REALations — a REAL Social Media network
We have been using Social Media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter for more than a decade now. But is nowadays when we feel our time in front of the screen is out of control. The more into social media we are, the more lonely we feel. This tends to be the most common cry of the new generations. And yet spend more and more hours in social media platforms. It’s like an addiction! But, can we turn our addictions to social media into something that really improves our human relationships. And best of all, can we incentivize these actions getting something of value in return. This is what ·REALations· aims to do.
It’s not really our fault that we are addicted. After all, we just have a bad Social Media hygiene generated by the algorithms that play with our psyche like in a game. We feel urged to check our notifications even though we know there wasn’t anything good in there 5 mins ago.
Not everything is bad with Social Media. We have seen people find their parents using Facebook, other people landed professional contracts posting pictures on Instagram and we can even warn people of upcoming earthquakes using Twitter. Additionally, let’s not kid ourselves, the advent of Social Media is inevitable and regulating Social Media use can only restrict our individual freedom. So can we create something better?
Introducing REALations
REALations is a proposal for a new social network game that uses ideas from blockchain technology and augmented reality games to create new incentives for users to interact offline more often. This platform should be what veggies are for a healthy lifestyle, but way more fun than a salad.
The main incentive in REALations is to ‘mine’ currency called REALcoins, that then can be used for a variety of things, including buying user ‘skins’, exchange products or services in the marketplace and develop businesses. Users mine REALcoins by using the app, but the rate at which they get coins is significantly higher if they spend time offiline with other platform users.
The platform
Imagine a quadrant with the different social media platform affordances, we can differentiate some of the characteristics of the different social media platforms and characterize what makes a platform different from the others. For example if we use the horizontal axis as the affordance of Time relevancy, meaning how important is time in the use of the platform, and user type as the vertical axis which means if the user in the platform normally represent the user in real life. We could place the different social media platforms as depicted in figure 1.
This means that platforms like ‘Whatsapp’ is used because is real time conversations and the users normally are identified as the people they are in real life. Twitter is still time relevant but there are more anonymity among the users and so on. REALations is less time relevant as we will see, and users need to have a degree of known identification in terms of the person that is using the platform.
The one affordance that is going to be very relevant is geographic relevance, due to the way the platform looks and feels. A lot of the interactions will be with the people we have nearby, instead of the people far away, as we see in Figure 2.
The platform inside looks and feels like Game Boy Pokemon games. Users pop-up in a game like environment seen from above, that resembles real life world. World can be designed using generative maps from a Google Maps or any other Maps provider. The user can only move the character if he moves in the real world, where he will see other platform users that are in the area (if profile is public, or only friends in the network). It’s extremely important that the app is light-weight and not battery intensive. For this graphics quality should be simple and refresh rate should be kept as low as possible. Another problem is GPS location. GPS will only be updated if the user is using the app actively, and should only refresh if the user is going to record a route.
Within the platform users can use 3 main features: Marketplace, Forum-Chat and Bio-scroll page. Users in the platform can use the Forum-Chat like a Twitter feed where they broadcast messages publicly or privately to the public local network. Bio-scroll page is an actual house in the game that contains usual pictures and posts that friends in the network can interact with. Finally Marketplace is an exchange site where people can buy and sell products. Products can be exchanged directly in the platform using the internal REALcoins or using the currency of choice.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency in the game is the main incentive for the user to take recover offline interactions. Cryptocurrencies are a protocols that create a shared ledger of transactions represented by blocks of transactions that are shared across a network of nodes. Since a social media it’s another type of network, we can distribute these ledgers of transactions locally. For a great summary on how blockchain technology works see this video.
Cryptocurrency in REALations is called REALcoins, and as with many other cryptocurrencies its value depends on its popularity of use and the scarcity of the coins. This cryptocurrency needs to be mined in order to find new coins, but the total amount of coins will be capped in the protocol. We will not discuss all the details here but we need to see how does mining work, which is the way in which we incentivize users to change the way they use their phones.
Here’s a schema on how new blocks are found and how the reward is given to a user.
Mining
Users of REALations are treated as cryptocurrency wallets. Each account stores the set of keys that are used to store and transact REALcoins. The main difference is that the phone app is the only way to mine coins. The system uses Federated Byzantine Agreement system to reach consensus in the network and prevent dishonest nodes to take control of the system. We won’t explain all the intricacies of the protocol here but here’s a summary of the way it works. Users need to be identified with a phone number and email address in order to identify a new user. More personal information might be required in order to transact from/to fiat currency.
A new user joins the graph like in figure 3. In order to join it must be invited by another user in the network. You can think of this as adding a new node to the network. This new user’s private key is generated at random. When a user is using the app, the private key tries combination of numbers generated by the private key and hashes them to check if the output corresponds to a new block. Same as bitcoin, when a new block is found, it is broadcasted to the network. Transactions in the new block are validated through quorum consensus, same as in the Stellar Consensus Protocol white paper.
As with many other blockchain currencies, the amount of REALcoins is limited and it follows a halving process that reduces the reward as more people coins are found. Additionally, each person is limited by the REALcoins that can be found within its private key, which they increase in complexity as more blocks are found. If you spend time with other people you acquire currency at a faster rate.
Collaborative Mining
Individual wallets can only mine a limited subspace of REALcoins restricted by the (Euclidean) subspace in which the private key lives. This means that the probability of finding coins for a given user will diminish with time. This limits the range of REALcoins that can be mined by a single user.
However, the trick is that when two users that are friends spend prolonged periods of time together, the two can combine input numbers from their private keys to generate subspaces for the hash function. As the mining circle grows larger number of REALcoins are available to the user.
The way to do this offline is that a phone locked will broadcast locally a public key. Other phones in the social media platform will listen and also broadcast their own public key. When two phones are close to each other and are part of the same friend network, they will combine their public keys to search in a new subspace for new REALcoins. Because each phone search will be symmetrical but opposite in the number line. Both phones will find coins at the same rate. Hash functions are not symmetrical, so one way around is to simply provide always an even number of coins and split between the 2 users. This search method is depicted in figure 5
This approach is similar to the approach used in the COVID-19 paper or this video to trace users without having to leaving information about the personal information of the user.
Spending Coins
REALcoins can be used in different ways. First of all you can customized your bio with unique banners or decoration that can only be acquired with the platform coins. Additionally the user can buy character ‘skins’ that would make our user look different to other users in the platform.
REALcoins could also be used to exchange product or services in the Marketplace. Of course the platform will not enforce using the platform currency, but it could provide added benefits like additional mining rewards from the two parties exchanging good or services. The two users exchanging coins would get a limited amount of “collaborative” mining keys to extract more coins.
Offerings and Benefits
There are several benefits of these kind of platform.
First, it aims to spend more time offline with friends than online by yourself. Furthermore, it incentivizes keeping your phone off while you are spending time with your friends, because the app will only do collaborative mining while the phone is blocked. Currently most social media platforms try to keep users using the platform, while REALations tries to incentivize the opposite.
Second, applications could expand on incentivizing work-out and healthy lifestyle benefits by expanding on new ways to creating new search subspaces. I.e. Doing steps every day, etc. People can continue to use social media as a way to share what they are doing and show-off rewards from engaging with people.
Third, REALcoins can be used to purchase products while keeping adequate inflation based on the number of users in the network. The way the architecture is structured as a decentralized ledger using FBA consensus would ensure the platform does not get taken over by only few nodes, while at the same time keeping.
Another cool benefit, is that marketplace has the added incentive of exchanging goods and services, and when both users get together, additionally they can get more coins.
Finally, this platform could in theory (if it gets enough adoption) not even need to have a lot of advertisements to be profitable. As phones serve as nodes in a network, each phone is able to serve as a shared ledger of the transactions in the platform. It would cost money however to maintain the app and the infrastructure, which could be afforded if the in platform currency gains value from the transaction usage.
Drawbacks
The platform, does not offer new online activities but more offline activities. It proposes entertainment offerings when the user is alone, but gives more incentives to spend time with your friends and family. This means, the app does not seek to substitute other apps, but to add new uses
Another problem is that, REALations is not actively regularized. People are free to post content publicly and messages can’t be individually scrutinized. Which means that the platform does not actively censor language or postings with fake news. A solution could be to have community regulators that include giving roles within a network. In exchange these users would get additional private keys for mining coins at a faster rate while doing those roles. We could then get into the problem of, who regulates the regulators and probably they would have to get consensus from community and other regulators. Additionally upvotes of posts could make these posts more or less relevant in the community.
Fake accounts are always an issue, and it’s very unlikely to have 100% organic accounts from real users. However, the fact that each account is paired to a phone number, email address and a unique device, it makes faking accounts more unlikely. Moreover, if the user wants to exchange money out of the platform it needs to provide information for taxation purposes which makes the number of fake accounts more unlikely.
We don’t foresee this platform will take away usage from other social media platforms. Which means people could still be incentivized by spending time in their phones, but it could provide a framework of good practices for other platforms to improve best practices on Social Media hygene for our society
Conclusions
Social Media platforms are making us less social and yet we don’t get anything in return for spending hours and hours in front of the phone. By leveraging Cryptocurrency protocols we can create a new type of social media that incentivizes spending time with the ones we love and the ones that are really worth spending time with. At the same time we get crypto currency, that with enough adoption will be valuable for exchanges. Even more, this currency is more likely to be more equally distributed than the current popularly adopted currencies like ‘Bitcoin’ that is mainly controlled by big corporation of miners. Instead this platform could reach better gini index while getting more meaningful experiences.
