Web3 social-media platforms have the potential to be much better - better for the world, and also just more-pleasant and more-interesting places to live - than our old web2 platforms.

I think that a bunch of the by-now-well-known standard themes of crypto/web3 - decentralization, censorship-resistance, openness, composability (“lego”), ownership (tokens) - might come together to produce something that can avoid the (also by-now-well-known) various types of awfulness than we see in web2 social-media (incentives for unhealthy types of content, lack of incentives for healthier types of content, polarization and echo chambers, etc.).

Putting together a bunch of ideas, here’s a first draft of a vision for a web3 social-media platform:

  • Content is stored as “open data” in decentralized, permissionless data storages, rather than in siloed private databases owned by Big Tech companies. This reduces the stranglehold that those centralized companies have over the data, and increases innovation by allowing anyone to create improved components of the system while still working with the same underlying data.
  • Basic content publishing is censorship-resistant; we’ll probably want moderated discussion groups, but those should be built on top of that censorship-resistant foundation.
  • Subjective, trust-network-based tagging and voting/rating: opt-in rather than opt-out systems for tagging and liking/rating content. This is less vulnerable to some kinds of attack, which is necessary in a system that doesn’t have a central controller to police it. I think it might also lead to a better ability to identify and incentivize the types of content we want.
  • Every creator and content item has its own token; donations (from tip jars or ongoing patronage) are split between the tokenholders. This enables new forms of monetization (and in particular, might let us reduce our reliance on advertising), as well as new content-discovery systems that work by looking for surprisingly-priced content/creator tokens.
  • We create a combined network effect, shared by many web3 social-media projects or content-creators, by having them all pay a small percentage of their revenue to a single collectively-owned treasury, and by using open-ended link formats, rather than fragmenting the system into many networks each pursuing lock-in. This opens the web3 social-media ecosystem as a whole to be invested in by anyone, and also lets us compensate content creators (for the positive externality of helping to build the network effect) by giving them a stake in the network’s overall value.

Overall, the themes here are all the usual buzzwords associated with web3: decentralization, censorship-resistance, openness, composability (“lego”), etc. All of that is worthwhile stuff.

What excites me the most, though, is that I think these systems have the potential to increase our collective intelligence. That’s a horribly vague term and I’m embarrassed to use it, but I think there’s something important here and I don’t know yet how to phrase it more clearly.

Increasingly, sites like Twitter and Reddit and Facebook are how we form our opinions and hold public discussions and make sense of the world. But those web2 systems are horrible in many ways:

  • advertising-based monetization incentivizing unhealthy types of content
  • inability to create other incentivization mechanisms that might foster healthier content
  • centralized orgs (vulnerable to pressure from mobs and authorities, as well as their own biases and agendas) censoring and directing public discourse
  • shared groups leading to polarization and echo chambers

My cynical side says that maybe our web2 systems’ failure modes are just unavoidable consequences of human nature. I do think there’s some truth to that. But… it does kinda seem like it’s also partly a consequence of the way those systems are designed. So maybe by improving those systems we can make ourselves collectively smarter (or at least stop making ourselves collectively dumber).

I think web3-social-media is a very natural use case for all the decentralized public-goods-provision systems that are starting to be developed, like retroactive funding and quadratic funding. (Social-media content fits the definition of a public good pretty well: it’s not very rivalrous and not very excludable.) Until now, our civilization just hasn’t had great mechanisms for funding public goods - basically just government, which is pretty ineffective. But if these new decentralized public-goods-provision mechanisms actually turn out to work well, that’ll open up a huge new field of important stuff that we can now adequately fund… and I think that includes a lot of the “public discussion and sense-making” activity that we’re using social-media for. So maybe web3 could end up being much much better at that than web2 was.

(Crossposted on /r/Web3SocialMedia; feel free to comment there.)