Owning your own voice: Blockchain's answer to big tech
Founder of TreeChat, Dmitriy Fabrikant, joined the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream this week to talk about decentralized social media, the economic incentives of the current internet, and why an interoperable system fueled by micropayments is a better option.
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What is decentralized social media?
Wuckert welcomes Fabrikant to the livestream, telling viewers they recently connected on an X Space and decided to expand on that conversation through this livestream episode.
One thing that stood out to Fabrikant was how many people on the X Space didn't use decentralized social media, yet some had strong opinions on how it should work. Many builders working on these things have no idea what their vision is or what they're working towards.
However, most agreed on how the current ad-fueled model was broken. This model means social media platforms have to harvest your data to serve better ads and are incentivized to engage in censorship to not harm their advertising revenue.
Most agreed that a Web3 social media app fueled by micropayments would be better, even though they had different views on what it should look like. Having an app powered by tiny payments would fundamentally alter the incentives of these platforms.
Wuckert agrees. However, he highlights how posts on these apps can end up being impacted by the chance to earn revenue. Everything becomes transactional when money is involved, and it shows. Fabrikant says this is where micro and nanopayments come in; when the value exchanged is tiny, it's more like posting for fun.
The benefits of micropayments and costly signals
Fabrikant notes how X uses engagement as a content amplification signal. For example, when you reply angrily, the algorithm shows you more of that type of content.
However, micropayments can replace all of that—the algo can simply show you more of what you're willing to pay for. Users still get a dopamine hit, and creators can monetize without ads.
Wuckert says he spends the most time on YouTube and deeply values how he can learn anything on it. However, he's often frustrated by how the algorithm shows him related content for weeks when he only wanted to know one thing.
Fabrikant believes this can also be solved with micropayments—sending one could signal to the algorithm that we want to see more content like this, otherwise it assumes it's a one-off interest. Ironically, this could incentivize people to spend less time on social media—creators would be rewarded for transmitting the knowledge they have to share in the most efficient timeframe possible. Furthermore, with no middlemen, there'd be a direct creator-to-audience relationship.
Building an open, interoperable system and platform
Wuckert compliments Fabrikant on TreeChat, saying it does an excellent job at taking all the on-chain data and aggregating it so people can decide what they value and build with it. He thinks building a platform on which other people can build clients could be a good idea.
Fabrikant says he likes that idea, but it's a case of not having the resources to do everything simultaneously. He does think opening up the ecosystem and making everything interoperable makes everything more valuable, though.
Overall, he's very optimistic about the future and thinks it will all work out. Wuckert feels the same: he sees it as fundamental infrastructure.
Managing relationships with micropayments
Wuckert talks about how managing all their relationships and interactions becomes impossible when a creator or personality reaches a certain size. For example, Joe Rogan likely has a team, and he can no longer simply shoot off a tweet to a friend.
Fabrikant says there needs to be a hierarchical structure to all of this. Nobody has 10,000 actual friends, so we need a way to separate the significant ones from the rest. We can use Bitcoin to do this, prioritizing them according to the metrics we choose.
For example, we could prioritize them in terms of value exchanged or total interactions. With a scalable blockchain and micropayments, we have a measuring stick that allows us to record anything, and we can also use it to send signals.
However, the best thing about decentralized social media powered by micropayments is how we can stop attention hijackers from interrupting us. We came to look for information and didn't necessarily want to see an ad, political Tweet, or video. This technology gives us the tools to control our attention again, which is hugely important.
To learn more about TreeChat, decentralized social media, and micropayments, check out the livestream episode here.
Watch: Bitcoin could be one of the most eco-friendly tech
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