Firstly, let me say that I'm not a social media expert, economist or a blockchain developer. My views are purely from the perspective of an avid social media user - one who has been endlessly disappointed by Steem, and would like to see a new paradigm, a fresh attempt at a blockchain-based social network. To that end, here's where my thoughts lie. Do note these are very vague, very broad overviews. The details will remain pending.
I have already discussed this topic countless times, with various ideas. Instead of repeating myself, I would ask you to read my post from a year ago, Why blockchain social?. That post clearly states why Steem has failed, but also identifies where there's potential. Many ideas here have also been presented before here.
Build a protocol, not a blockchain.
OK, so I lied, this is not about a blockchain social network, but rather, a protocol.
This one's pretty simple. To achieve true decentralization, we don't need yet another shitcoin or another blockchain that's at the mercy of 16 people (or, evidently, 1 in some cases). Let's face it, a vast majority of shit tokens only serve to enrich its founders and early investors. The Steem ninja mine was totally unnecessary, and only served to dump on to less-informed investors over the years. We need one standard protocol which people and companies can deploy at will. Think of it as IRC on the internet - anyone can host their own server at will, and each server can cross talk with each other - this is what true decentralization looks like. Not shoving all data onto one public pseudo-centralized blockchain, which has proven unsustainable and unnecessary.
This protocol will be cross-compatible with multiple blockchain systems and engines - and even centralized databases.
Let's say, someone wants to build on Ethereum, they can. They can spin up a Optimistic Rollup Layer 2 solution, which today achieves all the scalability a massive social network will need at 2,000+ TPS. The Layer 2 will only interact with the public ethereum blockchain for specific data. This way, this particular social network will leverage all of Ethereum's formidable network effect, whilst at the same time, offering a customized and tuned social network.
Or, maybe someone would want to run a blockchain on top of this protocol for data storage. Sure, they can do that too. You can spin up an EOSIO chain.
Or, it can be just an individual, who wants to run just their own blog, on a centralized database, thus having complete ownership over their content. How is it different from running, say, Wordpress? Their content will now be compatible with a wider ecosystem, should they choose to, and expose the content to crypto assets for monetization or other uses.
Or, it can be an aggregator frontend, that collects the best from all these differing architectures, and focuses on innovative discovery algorithms.
There are a myriad ways to go about it. May the best solution win.
But at the end of the day, each one of these varying underlying storage architecture will be compatible with and cross-communicate with each other thanks to this common protocol.
Who will build a protocol like this? While I have zero knowledge on the matter, I'm optimistic the Bluesky team, funded by Twitter, is building something like this.
Privacy is crucial
Speaking of zero knowledge, there's a significant amount of work being down in this respect. I'm very impressed by zkRollups as a Layer 2 solution on Ethereum - this already offers the privacy and scalability we need for social networks.
Yes, there'll be some people who would like a completely public blockchain for social interactions, but privacy is a human right, and for a vast, vast majority of the world's billions of people, it's a crucial requirement.
The protocol will need to be build in privacy and encryption standards, and ensure that all compatible architectures feature compatible privacy solutions. Today, it's probably only Ethereum, but I can't see why this can't be extended to EOS, Tron, and others.
An attention economy
Of course, each implementation of the protocol will have their own methods of revenue generation. Some will be centralized front-ends with their own advertising solution, some will feature fresh and unique methods of tokenization in ways of decentralized advertising.
Some may even go with a Steem/Hive-like system. That would be a terrible idea, of course. Steem, and by extension, Hive, are degenerative economies which are destined to lose value against BTC permanently. Save for brief altcoin pump and dump seasons, that's how it's been for the last 4 years, and it'll continue to be so forever. This is basic economics. Give away high inflation, and "dumb" inflation, and your network will be degenerative forever. Even if your network sees substantial growth, it'll be followed by equally substantial inflation, leading to a inevitable collapse.
We have to get rid of silly ideas like inflation-funding and common pools of printed money - or at least do so with very limited inflation. The token will only be worth something if it's given a fundamental worth. All money has to come from utility, gamification, tipping and/or advertising.
This can take multiple forms, once again, but here's an idea…
A decentralized advertising system. You are a celebrity, with 5M followers. You post some content. People and companies would want eyeballs on their comments, and can pay for it. It can become effectively an auction, the highest bidder gets the most attention on the celebrity's post, in a way that they state. If said celebrity doesn't like some content, they can reject it, and the fees will be returned to the advertiser. I don't want to go into details here, but you can see how this can be one concept worth considering.
All money can be bootstrapped with an existing assets like BTC, ETH or stablecoins; or their own token. I'd bet those using an established token with a network effect will be the more successful.
As you can probably tell, I have a lot more thoughts on the matter, but you get the overall picture.
What about Hive, then? Realistically, it's going to remain a niche platform. I and many others have written about plenty of issues endlessly for years, so I don't want to beat that dead horse again till someone wants to listen. That said, the most pressing need of the hour is reducing inflation.
^^^^^^^
You've listened to enough of my ramblings...
I will also post more ramlbing.
Esp about Q Anon, Trump, Corona and dumb slaves..
first in german, then in english ^^
The protocol exist, that’s the blockchain. The blockchain can operate with or without rewards mechanic.
That’s the beauty, one HF and there’s no “stupid inflation” anymore. Just remove the rewards pool and let the apps decide themselves if they want to operate any rewards or not.
What do you end up with?
Decentralized storage (database) and a “central userbase” (all accounts with their keys). You can then totally reduce inflation to only interest and witness rewards or just lower it, making room for new token utility for the base coin.
PS: Bluesky is a research project, there is no explicit intent to actually build anything at this point.
If you're talking about this blockchain, it doesn't achieve what I'm referring to above. But yes, it can be improved significantly even if it remains a siloed blockchain at the mercy of a few witnesses.
The mercy of few witnesses is probably why Jack wouldn't consider it (there may also be account scaling issues and then some probably) and instead is now investing in a research project.
But the beauty of open source is that anyone can fork the code, even create a new genesis block, and adapt the code to their desires before launching the platform.
Additionally, governance is flexible. As we have seen with bidbots. Stake is a weakness but stake (I mean money) also centralizes even Bitcoin. Only few, very few, specific mining pool operators are needed to collude and Bitcoin's rules can change over night.
Interestingly enough, because of the "stupid inflation" Steem/Hive is one of the healthiest DPOS models when it comes to collusion resilience. On EOS only the block producers grow. And they grow constantly, weakening collusion resistance every further day.
Here we still have 65% "organic" distribution, as well as interest. Eventually the stake will be more distributed.
As Patrick points out below, the Bitcoin mining pool "exploit" has been vastly overblown by DPoS fanboys. It's a risk, yes, work is ongoing to mitigate it - but in any case, it's far, far more of an existential threat with DPoS. I don't consider DPoS a decentralized consensus mechanism at all.
I do agree that Hive as it currently stands is one of the least weak DPoS networks, though. (Definitely not Steem though)
Either way, creating an open protocol for social media is an entirely different can of worms.
Creating the open protocol is not so big an issue btw. This platforms stores custom_json, which is pretty much very open.
I had typed a much longer reply, mentioning things like certain web2.0 protocols and so, but I think it would be irrelevant but I fear the dislike you've grown for this type of governance prevents you from still seeing the possible options.
I'm not saying this platform is the all compassing endgame, I'm not a DPOS fan boy either, and I'm happy for Bluesky. But all that doesn't take away that this platform has some truly awesome features and could have gotten much further with different past managers.
Governance? Not written in stone. Nothing prevents you/us from campaigning tomorrow for only 3 votes/account. Or 1SP->1vote.
Don't get stuck in those limitations. If we do we may as well pack in now. No startup founders would have continued if they knew about the future HR and boardroom games they would encounter.
On the other hand, one need not get stuck with current system.
I don't know that I would throw Bitcoin under the bus for the potential of mining pool operator abuse. If pools colluded to make a change then the community would just leave the mining pool immediately to a pool that supported the correct rule set. This would result in two chains momentarily but the community would quickly overtake the attackers hashing rate and resume blocks correctly leaving the fork to be worthless.
This isn't to say this isn't a potential attack vector to cause serious disruptions. That's why the work being put in on BetterHash and Stratum V2 are so important. Once we have these technologies developed then this attack vector will go to 0 and individual miners will have better control over their hashing power.
I don't disagree with that. But the attack vector exists, but yes I should probably have emphasized that the mining community is much more mature in response in general.
The biggest failure and why Steem has dropped off in MC is that the value returned for inflation distributed was never even remotely equal.
You can talk about "inflation" being the culprit but thats only a part of it. Inflation by itself is not the biggest culprit. "Dumb inflation" is.
That is the big obstacle HIVE faces as well.
Yes, exactly.