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At the beginning of the new year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s anxiety has brought us to the exposure of the blockchain completely subverting social media.
In his annual New Year’s wish, Za lists a point of his concern to the extreme, from learning Mandarin Chinese to visiting every state in the U.S., all of which are fulfilled one by one. The establishment of these wishes is both a personal interest, but more than that, it is driven by the pressure of work. As the helmsman of a technology company with a market capitalization of $540 billion, Za’s anxiety has been particularly evident this year.
This is the first time that Za has publicly admitted that Facebook is off its original track and in a huge pickle: “We want to stop all the mistakes and abuses, but there are so many mistakes in the policies and tools to prevent abuse that are being implemented right now that we won’t be on track until the end of 2018, if we can pull it off this year. “
Let’s also imagine how much time people spend on facebook globally? How much US GD is being wasted. The same reason: facebook used your social relationship, used your content, took up your time, and then promote games and advertising to you to cash, its trillion market value and you have nothing to do with a dime. Including we often play microblogging, WeChat is also the case.
Facebook wants to use digital currency to revolutionize its own life, before others go to revolutionize its life. The company’s digital assets have been distributed to users, making facebbok a real facbook for everyone.
This statement by Zuckerberg highlights the fact that the social network is facing a huge turnaround since its birth.”
The common problem of centralized social media.
In the earliest days, one of the reasons why social media attracted users was the accessibility of the information explosion here. This mode of communication broke through the traditional news media “I told you what to read”, everyone can voice, all information has the opportunity to be viewed.
But as social media matured, the situation began to change. They began to selectively filter information, buy hot search, on the popular, spend money on advertising space, users no longer see the native information, but what the platform wants you to see.
That is, platforms are also starting to filter information, whether it’s a deliberate search for what’s hot or the opportunity for advertisers to get priority display, the presentation of content has started to be heavily skewed. Users are no longer in control of what they see.” The original creators of
and
are also disgruntled. Their high quality content is often used as a graft for the platform, gaining millions of views, thousands of likes, and instant fame, but in reality most of the financial benefits flow to the platform.
and as the public increasingly understands the value of news, users have become reluctant to share their private personal information. The personal information held by social media is not only open to officials, but also exposed to advertisers, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or similar products that are on par with them, and the vast majority of social media are at risk of privacy breaches.
And, as companies like WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, Amazon, Google and others gradually build barriers that confine a range of media services to the hands of several giants. They once broke up the power center of information dissemination, but they are now building another centralized power center.
In other words, social media is starting to lose its edge.
Blockchain may break the social media landscape
The emergence of blockchain has given a viable idea to solve these problems. The decentralized social media platform is worthy of most people’s expectation, as all the lists can be revealed as real as possible, without the situation of buying the hot list.
Just with the existing technology, in some social platforms, it is still difficult to eradicate the problem of fake news, cyber bullying, and even data privacy protection and excessive commercialization.” The emergence of the
blockchain may provide a viable solution. Blockchain has three important characteristics: immutability, traceability and distributed consensus. In his New Year’s wish, Zuckerberg also conveyed his expectations for blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, announcing that he will delve into cryptocurrency and crypto technology to understand how related technologies can be applied to Facebook’s services.
Compared to the existing traditional social network represented by Facebook, the new generation of blockchain-based social network has at least two major features that are highly disruptive:
One of the features is the decentralized network structure.” Like its mainstream contemporaries, the existing Facebook is undoubtedly a centralized network, with Facebook itself playing the role of a huge intermediary platform. The blockchain, on the other hand, is technically a distributed ledger solution with a non-tamperable record that guarantees authenticity and trustworthiness. For ordinary users, it is essentially a trustworthy and unmediated network platform. And when applied to social networks, it is a trustworthy peer-to-peer social platform.” The second feature of
is the high level of confidentiality of user information.
traditional social network data is stored on the platform’s servers. Back in 2012, Data Center Knowledge estimated that Facebook had 180,000 servers, and if these servers were attacked, the consequences would be unimaginable. In the blockchain environment, the social network allows users to run nodes on their own devices to access the network, and nodes are interconnected with each other in real time, and user information is stored in encrypted form on the network nodes, forming a distributed cloud. According to blockchain technology, data is stored redundantly, and data is onlyOnly those who have the secret key can view it.
The distributed database can help social media users better control the privacy of their own information, and ordinary users also reply to more rights, blockchain-backed social platform, can have a more reliable content ranking and social system.
What does a decentralized social platform look like?
blockchain is technically a distributed ledger solution that cannot be tampered with, ensuring authenticity and trustworthiness. But for the average user, it is essentially a trustworthy, unmediated network platform. And when applied to social networks, it is a trusted peer-to-peer peer-to-peer social platform.
This is not just a theoretical idea, there is already a wave of social products based on blockchain technology.
A company called Synereo in Tel Aviv, Israel, is trying to challenge the status quo of centralized social networks by forming peer-to-peer networks through blockchain technology.
Synereo social network is the opposite of Facebook and Twitter: one, it can’t record or store any personal information; two, it doesn’t push precise ads to users.
Synereo social network allows users to run nodes on their own devices to access the network, nodes and nodes interconnected in real time, user information is stored in encrypted form on the network nodes, forming a distributed cloud. In accordance with blockchain technology, data is stored redundantly and data can only be viewed by those who have the secret key. The network compensates users who make storage and arithmetic contributions. In addition, rewards are also provided to users who create and maintain content.
This is what Dor Konforty, the founder of Synereo, has been emphasizing to create a “social network that doesn’t harvest users’ information for cash”. Interactions between users, such as sending messages, posts, images, and videos, are peer-to-peer, and users can also post content for a fee and charge for it through AMP (local cryptocurrency), which is an alternative coin.
Other decentralized social media platforms include Steemit, Yours. where Yours is more focused and wants to be a bitcoin-based social media platform for content creators. Its slogan is simple: you are responsible for creating or discovering good content, and Yours is responsible for helping you make money and cash. (Yours is a way to earn money by creating or discovering good content.)
Yours developer Steven McKie once wrote in a blog post that the Internet itself is the network, and that Yours’ peer-to-peer network is based on the Internet as the The Yours platform puts control of content squarely in the hands of the users themselves, who can create channels and earn revenue for their creations.
Unlike Syner, which uses the alternative coin AMP, Yours uses the well-established Bitcoin for its liquidity currency.
As a video sharing platform created using blockchain and torrent technology, with a community of creators, viewers, and advertisers, Flixxo promises to get even better as it grows.
Flixx’s Flixx cryptocurrency is at the heart of the platform’s economy. As such, when content creators upload videos to the network, they can set revenue parameters to determine the Flixx fees spent to enjoy specific content.
In addition, they can set the percentage of revenue that will be shared to users who share videos on their devices. Advertisers can also use Flixx coins to get the ability to sponsor content on their videos. Users can take the time to view sponsored content to earn Flixx coins.
It works a lot like a torrent platform. However, instead of user preferences, Flixxo’s economy, with participation incentives, offers a sustainable business model.
The technology of the blockchain has started to give new hope to the dormant social media startups. The original social media, mainly at the interactive level of innovation, such as Twitter’s broadcast-style information distribution, Snapchat’s read-and-burn, etc.. But today’s peer-to-peer based social networks offer a new way of thinking.
Of course, the rise of decentralization is also related to the fact that all the people are paying more and more attention to their own rights, in the treatment of personal data and their own privacy issues, has been too much energy pent up, this energy if not effectively relieved, nowadays all social media platforms may be subverted. The only way to return the rights of the centralized system to the hands of people is also the inevitable trend in the future.
Nowadays, both China and the United States have started to explore on blockchain social. But Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, microblogging and other super social platform to adopt the speed and scope of blockchain technology, at present, among these four, only Facebook has announced to try to use, but for Zuckerberg, 2018 is only the first to understand and research, and will not land on a large scale. Even if only one of these four platforms is the first to announce the full application of blockchain technology, then it means that the blockchain social era is fully here. But in the fast-changing Internet industry, the earlier you intervene, the more likely you are to come out on top.
Don Tapscott, co-author of “The Blockchain Revolution,” hints that the decentralization thing should never rely on big companies that deprive users of surplus value.
Perhaps, in the near future, a new social platform built with blockchain technology will bring us a different kind of surprise.
