How Blockchain Could Revolutionize Social Media
I want to talk about how blockchain could revolutionize social media.
Alright, so I hear a lot of people complain about social media they say it's broken and for lots of different reasons right sometimes. I blame the platform sometimes I blend a person or sometimes I just blame the algorithm right as the reason for their post never getting seen right it's just that darn algorithm that you know keeps your content in the gutter nobody ever likes it or shares or comments on it right so these are kinds of things that had people argue about.
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So how can we solve some of these problems with blockchain, okay so there's a few ways I think we can do this right so the target that we're aiming at to fix social media. I think is to do a couple of things one is to decentralize social media that's to remove you know some control out of the hands of these you know centralized entities like you know the CEOs people complain about or the platforms that have you know businesses that control the rules of social media.
And also that darn algorithm that everyone complains about right and longs for the days when they just saw all their posts chronologically in the newsfeed right so let's talk about how we can achieve that right more decentralization and also how we can kind of reinvent the incentive structure of social media where different types of content get rewarded differently than it does now and there are different ways to reward it alright someone talked about all that.
I'm gonna break it down all right so really quickly let me just clarify what it means to decentralize social media right it's just like when I say it removes some of the control from a central entity a centralized company or platform whatever and moves more of the power into the people who actually use the network like people who post content and interact with content and like it and stuff like that so what are the benefits of this like why would you do it well it helps the couple different things like I said that algorithm that everyone complains about it offsets some of the effects of where there's not this company controlling what they reward and what they see on the platform stuff like that.
It allows users to reward that and you know the incentive of people to post more or boost their own post or something like that okay and also it fights this problem of censorship resistance which people are complaining about with social media rights.
I guess the algorithm is part of that right like if the continents not good necessarily tenth I think it's censored by being pushed down and the queues but it's also more blatant censorship that people complain about like certain ideas aren't necessarily represented more on social media right or maybe other ideas are represented more people who think this there's a perception of this whether it's true or not right and you also hear like certain people being demonetized on social platforms or their accounts get banned entirely rice is another example of censorship on these platforms.
Decentralization can solve some of these problems now there are lots of different companies who are coming out with decentralized alternatives for social media and I want to talk about one, in particular, today and that's minds.com.
I'll just pull that up on my screen here this is actually the page for bill Ottman who's the co-founder of minds I actually just had him on my youtube channel should go check that out if you haven't already it's a really great interview yeah Bill's a really smart guy I really had a good time talking with him of my channel and you know you can go see lots of the interviews about him he's been all over the place like on Joe Rogan.
It's like that but I like our talk that we did because we really get into the meat of the technical part of minds and how it's you know working toward decentralization interlayer specific way so go check that out if you haven't already so what is mines doing to decentralize social media or revolutionize it with the blockchain well there's a few things and the first thing I want to talk about is that it's reinventing the incentive structure of social media in a way right so you know we talked about before about the dreaded algorithm that everyone complains about well the algorithms.
Rewards certain things and maybe punish other things maybe by not rewarding them and we don't always know how it works right there's constantly people trying to figure out how the algorithm works so they can optimize their you know so for me to reach and things like that right and that is essentially a problem in a way you're always guessing because you can't see the code you can't see how it works and it seems like it's always changing right so in a more decentralized context you don't have to worry about the algorithm that no one understands right the powers placed more into the user's hands whether users reward other users and this creates a different incentive that you have to guess about necessarily you're more looking at what do.
Other users want rather than what does this algorithm want you to do right and this incentive structure has changed to include money monetary incentives right so basically they have an aetherium based token that works natively on their platform you know it's a full-on utility token that can be used freely on the platform you can you tip people send people wires and things like that it's really well integrated into the platform and it creates this new incentive structure that I'm seeing a lot across a lot of other crypto applications like money is this new powerful thing that we can you know integrate natively amp into applications.
This is how they're doing it with social media and I'm really excited about it okay so let's talk about you know what this token opens up other opportunities for the platform to decentralize social media or fix it right one thing that does is it changes how users can you know interact with influencers okay so right now if you want to work on an influencer you basically have to you know to connect with them over email or direct message or something like that and work out a deal and how you're gonna pay for it and you know also talk about the terms and you know to see if it worked and then there's all this back-and-forth that goes on right and mine is gonna let you basically automate.
A lot of this away it essentially allows you to create bounties for influencers where you know you can just say hey if you do this and I'll pay you a certain amount right and you can do it automatically so basically if you get the desired result then you just pay that person right and that's a really cool thing sort of who's all this friction of communication and trying to figure out how to get influencers to do stuff for you it's a really cool feature and Bill explains.
That more in that interview if you want to go check that out okay so another thing is also how it fixes advertising in a way right so on the platform you can just boost your own posts natively with the cryptocurrency that you have on your account, okay and this is really cool because it's a way that you can just guarantee that your content is gonna get seen more to just boost it up in the newsfeed alright and this reduces a lot of friction with the advertising.
So I've done a lot of advertising and there's a lot that you need in order to get started you sometimes you can add the account you need a business page outside your personal page you need all that your stuff you know to add a credit card and that's a lot of friction just to like basically boost some posts on your account right and this is a way that you can remove a lot of friction you can just have a simple user account and just boost your post with the cryptocurrencies already plugged into the platform itself that having to worry about all that extra stuff, okay and this also has the added benefit that you know how it's going to work okay and this is not just for advertising it's for a lot of different pieces of minds a lot of their code is open source so.
I've actually got the github page pulled up here where you can go see you know how different parts of minds work if you're a programmer right you can go and look at the code yourself and if you're not a programmer which I understand you could get somebody else to look at it for you and even if you don't need that it basically is a new layer of trust that they're even willing to have this peer review process for other people to come in and see how it works even if you can't understand it you know directly yourself okay it's just a whole new layer of trust and specifically when I'm talking about advertising that's a big problem advertising right now.
As you're always trusting these entities that they're gonna show your ads to people and we've seen situations in the past we've all gotten in trouble because well they lied about their impressions or something like that and you won't get that with something where all the code is just open-source and you can see how it's gonna work right and that's not just for ads it's for really anything on the platform again so you know let's talk about this idea of decentralization and how can be achieved on this sliding scale and this is something I've talked about with Bill in the interview like I said highly recommend you check that out if you haven't already you know cuz I talk to them about how do you achieve decentralization how did you all do with minds you know what did you decide to do now and what are you working toward because when you're trying to work for decentralization you're always going to basically sacrifice something in favor of decentralization right.
There's always sort of this tension of like what do we sacrifice what do we not sacrifice in order to build a really good decentralized application or add app or D app right so what I mean by that is you know you can have this extreme case where everything is as decentralized as possible where you know you have you know stuff running on ipfs and there's like no web servers or anything like that right and it's possible to do some small-scale projects like that and that can serve a very hyper niche use case right but for most consumer-facing applications have a lot of users you want to take some of that away and you know use certain tools that will work well they don't necessarily have to be decentralized and use the parts of the blockchain and other decentralized.
Tools to make the really essential parts of the application decentralized and that's what I've talked about a lot with Bill and how they did that with mines and what they're working more towards because it's a great user experience right not everything that's decentralized has a great user experience right now people are figuring it out and I think they've done a lot of hard work in this space and done a really great job all right so let's log out for today guys again check out mines comm check out that interview I did with Bill I think they're doing a really good job I think there's a lot of room to revolutionize social media with the centralization with the blockchain so again be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and click the like button down below if you all learn how to build blockchain technology you need to get into my block developer boot camp over at Daffy University com forward slash boot camp you can sign up for some free training alright so if y'all like this video and until next time thanks for watching Daffy University