How Will Blockchain Solve New Social Media Problems?
RegulationBit News Today2 min read
In October 2021, Facebook experienced a well-known outage lasting several hours that disconnected users from the site. Facebook and Twitter have expanded into colossal entities that wield major influence over online interactions and the consumption of information.
To explain: “The centralized social media industry is plagued by global censorship, a lack of customization, unfair monetization, algorithm dictatorship and a monopoly on network effects,” says Subsocial. Several legal actions addressing how user data is handled have named platforms like Facebook as defendants.
Conventional social networks capture considerable value from user-made content while offering minimal compensation to the people who create it. A review of the terms of service on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook shows that standard users have very few protections.
A decentralized social media network built on blockchain provides a potential fix by offering individuals greater oversight of the material they post.
Decentralized architecture, data ownership, and privacy
By employing decentralized storage tools such as the InterPlanetary File System, social networks hosted on Ethereum can defend user records from exploitation and malicious activity.
This means users can, for example, sign in to an Ethereum-based social network without having to share personally identifiable information, such as names or email addresses.
Spreading authority across a network makes it much harder for centralized organizations or governments to restrict information or silence dissenting viewpoints.
Because blockchain establishes a distributed and unchangeable record, secretly inserting or deleting data is exceedingly difficult. All user profiles and posts are saved on the DeSo Blockchain and made accessible to users through any social app.
Networks such as Polygon, Bitcoin, and Ethereum maintain cryptocurrency balances and transaction records on their blockchains. But DeSo is a blockchain network for social networking material itself, inclusive of profiles, posts, followers and likes.
Tokenized content monetization and creator micropayments
With blockchain also comes the ability to create new ways for users to monetize content. Posts published on Mirror, for example, are stored on Arweave, and can be minted as collectible Writing NFTs.
Authors can mint Writing NFTs without paying any fees, and collection takes place on Ethereum to ensure transactions remain fast, economical, and eco-friendly.
Brave has incorporated the Basic Attention Token, an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, into its browser environment to support creators and reshape digital advertising. The Brave Rewards program, meanwhile, allows users to earn BAT by viewing privacy-respecting ads, and automatically contribute to content creators across platforms like YouTube and Twitter.
Prominent decentralized protocols and emerging platforms
The Ethereum network has become a top choice for developers building decentralized social media, spurring a number of experiments. Mirror is a user-owned writing platform. Farcaster is a decentralized social network for sharing casts. Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph that allows creators to own their content.
After securing $9 million in seed funding in a round led by Polychain Capital, DSCVR, a network on Dfinity's Internet Computer protocol, entered the effort to build a scalable decentralized social platform. Bluesky, another decentralized network, has also entered the fray as the decentralized social media ecosystem expands.
