coinsights #5: decentralized social part 2
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DeSo Tokens
Yesterday, we covered the arguments for decentralized social media platforms and why DeSo could be the one to disrupt Facebook and Twitter. If you haven’t yet, check that article out here. Today, we’ll be talking about one of the most powerful features of DeSo: social tokens.
Every profile on DeSo comes with social tokens that anybody can buy and sell. In some ways, these tokens behave just like a stock: the price goes up when people buy, the price goes down when people sell. In essence, you can trade on someone’s “social clout:” it’s no surprise that Elon Musk has the priciest token! You can also “invest” in people that you believe in early on, with the idea that their token price will skyrocket once they go mainstream.
Now before you write DeSo off as some massive speculative bubble, tokens can also provide social utility to their holders. DeSo creators can release content exclusively for their biggest fans or even host auctions for charity, all with their coin and enforced by the DeSo blockchain. The world of possibilities is endless, and that’s where DeSo shines: since everybody has access to the same data, anybody can build an app for even the smallest use case and have instant distribution!
For example, say you wanted to build a DM system that ranks incoming messages by how much of your token the sender holds. In a world without DeSo, you’d have to build an app from scratch and figure out a way to bootstrap an entire social network. Not fun. With DeSo, all you need to do is build an interface that plugs into the underlying blockchain and you’re ready to go! Setting up the database, server, and social network (the hardest part!) is all taken care of by the DeSo protocol.
We mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth mentioning again: DeSo’s goal is to kickstart social innovation by supporting “a new generation of applications that the entire world can build collaboratively.” By combining open data with tokens, we think that DeSo is on its way to achieving that goal. (It also was just listed on Coinbase, which helps!)
Link: https://docs.deso.org
Ben Thompson & Interoperability
In writing the above I was reminded by Ben Thompson’s article a few months back titled “The Web’s Missing Interoperability.” Ben argues that passing privacy-centric laws like GDPR actually stifle innovation because large tech companies have the legal firepower to navigate around legislation, while startups are forced to comply out of fear of being shut down. To truly support competition, regulators should “force existing social networks to open up their social graphs” instead. In fact, Instagram grew quickly because it imported people’s Twitter networks and made cross posting easy! While Ben didn’t explicitly allude to the web3 world, the parallels are clear: to encourage innovation, make the data open.
Link: https://stratechery.com/2021/the-webs-missing-interoperability/