Mark Zuckerberg Agrees: Centralization is a Problem

Last Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to make his annual public New Year’s resolution. In the past, his resolutions have focused on personal challenges and goals, such as learning to speak Mandarin, making an artificial intelligence system for his home, and visiting all 50 US states.

This time, however, the resolution isn’t just personal; it could impact Facebook’s tech and products, as well as the way in which it conducts business.

Zuckerberg opened by listing many of the problems plaguing Facebook in 2017, which included foreign interference on the platform (for which they needed to attend a Congressional hearing), ongoing instances of abuse and harassment, a lack of transparency in advertising, and complaints that scrolling through the newsfeed — designed to engage users for as much time as possible — is actually a waste of time. Zuckerberg then promised to learn more about encryption and decentralization technologies.

Here’s the text of his post:

However, though he enumerated the problems rather well, Zuckerberg was vague about how he was going to go about fixing these problems. Currently, user engagement, such as screen time, click-throughs, likes, and comments are Facebook’s metrics of success — and the keys to their profitability. Until all that markedly changes, any talk about “time well spent” and “power in the hands of the people” seems like no more than nice rhetoric.

Furthermore, while Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are just beginning to confront these issues, Synereo is already using decentralization to build a Liberated Attention Economy.

At the core of everything Synereo does is the fundamental assumption that human attention is a highly priced, scarce commodity, and that the internet should be a fair, free place, with content creators and curators liberated from their dependency on the monetization method provided by the big-company publishing platforms. True to this belief, Synereo’s first product, WildSpark, provides a platform in which creators and consumers are entirely free from revenue-based algorithms purposed for one-sided monetization methods, and instead, are served with feeds designed with the user’s benefit and interest in mind.

We’re leading the charge towards meaningful change.