What we learned from building social media on a public blockchain
In 2018 and in the most part of 2019, we were working on a decentralized social media built on the open-source Steem Blockchain. We named it 1Ramp.io, it is open-source and available on Github.
While working on it, we joined several Dapp communities, we're building open-source libraries, exploring various blockchain use cases, and experimenting with directions the blockchain-based social media could take — in the process, we learned a few things.
In this blog, I’m compiling most of the learnings that we got from our first-hand experience of building social media on a public blockchain. I’ve tried to keep it comprehensive, but in case you feel I didn’t elaborate on any specific topic, please point it out. If you think I’m wrong somewhere or you disagree, I request you to correct me.
In December 2017, we came across Steem Blockchain while researching Bitcoin, blockchain, and other related platforms on the Internet.
The first thing that caught our attention was the possibility of monetizing content. Bloggers on Steemit (a blogging platform built on Steem) were earning hundreds of dollars on each post.
The biggest question at that time for us was “where’s the money coming from?” and “who is paying?”. At first, we were trying to figure, can we do it without using blockchain or cryptocurrency? The answer is, Yes we can. It is called “revenue sharing”. But the Steem blockchain-enabled earning worked without building a revenue-sharing model. So, we went ahead creating 1Ramp on top of the Steem blockchain.
Learning #1
Cryptocurrency earned on platforms like Steem is not a true reflection of the content’s actual value
The idea of rewarding content creators is visionary, ethical, and it should be a norm for all the platforms that make money off the user-generated data. The ideology is that content creators and users create monetary value for the platform. And the platforms should share a fair monetary value with the users from their revenues.
It sounds fantastic until it doesn’t. The cryptocurrency rewards are inbuilt in the functioning of the blockchain. But the speculative nature of cryptocurrency trading makes it less sustainable and prone to manipulation. In this model, people are earning a monetary value from their content but that value is not a true reflection of the content’s actual value. Instead, it is a reflection of how much worth the traders/holders of that cryptocurrency think it is.
This is how the rewards on Steem works: The Steem blockchain generates a fixed number of tokens every week. This is called a weekly rewards pool. Now, on the basis of the upvote users get on their content (on all Steem based Dapps), the users earn some steem tokens. At the end of a payment cycle (a week) an adjusted amount totaling the fixed steem tokens gets transferred to the Steem wallets of the users.
In this particular case, the platform’s generated revenue out of a particular user or his/her content doesn’t reflect in their earning. Instead, users earn on Steem irrespective of the platform’s revenue. Then they sell that Steem cryptocurrency in secondary markets (crypto exchanges) in exchange for fiat. This exchange in fiat depends on the current value of Steem in the market.
The core reason why we chose to build it on a blockchain was that it gave the users a sense of earning directly from their content. It also gives us a first-hand experience of seeing how people perceive and use platforms that reward them with money.
Above all, Steem gives birth to a concept, the concept of sweat equity on digital platforms. This might not be the economically right way of rewarding, but it shows that micro-rewards are possible and everyone can get a chance to monetize their work on the Internet
Learning #2
It’s high time to create an infrastructure that supports revenue sharing on platforms that depend primarily on the user-generated content
The Steem blockchain-based platforms should be seen as a proof of concept. They challenge the status quo by showing an alternative model of building and running Internet platforms.
For context, look at the growth of the automobile industry. Today the automobile industry reached a stage where we are building autonomous cars, electric cars, and flying cars. It took more than 100 years of marginal improvements to bring the automobile to this stage. The Internet is comparatively new and there is no way it’ll stay as it is for the next decade. The pace of adoption and experimentation is quicker. And the availability of great talent and capital makes it easier to bring lots of marginal gains within a short span of time.
After a decade of marginal improvements in Internet technology, it's time to set the stage for a change in the status quo. We need an underlying infrastructure to associate a monetary value to data/content which belongs to a particular user. Platforms built on such incentivized model do exist at present like YouTube provides ad monetization, Medium has a membership program to publish behind a paywall, and Spotify pays the creators on the basis of streams. This model can be generalized to all the platforms that earn off the user-generated content, for example, Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
This is not only fair but will enable millions of people to use the Internet as a source of Income. The bloggers who create their standalone websites and drive attention will get another option to monetize their hard work. And is evident from thousands of people who’ve leveraged Ads to earn online and it profoundly changes their lives. Right now we have got this enormous opportunity to create an infrastructure that can potentially change the lives of billions of Internet users.
Learning #3
Dealing with the long list of keys (passwords) becomes an experience-killer
The UX of crypto is not ready for mass adoption. In the Steem ecosystem, managing private key, public key, and transaction key gave everyone a hard time. This experience is the same for all other blockchain platforms. Be it Metamask for Ethereum, EOS, or Blockstack.
Ease of access and use are critical before the creators take their platforms to the masses. It is evident from the experience of using these platforms, that we need significant improvement in it and a sense of ease. Experience is the real differentiator for products in the market. If the end-users feel that Blockchain or cryptocurrency is making it easier for them to achieve their tasks the adoption will follow. Until then, we need to focus on finding product-market-fit for B2C blockchain products.
Learning #4
Decentralized communities help when you build for them
A core reason for decentralization to catch hype was the promise of removing the middleman from the systems. Thus, leading to ecosystems where the actors and participants benefit more than the mediators. On that promise, we saw every kind of platform emerging: decentralized ride-hailing, marketplace, video streaming, hosting, etc.
The communities that are excited about the decentralization and want to make it an everyday reality accepted most of these products with open arms. The developers, users, day-traders, formed various communities on Reddit, Discord, and Telegram. This shows that there is great support out there if you build the right products for these early adopters. But no one can get away by building something that has been built before and labeling it Blockchain-based.
Keeping everything open-source is also great. The biggest blockchains and apps being built on them are all open-source. The developer community had really picked up the moment. There is no shortage of self-motivated and talented developers who are ready to contribute to the ideas that they find interesting. A lot of blockchain-related projects were started with nothing more than an open-source repository on Github.
Learning #5
Hybridization is important — Blockchain + Centralized
The public blockchains are not solid foundations for different kinds of apps to be built on top of them. Most public blockchains lack functionalities and severely hurt the possibilities of building new features on the apps.
We realized that instead of using the data structure of blockchain to store everything, we can keep some data central to the platform. But only the kind of data that is not sensitive to the blockchain and will help us improve the experience.
Learning #6
It is not necessary to save everything on a blockchain
This learning is an extension of learning #5. But here, we are suggesting changes on the blockchain level. In the case of Steem, the use of blockchain’s storage (decentralized storage) could be limited to the transactions (who owns what), a hash of the content (instead of the entire content), and the final upvotes at the end of a payment cycle.
Relying entirely on the blockchains for storage and computing only increases the demand from nodes. Thus, increasing the cost of running a node. Which ultimately leads to fever nodes or underperforming hardware or slow infrastructure. We need to figure out how to use public blockchains only for the parts that help us put all the good qualities of decentralized trustless networks and eliminate the limitations.
Learning #7
Most Internet users are not aware of the problems that blockchain/crypto apps are trying to solve
The masses seem to care less about individual privacy, data security, and monetization in general. We only feel frightened in an event of a massive data breach and when big Internet companies pay huge fines for not following the data protection guidelines. In those times, some people look for alternatives. And we’ve learned that it is an uphill battle for everyone in the Internet space to solve the problems related to data privacy, security, and monetization. And it is not about one technology but about the intent of solving those problems.
It takes time to bring a change. To make micro-earning a possibility on every user-generated data on the Internet, to give ownership of data to the people just like they own physical property, and to learn the upsides and downsides of both the platforms is a lot for everyday users of the Internet to digest.
Social media was supposed to be a medium of expression. But the way these platforms have turned out on a massive scale, from data breaches to becoming a serious threat to the perceptions of society. No one ever expected these things to happen. The supposedly liberal forces that vouch for individual freedom became eco-chambers and an endless list of recommended products, people, and opinions. All that is okay, we are collectively learning to deal with the scale of social media and hopefully, we’ll also learn to deal with the problems that we’ve not yet faced in their full potential.
(Looking past the) Hype
The blockchain is not a magic wand that will fix everything that is wrong with today’s social media. But it does offer some possibilities for improving the social networks we have today — and we are glad that we are exploring it to build better solutions.
Hapramp Studio is currently building GoSocial and Asteria Protocol. 1Ramp is the first product that we built on Steem Blockchain (at Hapramp). If you are interested in working at Hapramp, check out the open roles on our Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/company/hapramp
P.S. This is one of many blogs that are lying in my drafts (that I usually write for my own record), but I decided to publish it now. And data points mentioned in the blog are not up-to-date.
