Mainline AMA Recap with CryptoDiffer 6/21/22

Francis
Mainline
Published in
9 min readJul 5, 2022

Q: What is Mainline?

A: Mainline is an intelligence tool to help us figure out what’s real on social media. We have a platform that helps uncover the authenticity of influencers and projects, and find what’s going viral.

We help see beyond the algorithms and echo chambers so you can know what’s really going on in social media. We also have a token economy we’re developing that allows anyone to make money off of relevant social data that businesses use to make key decisions on where they invest their time and attention, as well as reward mechanisms to help us curate data.

We also have a governance model that allows the community to prioritize the tools that would be most useful to them.

Q: Can you tell us about your backers and private investors? Also, do you have any plans for the public?

A: We may do a small public sale before launch depending on what the markets allow.

Q: I learned that tokens can be earned by meta-tagging and connecting social accounts. If I may ask, what is meta-tagging and how does the reward mechanism behind it work?

A: Meta-tagging is a system we’ve developed that helps add a layer of metadata on top of social data — for example, labeling users as ‘Promoters’ or project accounts as ‘Layer 1’ or ‘NFT’, etc. This extends to tagging other elements in the platform as well, like labeling posts as ‘Spam’ or ‘Prediction’. All of this human intelligence combines with our algorithms to provide better intelligence on what’s happening on social media. Rewards from meta-tagging will be based on stake, and those rewards increase as other users upvote tags.

Q: Regarding social accounts, how many accounts can a single user connect at once? For instance, can I connect my FB, Twitter, Instagram all at once to the app?

A: Currently our primary support is Twitter, but we will be adding other social platforms as our community requests them — Reddit, Telegram, Discord, Youtube, IG, FB — the idea is to give an overall pulse of what’s going on across social around any particular topics that you’re interested in, and see how those conversations connect and move across the different social networks.

Q: What are the minimum requirements to join the Mainline staking program? And what is the APY mechanism?

A: There will be no minimum amount of $MAIN that can be staked. However, there will be premium features that are unlocked when your $MAIN stake is large enough. Also, meta-tagging rewards will be multiplied by the amount staked. The APY mechanism will be that 2.5% of all transactions on the Mainline Data Marketplace will go to stakers. In the beginning, we will most likely bootstrap the rewards until the Marketplace gains traction.

Q: Since maps are organized in collections based on topics, must users subscribe for an entire collection, or are users allowed to subscribe to individual maps on certain topics?

A: We’re adjusting our subscription model to be more open and accessible for the community. There will be maps that mainline hosts that will all be open to subscribers, and more specific/special interest maps started by other users that will be additional fees to access, where those fees go to the users that own the maps.

Q: Using information from Mainline maps, is there a way to identify and differentiate authentic campaigns from bot-driven campaigns?

A: Yes! The first tools we built were finding what’s going viral and understanding if the engagement is distributed across the conversation (good) or mostly an echo chamber of users which suggests botted activities. We also added multiple tools for looking into an account’s followers' authenticity and engagement.

We’re delivering follower quality scores as well as engagement quality scores to some of our partners now, and we’ll be opening that up for the public soon.

Q: I got to know that Mainline Dao will function as the form of governance for the Mainline Ecosystem. May I know more details about the Mainline DAO — how can users become members of the Mainline DAO?

A: At this time anyone who holds $MAIN will be able to use it to vote on a proposal presented by the DAO. Anyone in the community will be able to submit proposals if they meet the minimum holding requirement of $MAIN. The minimum requirement has not been determined yet but it will most likely be one of the first proposals voted on.

Q: The problem with crypto projects that have attempted the staking-for-access model is that they have typically done so with a static staking requirement and this has eventually exposed a major flaw which is; as the token price increased, accessing the platform via staking also becomes prohibitively expensive. Tell us how Mainline intends to do it differently.

A: During the development of our platform, we saw in other projects that the staking for access model wasn’t sustainable. We’ve adjusted our platform economics where only certain features like our data marketplace require staking, with the goal being to earn more tokens by participating in the generation and promotion of data assets such as authenticity audits and real-time conversation maps.

Q: Currently, Twitter is the only supported social media app for signing up on Mainline. Will that remain the case in the future or will other social platforms like Facebook and email be supported in the future?

A: Our objective is to integrate as many social platforms as possible. We started with twitter because we can get a lot of data really quickly, and we’ll be integrating more platforms based on what our community wants — looks like Discord and TG are high priority, as well as Youtube and IG.

Q: Can I pay for my subscription in fiat? If yes, how many fiat currencies are available to pay?

A: Yes, our subscription model will be flexible and allow both crypto and fiat. Initial support for USD, but we’re not opposed to accepting other currencies in principle.

Q: In the buyer benefits it is obvious influencers can have a good benefit from Mainline. Do you also have some rewards or benefits for fans and followers?

A: We are working on a dapp that will be called Mainline Community Engine. This will be a dashboard for project owners to see deep analytics on what their community is engaging with. This will not just be a raw count of likes and retweets. With our proprietary metrics and algorithms we can pinpoint which community members are getting the most organically driven engagement. Those community members that are authentically get engagement can then be rewarded by the project owners in their tokens.

Q: Mainline has a token supply of 50M tokens. What are your plans to increase token demand and scarcity? Does Mainline have any plans for token burn in the future?

A: This will be something the community/DAO will have to propose and vote on.

Q: I am a user who prefers to use Mainline for free. What are the advantages of upgrading to a premium subscription? What kind of opportunities and returns do I get?

A: We wanted to create a platform where anyone could get greater transparency in their social media experience. We will support a free tier that includes many of the basics so our community can get value out of our tools, while premium features like authenticity reports and engagement audits will be paid features for businesses that are using the platform to up their game on social media.

Q: What are the requirements to join the Beta Program? Will there be benefits to Beta Program participants from Mainline? If so, what are they?

A: Currently the platform is in Open Alpha. Anyone can go to app.getmainline.com to test out V2 of the platform. And yes we are keeping track of everyone who is testing it out and giving feedback but I can neither confirm or deny if there will be any rewards for them.

Q: Reading about Mainline I was intrigued by the “broker” feature. Can you explain in more detail about this? What are the basic requirements to become a broker?

A: We’re collecting a ton of data from social media, but we’ll never be able to collect it all. We are creating a broker tier to help us prioritize which data we collect. Specifically, what real-time streams and maps will be the most valuable to paid users of the platform. Brokers will be able to create custom maps that cater to business users and earn as those business users consume the data

Q: Will a user be rewarded for what they do on social media or only what they do within the Mainline platform? Can we say neutral, uncensored, and decentralized for the Mainline platform?

A: Mainline itself is not a social platform like Twitter or Facebook. We are a suite of tools for defining social capital in the Web 3.0 era. We do have some other plans for rewarding users that bring valuable social data to the DAO. Which everyone in the community will benefit from. The more valuable social data the Mainline DAO has, the more valuable it becomes.

Q: How do you verify if interactions on accounts and posts are valid on Mainline? How is the system you prepared for this coordinated the originality and effectiveness reports and how are the inspections done?

A: We have developed several proprietary scoring algorithms that are like x-ray vision for social — they help see through large follower counts and engagement numbers and determine how authentic they are — for example, if a post has 10,000 retweets, but all the accounts that retweeted were created yesterday, this would score lower than 10,000 retweets from accounts with a high variance in account age. This is one of many angles our system analyzes posts/interactions as well as the participating accounts.

Q: How many different modes are there to enable business uses in Mainline? Can we customize this mode for our own workflows?

A: We developed the platform to be extensible in the form of modes. Modes are use-case specific workflows that work within our interface to deliver specific value. For example, we’re working on an evangelist mode which marries our authenticity scoring and activity tracking to help projects build authentic conversations around their work. Eventually, the community will be able to create custom modes and algorithms for any kind of activity on social — shopping for the right NFT influencer, finding emerging projects with the most authentic engagement, targeting groups of engaged users around any topic, etc.

Q: I love social media. Can I join the Mainline? Are there premium features available?

A: Right now you can check out the platform at app.getmainline.com premium features are still in development but if you are looking for something in particular, please reach out to us. We want to focus on building the tools that are most valuable to the community.

Q: What changes or developments have you made in Mainline within this recent year?

A: One of the largest additions since then was a focus on authenticity scoring. Our early platform was designed for what was going viral, but obviously in crypto a massive problem is farmed/fake virality. Adding this layer of intelligence to our system was a big step for us in providing quality data for the community to make decisions. We also made adjustments to our token economy that allow more direct participation from the community that can earn tokens while growing the value of the platform, the most notable being the data marketplace where token holders can acquire data assets and earn as business users access them, as well as a curation layer with our meta-tagging system that allows users to earn by helping us label things in the system.

Q: I see in the Mainline website there is an Alpha Phase going on. How can we join the Alpha? Should we apply first? What can we test in the Alpha?

A: You can check out v2 of the Mainline platform now at app.getmainline.com. Feel free to check it out and if you have any feedback let us know!

V3 of the platform we’ll be releasing soon. It will be much more robust and being able to derive value from it will be much easier. This is a map we’re running for NFT NYC app.getmainline.com/map/166. Maps are a great way to see the conversations from above. Feel free to explore around.

We have some light tutorial content on our Youtube that explains the basics of what you’re looking at and how to get value from it. We’ve also posted several of these on our Twitter. And this is an example of our profile pages, here for Lunar Crush app.getmainline.com/user/LunarCrush. This is a great place to see the top followers of an account as well as basics of their following like how many 0–10 followers they have vs. verified users.

Right now we are not just in the building phase of the platform but also building relationships and partnerships with anyone that can get value from Mainline or social data we’ve gathered. We would love to connect with you!

We have collected a ton of social data already! Everyone feel free to make an account with Mainline and authenticate your Twitter, and stay tuned in our Discord and Twitter as we continue our journey!

Thank you all so much and if anyone has any more questions feel free to reach out!

Here is a link to our Discord community: Discord.gg/5jwnkFcJ

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Francis
Mainline
Writer for

Learning in public to inspire others to start the journey. Current Topics: Crypto/Economics | Brand & Authority building | Systems Thinking & Theory