Who Owns Your Social Media Reputation?

Centralized social media platforms of today like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, among many others, have allowed billions of people to interact with each other in an instant manner. The rise of social media has accelerated the globalization movement, which is the rapid exchange of ideas, culture, and even ideologies from one jurisdiction to others.

Although many of these traditional social media networks allow consumers to interact with their followers at no apparent cost (“free” to sign up), and even promote their business, the platform owners are making a lot of money by charging hefty amounts for paid advertisements and other ways to generate revenue by taking advantage of the time and effort of their users. While the platform benefits tremendously from the input provided by the users and even large influencer accounts, the end-users are not able to earn substantial returns.

Even on streaming platforms and video sites like YouTube, there might be many accounts with millions of subscribers like PewDiePie or Jake Paul and MrBeast. However, these large accounts are still giving up a huge chunk of their revenue to the centralized platform owners. It’s simply not fair to the content creators who are working so hard to produce engaging material and then make hardly any money from it or not what they truly deserve.

Leveraging Blockchain Tech, Decentralized Infrastructure to Deploy Social Media Apps

That’s why we have seen the rise of alternative social media platforms that aim to leverage the power of blockchain technology and other forms of decentralized infrastructure. These types of networks are focused on enabling a fairer, more democratic social media ecosystem. While blockchain or distributed ledger tech (DLT) alone is not going to magically create a more equitable social media platform, it does help with establishing a foundation upon which many of these Web 3.0 apps are being developed.

By using distributed and decentralized storage space with the support of protocols like IPFS, many of these next-generation social media networks are beginning to provide a more engaging and rewarding experience to their users. Unlike more traditional social media networks, users are able to take advantage of a wide range of touted benefits such as truly owning their online reputation.

What this means is that an individual user and their account can be fully responsible for their actions as well as being fairly rewarded for their contributions. These blockchain or DLT-powered social networks have been designed to level the playing field for all participants by allowing each user to build up their reputation in a transparent manner. For instance, one of the earlier blockchain-enabled social networks and blogging sites, Steemit, allowed people to build up their reputation on the platform by engaging in positive and authentic interactions with other users.

Independently Managing Your Online Reputation

Although this platform had/has many flaws, thus preventing it from reaching mainstream adoption, it did manage to successfully showcase how a blockchain-based platform would be able to allow users to independently manage their reputations. And the higher a users’ reputation score, the more they could earn via the platform in the form of cryptocurrency tokens and various other incentives.

In addition to Steemit, there have been several other social media platforms that have issued their own tokens such as Uptrennd. Although Uptrennd failed due to a poorly-designed incentive model, which was easily gamed by users (upvote for upvote or mutual upvoting of posts, among other flaws), it did show us that crypto-focused social networks could be powerful. 

Until now, however, these blockchain-related networks have not been successful at onboarding as many users are centralized platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Even though they aren’t attracting as many users, there are some projects that appear to have the right approach when it comes to deploying a viable DLT-enabled social media network.

Creating a Permissionless Social Network with Transparent Reputation System

Subsocial is one such innovative and open platform that enables anyone to seamlessly create their own decentralized, censorship-resistant social networks and marketplaces. Subsocial will aim to help individual users with launching their own decentralized version of well-known sites like Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, among others.

As explained by its development team, Subsocial allows users to truly be free when interacting online. It also aims to help users capture the full or real value of their contributions. Users of other social networking websites regularly offer value to the network, but they are not fairly rewarded for their time and work. 

Most Twitter users (if not all) don’t get substantial financial returns from contributing content. By hosting their content exclusively on Subsocial, creators could get the complete worth of their creations through generous tips or even subscriptions, among other incentivization models. 

Like most other blockchain-powered platforms, there’s no middle-man involved to take a large share of the profit. There’s also nobody harvesting user data, or using intrusive content algorithms to control what users are viewing so that they can unfairly influence their emotions or thinking patterns.

Subsocial leverages the Substrate blockchain or DLT framework and IPFS for providing a decentralized file storage system. This is meant to support a personalized news feed and notifications, along with a transparent reputation. 

A transparent reputation means that users’ actions are clearly visible to others, so that when rewards are distributed, one can easily see how content creators are being incentivized for their efforts. There’s complete visibility into the operations of the platform and behavior of individual users so that everyone can see how incentives are being created and given to users who make meaningful contributions.

As noted by its developers, Substrate allows Subsocial to connect to the Polkadot and Kusama networks. Polkadot is described as a next-gen blockchain/DLT protocol that brings together a vast network of purpose-built blockchains, enabling them to interoperate effectively at scale. Polkadot will offer cross-chain interaction as part of a robust, shared security model that Subsocial can scale.

The Subsocial project is the recipient of technical grants from Web3 Foundation. It has also delivered on important milestones outlined in its grant applications. It’s reportedly one of the first 17 initiatives selected by Parity to participate in the Substrate Builders Program.

The project introduced its betanet last year, which is fully operational and has been running as intended for several months. It has more than 12,000 account sign-ups with balances on the betanet chain.

Although it is too early to say whether Subsocial or other crypto and blockchain-focused social media platforms will succeed and attract a large number of users, it is for certain that change is required. Traditional social media platforms have too many systemic problems including lack of transparency when it comes to establishing a trusting reputation on their networks. For these reasons, we need a better social media ecosystem that’s fundamentally different from the models prevalent today.