Showtime manifesto: solving the social dilemma 🔮

They made money off our content.

Online creators can’t make much money from producing social media content— let alone consumers. After onboarding billions of people, companies like Facebook, YouTube and Spotify slowly partake in rent-seeking behaviors. They maximize ad revenues and time spent on their apps at our expense. We can’t monetize well, because they do it. They profit from us.

Beyond voicing those problems, we can’t do anything about the status quo: it’s structural. These centralized companies are legacy networks owned by private parties. Yet, this is where public content and discourse take place. A new social platform should be publicly owned and operated by its users, as we transition to the ownership economy.

They can’t innovate: they kept our data to themselves.

And no one can help them. They own the world’s largest social graphs, which is why regulators are after them, and rightly so: even with good intentions, having too much control is a liability. But that’s only one problem.

The larger problem is that only they can leverage their userbase. They can’t let anyone on the internet improve their products. That kills innovation. “Sign in with Facebook” is simply that, signing in. No developers from the middle of nowhere can start building something new with existing Facebook users. Very few people are building on top of social media and improving the overall experience, because no one can trust them. Worse, they could shut you down.

In crypto, digital items are growing exponentially.

Crypto technology is uniquely suited to create a new social platform, because you can monetize anything. When someone pitched a “decentralized social network”, people would dismiss it as too early, and they were right. Until now.

Digital items (or NFT’s) have been exploding in popularity for the past 6 months. Marketplaces like Superrare, OpenSea, Rarible and others are getting significant traction in art, collectibles, open worlds and gaming. Unlike DeFi, it is the fastest growing consumer-facing crypto primitive, attracting the likes of digital influencer Lil Miquela and making previously unknown young creators famous. This graph shows the art segment:

Credits to Richard Chen. Source: cryptoart.

Creators are finally making money from their content, without middlemen.

Digital items newfound popularity can be explained because they are:

• Monetizable: instantly buyable assets.
• Unique: provably scarce, original content tied to their creators, that can’t be copy pasted.
• Traceable: credit creators forever— and even encode a royalty fee for future resales.

Those characteristics led to the peer-to-peer, transactional marketplaces for digital art and collectibles mentioned above. They unlock new financial capital for artists and creators alike.

Yet, digital items could be much more than price tags.

Right now, NFTs are simply assets that you buy and sell. It’s transactional, and you can find many different niche vertical marketplaces with creators and collectors alike. Those use cases, mainly centered around expensive digital items, still remain niche. They only optimize one type of metric: assets price, volume, favoring the “collectors” persona buying expensive rare items. To keep their buy prices low, collectors are actually incentivized not to tell others. Those platforms only take NFT as their raw state: assets.

To get more out of digital items, something major is lacking. So major it got us all online in the first place: social. People simply don’t talk about crypto or decentralized finance to their friends — but they talk about popular creators they consume content from everyday.

DeFi is mind-blowing tech for insiders; but social platforms will be the ones bringing consumers to crypto — and eventually become their gateway drug to DeFi. By speculating on future popularity of online content, people could be incentivized to share it. This unlocks new social capital for everyone, on top of the existing NFT perks. Social curation would mean better discovery for everyone, and result in more social and financial capital for all parties. We take digital assets not as a finished product, but as a primitive to build on: more than art or collectibles, it has the potential to become the foundation for any type of content online.

A social platform is how we get to the next billions owners of crypto assets.

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