Is Sola a competitor to Steemit? See inside for my thoughts!

A few days ago, I found some information about an upcoming ICO for Sola, which says this about itself: (emphasis mine)

Sola is the next generation decentralized social platform that incentivizes and benefits all involved parties — users, third-party developers and the core team. The name Sola is an acronym for “social layer.”

Does that sound something like Steem? It should -- they reference Steemit as a competitor in their whitepaper. I've downloaded their app and I've been tinkering with their system a bit over the past few days to assess. Details on exactly how they'll accomplish their revenue sharing ideas are scant so far, but I'll summarize my first impressions here.

It's like Twitter and Tinder had a one-night stand.

From what I can tell, Sola is the new name of a social media platform called Plag (or Plague? their materials seem to use both names) that's been operating as a mobile app for some time. It's like Tinder and Twitter had a baby.

Twitterishness:

The content is distilled down into tiny mobile-screen-sized "cards" which are fed to the user one-by-one. Here's the first random card I saw when I logged into the web app:

That sort of thing is standard. You get a lot of links to other stuff, a lot of photos, a lot of stupid copy-pasta memes, and a lot of one-line ideabites. Here's something I posted that's gotten a bit of attention. It's a very long way from the kind of format that usually attracts me. I wouldn't ever waste my time with something like this if I didn't have some kind of profit motive.

Tinderishness:

You see exactly one card at a time; the exact cards you see are determined by a centrally-administered secret-sauce artificial intelligence algorithm. If you like the card, you swipe up; if you don't, you swipe down. Either way, you move on to the next card. If you swiped up, you "spend" a couple AP (action points) and the author of the content you liked gets awarded some of the SOL cryptocurrency. Your AP points replenish daily, I think -- and you can also get them by referring users (for example, click this link to sign up and I'll supposedly get a referral bonus of AP).

How does the economic model work?

It seems that the long-term supply of SOL is fixed, and the SOL tokens are just shuffled around between users to reward content creators. I think that the platform has a pot full of SOL, and those are given out to different users -- on the surface, this will feel a tiny bit Steem-ish. However, in Steem, the rewards pot is administered in a totally trustless and decentralized manner - but I've seen no evidence that Sola will work in the same way. Here's the economic infographic from their whitepaper:

As far as I can tell, the crux of it is advertising revenue. It seems like people buy ads, and then somehow that ad revenue is used to purchase SOL tokens on the open market. Then those SOL tokens are split between node operators, content creators, and founders. Exactly how this split and these buybacks and the advertising market will be administered is not at all clear to me -- and I suspect all of it will be centralized. Maybe auditable, but I think if the founders actually had some secret sauce way of decentralizing that they'd have made more of it in the whitepaper.

So will Sola be decentralized?

I suspect not, though of course I'll be happy to be proved wrong here. I suppose you could call their endorsement system "decentralized," but only in the sense that Reddit's voting system is decentralized: sure, the voters are decentralized, but the ranking algorithms and such are not. But who knows... time will tell.

Is there an ICO?

Yeah, it starts really soon -- you can find details on their website. I'm not endorsing it, because I don't endorse (or not endorse) ICOs. Invest at your own risk, and only if it's legal for you to do so in your legal environment.

I want to sign up! How?

Use my referral link! It's here:
https://sola.foundation/r/ODMxM2Y