiny but mighty.

Centralized services do exist in web3 as not all content creators might be ready to get onto using decentralized services. But, the scenario is changing. Consider Opensea, one of the early NFT trading platforms that are still controlled, but the take rates are relatively low, and several competitors such as Magic Eden and Looksrare are gaining traction being decentralized🌞.

Here is what the a16z study 📎says about web2 versus web3 platforms:-

Web2 giants’ take rates are exorbitant; web3 platforms provide more equitable economic terms. In contrast to Meta’s over 100 percent take-rates across Facebook and Instagram with OpenSea’s 2.5 percent. “You know something is seriously wrong with our economy when Big Tech has a greater take rate than the mafia”.

Existing Web3 Social graph projects and tools

I would like to walk over a few web3 social graph projects in this part.

1.Mirror.xyz

One of the early writer-friendly projects✍️, a media DAO📻, mirror focuses on providing monetization options for writers by creating NFTs, holding auctions, and launching crowdfunding campaigns. Joining mirror to write an article requires you to provide 1 $WRITE 🪞token but there aren’t any entry fees.

Few creator tools like different editor modes, importing entries, creating blocks, and embedding NFTs are provided to the writers. The posts are published on Ethereum L2s for faster and cheaper transaction costs.

2. Lens protocol

This project was an initiative from the Aave team and they wanted to provide people with a decentralized social network similar to Facebook & Twitter. It is a permissionless🖐, composable, and decentralized social graph built on the polygon chain.

The protocol is still in its early stages and is not public yet but has gained a lot of interest in the web3 community. If you are active on CT, you might have seen someone with a link asking them to connect🤝 to the lens protocol🔍.

You need to sign an open letter to get an early entrance to the platform. They are also bringing in Profiles, follow NFTs, and a lot more. Lens Protocol is fully open source for the community to build on Social apps, analytics platforms📊, verification systems, and DAO tooling.

There are apps currently built over the protocol and anyone could create their own as well. The platform tends to be more friendly by providing a lot of tools to the creators.

3. Audius

An alternative to Spotify but gives creators the power to distribute, monetize and stream unstoppable audio🎵. Audius is both a protocol & platform built on top of the blockchain (several, in fact) and community-run nodes. Audius is open source, open data & access, and open ownership. The governance and the rewarding token is named $AUDIO and one could stake and earn on it as well. The fans can have high-quality free listening🎶 and could also get exclusive creator-based content too.

The Audius protocol is powered by two off-chain services, the Discovery Node and the Content Node.

What does Wordcel mean and why Wordcel?

Before looking at what wordcel as a platform is, we’ll look into the origin and the meaning of wordcel.

Persons with great linguistic abilities are referred to be Wordcels, whereas people with excellent math and science abilities(STEM) are referred to as Shape Rotators/numbercels. The word became popular out of a tweet from roon(@tszzl) on a dichotomy of deciding if AI vs Crypto is a wordcel or a shape rotator thingy. Wordcels and shape rotators are often seen as rivals🌚

In case you are more interested, here is an article from roon explaining shapes & words and a tweet from Vitalik on the same.

Now onto the platform.

Wordcel club is a Decentralized publishing stack on the Solana Blockchain with a lot of content creation tools⚒️. Wordcel is a protocol primitive platform and will be prioritizing long-form content and anyone could buidl🏗️ upon their stack as it is a protocol first forming the layer 0 of on-chain decentralized media.

It is on the Solana blockchain because it has the most active address with the most number of transactions daily and is the fastest and most powerful blockchain to date.

The data is published on-Chain and the content is hosted on Arweave. The platform gives people the opportunity to host on their own Domains.👀

I feel, that importing one’s data stacks from existing web2 Platforms like Medium and Substack is going to be the potential for wordcel as a platform to potentially onboard creators by achieving their aim of giving creators the power of Sovereignty.⚔️ wordcel allows you to publish from Vim, VScode, Notion, or a Custom editor of its own. It also provides User control, free speech, censorship resistance, Data Privacy, and distribution Control over to the creators.

You can also find a proof of post button below every post to verify it on the Solana Blockchain explorer. Take a look at wordcel’s Genesis post here to see how the platform is. ( Genesis post is the first post on wordcel ) To those CT people out there, if you are still wondering and waiting for a twitter edit button🤥, remember that wordcel offers an edit button option for on-chain posts😲.

Wordcel competes against its web2 alternatives👊 like Hashnode, ghost, Medium, and substack to provide ownership back to the people.

Conclusion:-

At the end of the day, it is up to us (the people) to determine which platforms are best for us, and we must take steps to create a censor-free society.💪

I would like to end this up by citing balajis ‘ 6 layer framework in enabling L0s:-

Make moves that are either sub-national or International as countries(Govts) might or might not be supporting these initiatives.

2. Gain rough consensus with the constituency because internal alignment comes first. Anything that reduces partisanship should be avoided. So, one must prioritize big wins over petty CT twitter fights.

3. Learn to write law model legislations because technologists must be preferred over banks and hostile academicians when it comes to this web3 space. a16z has been bringing out web3 policies, and that is one such classic example.

To quote this in a fancy way “write them all legislations or else the law will get written for you” else you could also say this way: 👾“Learn to code laws faster than they learn to outlaw code”- Balajis

4. Build Distribution to avoid distortion by building up your communities and media outlets. Doing this would help you connect with people who are at the root of L0s.

5. Analyze the risks because web1 was about technical risks, web2 was about the market risks but the risks in web3 will be political. Also remember the competitors are legacy media, corporations, academicians, regulators, and NGOs who will be fighting over the L0s.

6. Be globally mobile and preach simplicity. There will be regulations and you might have to move for a cause.

Pheww, That’s all peeps.😊Feeling ironic to write an article about decentralized media on centralized services. Looking forward to wordcel’s Public release and happy to write my first Bounty for superteam DAO and Wordcel😇. Thanks for the opportunity and would love to connect with anyone reading this article to discuss your point of view as well.

Twitter:- https://twitter.com/Madhan_Raj17

Also, I’m publishing this article after the bounty results are announced, and I didn’t make it. I’d appreciate any feedback.

Thank you :)