Blockchain social media will free us from tech monopolies.
After the Capitol riots on January 6th, and former president Donald Trump voicing his tacit approval of the matter, he was banned from Twitter and soon thereafter most other websites. Let that sink in, even the most powerful person on the planet is subject to the whims of big-tech and this is an increasing concern.
Then, when there were rumors that he might go to a competing platform, they were throttled by their hosting systems, threatened by advertisers, etc. Regardless of what you feel about the man, he was still a democratically elected leader of a world superpower at the time. If he can essentially be wiped out of the internet instantly, then us normal people are far from immune in regards to this.
Even from a market competition standpoint and maintaining a healthy economy, it’s become evidently clear that we need alternative social media sites. The problem though is that the alternatives tend to just be a bad clone with less functionality, or they’re still fundamentally the same creatures, which just haven’t had the chance to grow and influence the market.
We need an alternative, a real one. One where we users are in charge of our experience and our data. Whichever side of the political spectrum that you are in, we need a fundamental reframing of social media so as to prioritize the interests of the users, instead of big tech, which will merely try to protect the status quo that has enabled them to gain their monopoly.
One such alternative is to structure social media via a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). These are blockchain entities that allow their constituent members to have full control over the data they share. Furthermore, they can be managed in a decentralized manner, and are thus much less likely to succumb to censorship and peer pressure from big tech platforms.
The future of blockchain, and indeed of the internet in general, might increasingly no longer be dependent on the desires of monolithic companies that control everything. Instead, in this era of hyper-segmentation, we might see that we can recover some of that lost sense of community and restructure our society to see value in the user again, instead of treating them as endlessly disposable.
