The blockchain is the new technology that people just can’t stop seeming to talk about. It’s staged to change everything, from currency to digital property to even social media and the attention economy. Some have even taken to calling it the second significant overlay on top of the Internet, aka the trust layer .
William Mougayar’s The Business Blockchain: Premise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology describes it as such:
The blockchain cannot be described just as a revolution. It is a tsunami-like phenomenon, slowly advancing and gradually enveloping everything along its way by the force of its progression, he writes. Plainly, it is the second significant overlay on top of the Internet, just as the Web was that first layer back in 1990. That new layer is mostly about trust, so we could call it the trust layer.
Mougayar’s confidence is shared by more than a couple of other enthusiasts, such as Imogen Heap and others in the music industry, certain govtech CIOs, and even insurance tech startups. The real indicator that blockchain will touch everyone’s lives, however, is that it’s predicted to change the way we interact over social media.
A Quick Rundown on Blockchain Technology
For those unfamiliar with blockchain technology, the reason that Mougayar calls it a trust layer is its nature as a decentralized consensus system. The best way to explain this is that, in the real world, if I give you one dollar, you possess that dollar; I no longer possess it. If I give you ownership of a car, you now own it; I no longer do. Pretty simple concept, right? But let’s make things interesting; what if I gave you a song?
In the world of computing, things are not so simple. If I own an MP3 copy of UB40’s Red Red Wine, I can copy that file and give it to you. Now you own it–but I do too, via different copies of the same file. The blockchain utilizes mining to create what are essentially long threads of blocks that mathematically verify whether each block in that chain belongs there. So if something is copied, or forged, the block will be rejected by the network.
This is how the blockchain is built upon transparency, and also how it could be seen as the harbinger of trust. Every transaction, be it monetary, or upvotes and downvotes , or likes –all of these can be traced back to an original source, and they are impossible to forge or counterfeit.
How Blockchain Will Be Used in Social Media
We’ve all heard the phrase fake news uttered far too often in the last six months–but one new company wants to combat fake news once and for all. Blockchain startup Userfeeds, based out of Warsaw, has raised $800,000 in seed funding from BlueYard Capital, Coinbase co-founder Ehrsamh, and Piotr Smoken of Dataventures, according to Mike Butcher, writing for TechCrunch.
Userfeeds essentially contends that the way content and information is ranked and discovered on the web–whether that be via search engines or on social media–is broken. Third parties like bots, false news providers, and advertisers are gaming what you see, leading platforms such as Facebook, for example, to rank fake news higher because it’s more sensational.
In our view, the only way to fix these problems is to modify incentives that make it economically viable to produce and spread these types of content, Userfeeds co-founder and CEO Maciej Olpinski told CoinDesk.
Userfeeds strives to create a credible system of content ranking that rewards users for their feedback, instead of incentivising publishers to create hollow clickbait. This is its own form of cryptocurrency, in a way, and the amount of this social currency that somebody has could inform their credibility. Advertisers could benefit from this type of social currency, and it could even help mitigate some of the legal risk associated with adopting user-generated social content by properly attributing ownership as well as even crypto-royalties to content creators.
The Attention Economy
What it all comes down to is the attention economy. Userfeeds isn’t the only company dabbling in the blockchain/social media game. Linda Rosencrance, writing for Nasdaq.com, mentions Steemit, AKASHA, and Synereo’s Qrator as possible frontrunners in the race to blockchain-ify social media.
All of these companies are essentially trying to get a grip on the attention economy, and to unify it in a way that is palpable. Traditional media is losing viewers and attention to Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, Youtube–basically all of the apps pour into our daily lives as the years go on.
“The audience sizes being drawn to these new platforms are massively dwarfing audience sizes of traditional media properties, writes David Pakman, VC at Venrock. You wouldn’t know that from reading the ‘media‘ sections of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, who still produce thousands of stories discussing the rise and fall of cable TV programs… yet they comfortably ignore YouTube celebrities, Viners and Twitch broadcasters with much larger audiences.”
The blockchain could essentially fuse all of these sources of media together, from traditional to new apps, and create a reliable platform from which we derive trusted information.
