Twitter Investor Helps Develop Blockchain-based Social Media Platform

Last year, Naval Ravikant tweeted: “Today’s social media, payment, identity, & application platforms will ultimately be replaced by distributed, uncensorable, open source ones.”

A few days ago, he revealed a plan to sponsor a prize to create a Blockchain-based alternative to Twitter, using the Blockstack platform. With this plan the co-founder of AngelList, proposed an edition of Twitter that will have no central authority and the users will be able to monetize their contributions.

Ravikant is not the only one with plans to support new blockchain content platforms. Albert Wenger, a partner with Union Square Ventures has revealed plans to fund a new prize aimed to incentivize blockchain-powered blogging platform.

Blockchain is the most disruptive idea since the Internet. The disruptive potential of Blockchain has proven to be limitless, not just to currencies like Bitcoin, but to every industry around us. The potential applications of blockchain will be disrupting everything, and one the industries that is ripe for disruption is social media.

Today’s social media are centralized networks, made up of users that give up their personal privacy, data protection and ownership of the content they create. Most social networks collect information, interests and habits of their users in order to monetize the data through advertising. They heavily guard this data and many of the big social networks, like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, act as identity providers for other sites and apps that use OAuth-based authentication and single-sign-on mechanisms.

Facebook’s algorithms control the news that reaches 2 billion people, in many ways creating censorship and potential bias that prevents people from encountering new and interesting ideas.

The content on social networks produces a massive financial gain for the platform, rather than the user that creates it. Users produce quality content, but their work is consumed by the platform, leaving them with no real financial gain. Also users have no control over the ads that appear with their content, and many feel that advertising may diminish the value of their work.

Blockchain technology can provide a more democratic and secure way to share content, preventing many of the problems that social networks have been criticized for in the past. The use of blockchain technology can enable users to control their data, escape the censorship imposed by platforms like Facebook and Twitter and get paid for the content they create.

There has been lots of talk around the idea of using blockchain to build the social networks of the future and numerous of projects have sprang out. Most of these new services are still their early stages.

Steemit is a content-sharing site where posts are ranked by popularity, similar to Reddit, it allows private messaging and the ability to follow specific users. It was launched in March 2016 and since its user base has grown significantly. The most interesting feature is the way it rewards users. When users produce or share content, they receive Steem tokens. These tokens can be exchanged for fiat currency or used to vote on how the platform will evolve, giving users power over the future of the platform. The content users see is not filtered or controlled by an algorithm, preventing any form of censorship. Also because the data is on blockchain, Steemit doesn’t control or own any of the data created by its users and cannot use it to sell advertising.

AKASHA is like a decentralised Twitter, that uses the Ethereum blockchain to store the content created by users. The content is broadcasted across Ethereum’s decentralized network and votes are bundled with Ethereum microtransactions. When content gets votes, the content creator can earn some Ethereum from it.

Synereo is another decentralized, next-generation social networking and content delivery platform. Synereo has created tools that lets users monetize original content, get rewarded for sharing quality content with others and also discover the best content on the Internet.

A new breed of social media networks is emerging. Blockchain can radically shift social media to a new level. Its introducing decentralization that encourages free speech and has the power to reinvent the very basics of how content is shared and profitably distributed.