STEEMIT, ROBINHOOD, SOLA and many other platforms have emerged in blockchain industry claiming to decentralize social media like Facebook. But are they truly on the path of decentralizing Facebook? Should decentralized facebook look like Steemit or Sola or another numerous platform emerging?
Let's try to look closely where are we going wrong?
First thing first, I think most of the STEEMIANs are still confused about the STEEM blockchain, is it something similar to Medium or it's decentralizing social network like Facebook?
The trending posts tab, attention to the content and strong rules against spamming it feels much more like Medium or Reddit. We have Steemcleaners to fight spammers and @curie to curate the content. People are more focused on creating good content with no grammatical mistakes.
On another hand, we have platforms like STEEPSHOT, Zappl and Busy.org trying to make Steem look like Social Networks.
The main focus of people on STEEM is to create good content and earn money. Does the mindset of creating quality content and sharing it with friends will attract the mainstream audience of facebook? I am talking about the people who simply want to chat and share the photos, stories with their loved ones. Could Steem retain such people?
We all know people won't go for it, not everyone could write a blog, create a vlog or video and upload. People on social media hang out just to share photos, moments and keep in touch with the friends. They are not looking for content and earning through it.
As @atmosblack, pointed in his various blog on facebook only 10% are the content creators others just absorbs data. We know how sharing and memes work on FB, right? The blogs and reports are shared mostly not posted as on STEEMIT.
If not,STEEM/SOLA, how should decentralized facebook look like?
We need to first understand the revenue model of Facebook, and I think cause of recent news we all are very much aware of their business revenue. Facebook does the data scraping and indirectly sales the data to advertisers. The advertisers pay them for promoting their content/business on Facebook.
For Instance, you have joined few groups and pages of jewellery and food(assumes you are a foodie and loves jewellery). Facebook will take few dollars (according to the reach) from the restaurants/ jewellery shop in your area and show you their offers/content as sponsored ads. In marketing terms, they give you leads/prospects, in exchange for money to grow your business and visibility.
Their major revenue resource is running advertisements. Paid advertisement what we see on STEEMIT with the help of bots ( which even STEEM wouldn't have predicted until they were running). Moreover, FB has increased their revenue 4x by inviting businesses, making easy to open the online shop, introducing live features and chat+video calls options.
Few take away from Facebook-
- It's not about the content, but the socializing.
- features are chat and video calls plus live makes people feel more connected to dear ones.
- Advertisement revenue.
- Businesses pay to buy reach/ not the content creators.
- Consist of a numerous number of Spam accounts.
- No language restriction and race for creating good content and upvotes.
We need just revenue decentralisation of FB, for Decentralized FB!
EOSians will love a platform like FB and they will love to invest in it. For a true decentralised "Facebook" we need to forget about reputation/ influence on the platform, on FB everyone is equal irrespective of the money they have in their wallets.
The revenue model could be decentralized instead, for instance, if I give permission to "Decentralised FB" to access some of my data, and decentralized FB sells my data for "TOKEN X", I should earn few percentages of data revenue. Where I could use the same token to invest in the platform and earn more token or buy ads for my advertisement.
It will be a win-win situation for all the investors, advertisers and users on Facebook. They have full control of their own data, they could even sell it if they give permission to the platform and further earn delegating the earned token to "Decentralized FB" or put their own business ads.
It will solve the problem of 90/10, people could simply earn looking at advertisement like on BAT. This model is already working so I am quite sure that it works for the decentralized platform as well.
According to media reports, FB admits 270m fake accounts on the platform, maybe it's because of easy sign-up process, you could create your account on FB just using an email id which again is simple.
For "Decentralized FB", the 2 step verification, just mobile verification should be put in place. Thou spammers won't be such a problem on the platform as far as content goes but they could affect the reach and leads to businesses putting advertisements.
FB also monitors the spamming activity and restrain the users from further misuse of features, we would need something similar on FB which monitor the actions of users and limit them. I know we would have bandwidth but it should even limit the account with high bandwidth to stop abuse.
Constitution/ Policy should not support any kind of bot services on the platform, for equal distributions and long term goals.
It won't lead to instant gratification like STEEM, but Decentralised FB will slowly find it's own place on the internet.
Will this be the STEEM 2.0?
No one knows what @dan is thinking about, we need better STEEM, as blog-like Medium with a bridge with Wordpress so that people could just use it's as companies blog. Not based on SP but just on reputation and verified accounts (like Twitter/Youtube).
The social media website and content platforms like Medium or Reddit should not be merged.
What will we see in future as STEEM 2.0? only time will tell :)
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