The State of the Blockchain-Based Social Media Industry in 2018
For the past 2 weeks, I've been exclusively writing about blockchain-based social media platforms and every day, I find a new project that I've never heard of before. Projects built on Steem, EOS and Ethereum. Somehow, 9 years after the birth of Bitcoin, developers realized that social media is the most likely the killer app the space has been waiting for.
Today, I want to dig deeper into the state of where we are at, the opportunities, the challenges and the dangers of this burgeoning industry.
Blockchain-Based Social Media - Is it the blockchain killer app?
Let me ask you: What kind of application are the most downloaded and uses on a daily basis in the world right now? That's a rhetorical question but you get the point. Social media is a part of almost everybody's life for better or worst.
We take pictures of family and friends, we date, we share memories and mourn on social media. It is a medium where men and women are represented to the same degree.
Since I joined the blockchain world in 2013, I've wondered WHAT would bridge the gap between the highly geeky and utopian crypto enthusiast community and the real world. Today, without a doubt, I know that it is through blockchain-based social media.
What Problem Does It Solve?
Distribution
The goal of any token is to be distributed to as many people as possible. The first way was through mining rewards but then, economies of scale made it difficult to participate profitably. Then came airdrops, where a certain community gets rewarded by another community. Finally, we have the ICO that opened a brand new way to raise capital.
The above strategies are too complex for the average person to participate in.
Since Steem was introduced in 2016, people were able to get tokens with upvotes. The Steem blockchain managed to put tokens into tens of thousands of people hands. Whether people want to acknowledge it or not, this was a revolutionary idea. This strategy for distributing token is the most efficient I can think of. Now dozens of projects are trying to improve on this formula and this competition brings in very innovative ideas to the table.
Bridging the Gap
I'm a marketer by trade so whenever I think about technology, I put myself in the shoe of the lowest common denominator I can think of. Someone who doesn't care how the lights switch works but do enjoy keeping in touch with his friends and family.
For the average person, understanding cryptocurrency and blockchain is beyond their mental model. Buzzwords such as:
- Decentralization
- Centralization
- Blockchain
- Crypto
- Tokens
- Censorship Resistant
- Incentivized
With these people, the more you explain the technology, the less they care.
Now let's take the approach of social media...where one person gets to realize that it's possible to make a little bit of money doing what they are already doing on Facebook or Instagram. This is a much easier way to get those people onboard.
Social media is the perfect bridge since the new user simply do what he would do elsewhere...but this time for rewards.
The Challenges
Identity / One Person One Vote
I started participating in the Steem blockchain in May 2016. This experience thought me a lot about blockchain-based social media. Many of the challenges that the Steem blockchain faced were not problems that were easily foreseeable. They were trailblazers. One of the problems this project face is how much people try to game the system for rewards.
The blockchain is an open database that anybody can build bots on. One person can have thousands of accounts which are programmed to game the system in one way or another. Few blockchain-based social media are taking this problem seriously. The only one I've encountered was OnoSocial though their solution was a little too intense for my taste(KYC/AML).
Steem's solution at the beginning to avoid Sybil attacks was to have people who have staked a lot of tokens to get more rewards. But that completely destroy the ability of the system to find the best content as Reddit does(aka the Wisdom of the Crowd).
Steem's proposed solution are oracles but that has yet to be implemented and tested.
So the solution to solve abuse while providing high-quality content to the end users as yet to be found and implemented.
Scaleability
The requirements to operate a blockchain on social media is beyond 95% of blockchain even hope to attain in terms of performance. Facebook alone has 52000 likes per second. That doesn't include posts, comments or shares. That's just for "likes".
Let's compare that with are getting right now:
- Bitcoin: 3 transactions per second
- Ethereum: 30 transactions per second
The only 2 platforms that actually have a shot at this are EOS and Steem. Steem has for the past 18 months almost entirely dedicated it's resource to scaling. They are far ahead when it comes to the competition but we aren't even yet sure of it's limits.
Conclusion
There are a lot more challenges that this space is facing and every new solution comes at a cost or compromise. As always, I will keep my nose close to the grindstone on the lookout for solutions and ideas that will bring this technology to the masses.
Photo by Elijah O'Donell on Unsplash
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://dappcentral.io/blockchain-technology/blockchain-based-social-media-industry/
Totally agree with your analysis.
I was actually surprised when, upon sharing my views with friends (admittedly of the "crypto geeky" strain) I only got disapproval ... "no, but decentralization, and censorship resistance and bla bla bla!" ("who the heck cares about that, outside of our closed circle!???")
The only difference is that I regretfully only joined steem in august 2017 instead of may 2016. And only started to look closely at it even later than that.
The search for unique identification contradicts anonymity because it involves personal data. Which would comply with the AML/KYC and US SEC but against the European GDPR.
For 10 years, everyone has been watching the blockchain as the 7th wonder of the world or the holy grail that seems to have reached certain limits. Few people dare to look at other solutions.
However, the DAG seems to offer the same characteristics with possibilities of scaling. It is a relational database with a chained index (parent / child) without mining. It would be possible to integrate the privileges of writing to the DAG granted to the witnesses only, thus eliminating the proliferation of the bots.
A DAG is a relational database with a chained index? I thought I knew what the DAG is in both mathematical terms and in a number of existing implementations. And in none of those I know of is the DAG a relational database. It's rather a "tree-like structure" like the filesystems and the XML. Totally unlike a relational database. The only serious implementation of a DAG that I know of is Hedera Hashgraph and it doesn't use the DAG for the same things that the "blockchain" structure is being used. Because by design it cannot provide finality - unlike in a blockchain, you can never be 100% sure that "the ledger is balanced".
Let me say that again: my current understanding is that a DAG cannot be used as a "distributed ledger". By design. Unless your name is IOTA and you silently assume that "losing" or "misplacing" or not being sure of who really owns one or two MIOTAs here and there it's not a big deal. Something that is not going to fly with the accounting profession anytime soon if you ask me, but then I'm not IOTA.
My understanding comes from the ByteBall white paper different from IOTA. This technology is experimental, has not yet been proven for reliability, security and scalability but I think it is worth exploring.
In the blockchain, each block is bound by the previous / next one requiring a complete reading of the blockchain.
In the Byteball DAG, it seems that the id, serving as an index, is linked by child / parent not requiring a complete reading of the database but simply the index which could be in "relation" with a other databases or tables.
Hedera Hashgraph is a project, Byteball has a currency, is operational and announces a distributed ledger.
Will there be other alternatives soon?
Mathematically speaking, the blockchain is a DAG - just a very simple one
(blockchain depicted as a DAG)
A more generic DAG looks like this:
So yes, of course it is worth exploring and it's being explored by many projects.
But the "difference" you spot is not one. Depending on what you want to do or search for, it is actually much more complex to search a generic, unconstrained DAG than a much simplified and streamlined one that is better known as a "blockchain"
You can do a lot of things with a DAG. Back in 2002, I implemented a kNN search algorithm on a DAG that was an ontology of the medical domain: each "node" of the graph was not containing a "state" of the state machine like in cryptocurrency projects but instead was a concept from the medical domain such as for instance "illness" or "leg". The "child-parent" relationships that were linking the nodes of the graph were not transactions nor hashes of the previous "state snapshot" but ontological relationships such as "isPartOf" or "isSubclassOf"
That shows the versatility of DAGs
However one thing I'm skeptical about is the ability of "multidimensional DAGs" (non-blockchain DAGs) to implement a ledger. Maybe there are solutions, but they are not readily apparent
"On Paper" it definitely looks like a niche with tremendous potential, and one of the most ready answers to the question of how to get a broad audience familiar with blockchain technology.
On the other hand — at least of our own Steemit is anything to go by — it seems like new features take an age to roll out. Which may be a problem in social media, which tends to be very fast moving and ever changing. Perhaps that's just one of the challenges of trying to run something like this as a decentralized initiative by consensus? Don't know, not a techy.
Interesting topic, though!
Its good to see what different platforms offer, how each of them tackle upon issues but still manage to get through. Cant believe that social media pays for your thoughts
I have been following your blog and writing very well. I hope we can be friends! OK? I also hope that you can pay attention to me and cast a valuable vote for me! thanks again! @zero12345
I think you're spot on with the analysis of how social networks could be the masses' entry into the blockchain space. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question. The content on Facebook for example is already mostly useless crap, so imagine what would happen if you could directly get paid for your activity there. I think it would lead to even worse content, as the system would incentivize spamming even more.
Another problem I see is the inherent centralization that comes with platforms such as steemit or EOS. The 'janitors' of these platforms in the case of EOS, or the whales on steemit just have too much power over the distribution of rewards, which leads to cartels and a plutocracy.
It is extremely important that the social networking platform that eventually wins the current race to mass adoption is sufficiently decentralized.
Really interested to know where the EOS 'janitors' role comes from.
"The 'janitors' of these platforms in the case of EOS"
Are these the block producers which can be voted in and out of power? Their power is slowly being limited by the community imho. EOS still has a ways to go to be truly successful but at least the community is trying instead of committing resources and effort trying to scale smart contract platforms that will never manage the tps rate required to support a very small network of users.
It will be interesting to see what other platforms provide the community at large. For now I'm happy to not have 3 large mining farms controlling the security of the entire network.
EOS BP view: https://glass.cypherglass.com/map/main/top50
Yes, I meant the block producers.
If it is not a permissionless network you will always need to delegate some entities that at the very least process transactions (in EOS's case, these are the BPs). The problem with this is that it leads to a rule of the rich. Sure, they can be voted in and out of power in theory, but in effect the network is not decentralized enough for this to work. Average Joes buying 10/100/1k EOS each cannot compete with organizations that own a considerable percentage of the total supply. In such a system there always will be whales, so we need to build systems where the system itself prevents the centralization of power.
Currently, there is a huge trade-off because the more decentralized the network is, the harder it is to scale to millions and billions of users. We'll get there though.
Quality post buddy.
I think social media blockchain is the future of blockchain. After a decade or more it will be lot more difficult to work in crypto industry. mining would be more difficult n not beneficial
Love the post and how you broke down all the social media coming out on these different block chain platforms. I agree it is going to take time to work out the kinks
the platforms constantly improving is good news greetings and my regards.