-
@ TheBitcoinManual
2023-08-12 07:18:50Social media is a part of our lives, like it or not, it's how we get our news, voice our opinions engage with friends and family, find community and argue with anons, it's just what we modern humans do.
The problem with social media today is that it is run by corporations, these platforms, while acting as public utilities for communication are actually walled gardens where narratives can be pushed or suppressed and your time on site is paid for by ads that are burning your eyeballs so hard they leave an imprint on the back of your brain.
We can all see the incentive structure of corporate social media has us all going a little loopy while others have fully given themselves over to whoring for the algorithm.
We need decentralised social media
It's obvious we need a platform where we're not beholden to who has the biggest budget, or what the algos are looking to rage bait you into so you remain on site to see more ads. This is not a system that is good for one's brain and soul, the "free" social media model comes at a price, and you as the product have begun to decay.
Anyone who voices their real opinions or counters narratives that go against profits and the bottom line of interest parties also gets cleaned out pretty quickly so if you're are still on trad social media it's because you're willing to self-censor or you have nothing real to say.
We are all self-censoring in a way, you know it, I know it, but we all accept it.
Nostr came along
I think many of us didn't know we needed an alternative until #nostr came along and we could start to play around in a world where we had more control and some of us started to like it.
Nostr has grown slowly and steadily, without a token, without a real path to monetisation, it's organic growth built by people who have an interest in seeing this protocol eat away market share from tradsocial.
Right now it's just a bunch of people sharing their ideas, engaging in a small community testing out new features, pushing clients for new updates, and zapping one another along the way.
Despite the seemingly inconspicuous nature of nostr it's already started to rub large institutions the wrong way, first, it was banned in China, then it's mobile clients were removed from the Chinese Apple App store and later it was threatened by the global app store to remove zaps.
If a little protocol that simply allows for chronological curation and organic following of accounts and content along with independent payments powered by Bitcoin is already in the eyes of big institutions at this early stage, then you know you're on to something.
Shitcoiners are not going to let us have our fun
Nostr might have started as a Bitcoin-centric tool, but like Bitcoin its a protocol for enemies, you can say and do what you like on nostr, and if certain clients or relays don't like what you're doing you can find one that do or build your own.
If you're not a fan of zaps and you want to use stablecoins or your preferred shitcoin, you could build that into your own nostr client and relays that support it. But this would mean you are supporting nostr, since you're growing the user base and if your project failed, those users would simply login to the nostr clients and relays that remain.
But that's not the shitcoiner way, they don't want to compete, they want to extract value while its possible, the shitcoiner way is to try and create walled gardens where they can sucker you in and dilute you slowly or quickly.
Nothing new to the space
SocialFi is nothing new, if you've paid attention to this space long enough you would know that a lot of this is the rebranding of failed ideas and projects for a new cohort of users.
For those of you who were not around from 2016 during the ICO phase, you might not know that social media on the blockchain was all the rage. It was tried on separate blockchains like STEEM, these social applications like STEEMIT were wildly popular back then, running up to over 1 billion in market cap and were firmly in the top 10 tokens at the time.
Today it's still around, with a tiny user base, most people have abandoned it, those who profited from it have gone on to build new scams and the token has fallen down the ranks.
STEEM price action since launch
The way this scam worked was you would pre-mine tokens for yourself and your buddies, and then build various dApps would reward users with new inflation. Users would create content on your site, and users with stake would upvote their content.
When you upvote content you receive an amount of tokens, which is usually autostaked and the incentive for you is to create more content to earn tokens or buy tokens to build up a reputation so you can control more of the inflation through upvotes.
As users earned tokens and purchased tokens to stake them, you as the pre-mine owner get to sell into that demand and you have less competition for sales as the incentive is to stake to gain influence on the platform, so you're profiting off peoples egos and the gamification of the system.
Eventually, like all inflationary shitcoin projects you run out of new suckers and the original suckers feel they want to profit too and start dumping inflation just keeps pumping out, and you dilute demand to a point where your token is worth nothing.
I mention STEEM because it was probably the most "successful" relatively speaking, so i see this as the best outcome for these kinds of projects. Of course, there were others like Bitcoin Cash-funded Read Cash and Noise Cash, EOS-funded Trybe and Voice, SoMee, and Publish0x which used a bunch of random shitcoins.
Friends.tech and why we can't have nice things
So socialFI failed in 2018 and we all moved on from the dumb idea, the Bitcoin circles have picked up on nostr and it's got a fair bit of traction, so what do the shitcoiners do? Support Nostr?
Hell no, let's make socialFi 3.0 as part of this painfully stupid web3 narrative, and the first play in this new brand of SocialFI seems to be friends.tech.
An app that emerged out of nowhere and is built on Base Coinbases fork of ETH which is a weird choice, but it hasn't stopped its growth in a week the network reached 136,000 daily active users beating out OpenSea over the same time frame.
How much of that is real or just botting I don't know but that's the numbers being promoted.
So what is this app all about? Uncensorable social media? Owning your data? Migrating your data between apps seamlessly? No
The app essentially allows users to tokenize your social network by selling shares in your profile. So influencers in the space can sell access to themselves since buying someone’s share grants owners the ability to exchange private messages with them.
The new social app has driven 4,400 ETH ($8.1 million) in trading volume in less than 24 hours since its launch, far surpassing OpenSea’s in the same time frame.
Again these user numbers and trading value is not verified, and we don't know how much is just botting or wash trading to create attractive metrics to sucker people in, but sucker people in they will.
To me this just looks like another zero some game of extracting wealth from your followers, as if influencers don't already do this, I don't see how this is in anyway decentralised or an improvement on social media today, in fact I think it just super charges the worst kind of behaviour we see on social media and I don't see this app living longer than a footnote of 2023.
Sources:
- https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/08/11/is-friendtech-a-friend-or-foe-a-dive-into-the-new-social-app-driving-millions-in-trading-volume/
- https://captainaltcoin.com/friend-tech-leads-the-way-for-the-next-generation-of-socialfi-on-basechain/