Decentralized Attention Through The Blockchain
What to look out for in the new age of scarcity
Many authors have highlighted the scarcities of different times be it safety from nature as nomadic peoples or hunger as farmers. In the current age, developed nations face the scarcity of attention: calls over the phone have been replaced by exchanges over text, patience in waiting for the next episode to air on television is substituted by a myriad of content provided by a streaming service, and our newspapers have now become a continuous downwards-scrolling news feed.
All of the content we want is at our fingertips with the world wide web being so big. Aggregators have made it smaller, hence the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook. Yet, these incumbents will see massive changes as blockchain technology decentralizes attention.
Currently, Google and Facebook function as advertising giants and dominate the marketplace. Following these conglomerates, so-called adtech companies such as Taboola and Outbrain make up most of the remaining market for advertising, serving as intermediaries between advertisers and publishers.
These companies capture our attention when we use Google’s search engine and see the sponsored ads at the top of the results page. When the sponsored posts appear while scrolling through our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds. At the bottom of an article with a list of sponsored content. But perhaps not for long?
New developments using blockchain technology will fundamentally alter the way we produce and consume content. Steemit brings incentivized curation to a website, Userfeeds brings about reputation-based curation to existing networks, and the Basic Attention Token creates an attention-based economy for online advertising.
Steemit: Putting the STEEM in Reddit
To put it simply, Steemit is like a monetized version of Reddit. It functions around voting on content, economically incentivizing votes due to the incorporation of a proprietary token, STEEM. Votes determine the visibility of links submitted to the website.
Members can buy and sell STEEM on the platform and access different privileges based on their STEEM balances. Such benefits include having their votes carry greater weight and increased bandwidth limits to allow for more voting or other activities. Users can earn STEEM through upvotes received from their content or as a reward for aiding in the discovery of content by upvoting well-received contributions before they get popular.
In terms of attention, Steemit presents the novel concept of incentivized curation. Existing platforms such as Reddit include a function for upvoting, but there are no rewards. By incorporating incentives, both the user and the creator benefit — giving attention to popular content by casting an upvote, the user has the chance to earn STEEM when the upvoted material becomes popular. With many upvotes to his or her post, the creator also benefits by earning STEEM.
Userfeeds: “Google for the economic web”
Userfeeds takes the concept of curation and applies it to existing platforms such as Twitter. It does so in a manner similar to Google PageRank, except instead of setting the criteria based on how much a page is linked by other pages, it uses token balances as the weight measure.
Users can back curators through their balance of tokens, in turn facilitating a virtual transfer of crypto balances. The reasoning behind this is the case of similar incentives: users holding the same token must have the same vision for it’s success. Therefore, many users can back a curator, allowing the curator’s voice to hold as much weight as the combined balance of the token amongst the curator and the backers.
Attention gets shifted. Instead of following an individual based off of social cues such as celebrity status, affirmation by peers, or other sorts of name recognition, it becomes economic. Curators thus serve an increasingly important role due to the limited resource of attention coupled with the ever-growing amount of content.
Basic Attention Token: Rewards for your attention
Instead of looking at curation, the Basic Attention Token focuses more on user interaction. It offers an advertising platform for the web and incentive system through its proprietary browser, Brave Browser.
Centered around the basic attention token, BAT, this blockchain project’s key players are the advertiser, publisher, and user. As a proprietary browser, Brave Browser is able to better measure user attention using techniques such as monitoring the active tab and which pixels the user is looking at, which then gets recorded onto the blockchain. Advertisers purchase BAT to pay the publisher for capturing the audience’s attention. In return, Brave Browser users get a bit of the BAT and can either pay it back to content publishers, or access premium features at the publisher’s discretion. Such perks include access to subscription content or the ability to comment on pieces.
With more accurate measures of attention, Basic Attention Token eliminates many inefficiencies in current advertising, particularly in eliminating third-party advertisements brought about by middlemen, or adtech companies. In return, users get compensated with BAT and a browser that blocks third-party ads and trackers.
Additional Thoughts and Observations
Rewards for attention
Blockchain’s promise is that of decentralization. Decentralized attention’s main value add is in rewarding the providers of attention, a concept that is foreign today: currently, content providers host content for free as the way to add value to users; however, token economies will allow for the operation of the platform while also rewarding attention givers, challenging the current model.
Rewards for curation
Curation will play an ever-increasing role in attracting attention. As a result of token economies, what was formerly indirect compensation in the form of sponsorships or increased business will become direct compensation in tokens for popular curators. And there will only be more — this article by Jieren Chen titled “Optimization is gentrification” states that “yuppie social status is driven by curation”. Having the money but not the time to engage in the pastimes they put in view for others, yuppies turn to curation. Imagine getting paid for your Reddit upvotes!
Cutting the clutter
Lastly, the user experience is bound to improve due to the elimination of negative externalities. Curators will cut through the great amount of noise in the overabundant content space to reduce the amount of “clickbait”. Recording metrics on the blockchain will provide more accurate analytics on attention compared to traditional KPIs and algorithms fed by big data. Incentives will be aligned amongst content creators and consumers as part of the token economy.
Adoption and outsting the incumbents
I’m sure Chrome and Firefox fans are familiar with ignoring Windows 10’s new pre-installed browser, Edge. Network effects are hard to overcome — years of work accumulated on one platform faces the risk of getting lost in migration to a new ecosystem. The initial learning curve may prove a disincentive to switch, blinding people from the future benefits. Loyalty is there, see how strong a following massive companies such as Apple have; those for existing networks are also there.
Looking at this issue in a ponderous way, I wonder if it’s more an issue of the problems not being too bad. Sure, centralization is creating inefficiencies by concentrating wealth to flow into the monopolistic digital conglomerates, but it hasn’t yet damaged the user experience to an intolerable level. Viable businesses are meant to solve problems, and in this case it seems that many people, especially content consumers, are not aware of the problem. This becomes like a cat-and-mouse problem: content creators, despite knowing the issues with their platforms, cannot move to a new one unless their viewers as a whole do the same.
Going Forward
It will take a while for these projects to become more prevalent and it will be exciting once they do. This piece is more to let them be known and to be watched for further developments.
Closing questions:
- What effect will large actors have on influencing attention when purchasing large amounts of tokens to further an agenda?
- When will people pay more attention to blockchain projects instead of focusing on the speculation of cryptocurrencies?
- What happens regarding moderation? Will decentralization lead to an anything-goes internet? (See what happened with Logan Paul…)
