Great text Omar, I like it a lot. I would like to add a few things to engage in the ideas you wrote about.
Decentralization is often thrown around like the holy grail but decentralization brings issues like fragmentation and silos. The average user wants to rely on simplicity when it comes to interacting with a social identity on a network.
It also brings issues like slowness and complexity. Small ânodesâ wouldnât be able to handle the incredible amount of computation and data needed by a popular social network used by billions of users. Average people crave speed, not decentralization.
I would like to stress how important integrity and ownership is, yet is not often analyzed when we talk about social networks. I think I can cope with a centralized source of truth, as long as I know itâs incorruptible and cannot kill your ownership. Itâs one of the strongest points of Bitcoin. Itâs not so much that itâs decentralized but more of that it can be relied on to be extremely hard to corrupt. So, if corruption happens it can be halted and forked.
Ownership is also extremely important if not more. You canât rely indefinitely onto something you arenât the owner nor rely onto something ownership could be taken away from you. I can just give a simple example of how Zynga was owner of nothing on Facebook. It means that actors on social networks wonât invest fully if they arenât full owners. Some will be there for the quick gains, not the long game.
Public keys arenât that complex to manage, it's just not democratized yet. Tools available to manage keys that are user-friendly and give the user full ownership arenât popular. Donât cite GnuPG as an easy and available tool to use, itâs not.
Moderation is an extremely hard problem but current platforms are awful at dealing with the problem and they dragged their feet for decades before really taking the problem seriously. 13 years ago I was working on that very important issue on a social network for skiing https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/thread/355407/Karma-and-registration-just-got-updated Yes!!! 13 years ago!!! 2021 and you can only positively rate content on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. Mind-blowing! Anyway, there has to be a social network karma budget or something so people can easily spot who is shady and not.
Social media has one of the hardest problems to solve yet until it can blow past everything we can imagine. We need to solve the problem of interplanetary social identity first. Itâs an extremely hard problem to fix yet how can you spawn a company that is sustainable solving that single problem?
I personally have an idea in the back of my head of a mix between a public key tree in a blockchain store to create an incorruptible data store of verifiable identities online but I would need to be an expert in cryptography first before I can write the whitepaper for it...
Great text Omar, I like it a lot. I would like to add a few things to engage in the ideas you wrote about.
Decentralization is often thrown around like the holy grail but decentralization brings issues like fragmentation and silos. The average user wants to rely on simplicity when it comes to interacting with a social identity on a network.
It also brings issues like slowness and complexity. Small ânodesâ wouldnât be able to handle the incredible amount of computation and data needed by a popular social network used by billions of users. Average people crave speed, not decentralization.
I would like to stress how important integrity and ownership is, yet is not often analyzed when we talk about social networks. I think I can cope with a centralized source of truth, as long as I know itâs incorruptible and cannot kill your ownership. Itâs one of the strongest points of Bitcoin. Itâs not so much that itâs decentralized but more of that it can be relied on to be extremely hard to corrupt. So, if corruption happens it can be halted and forked.
Ownership is also extremely important if not more. You canât rely indefinitely onto something you arenât the owner nor rely onto something ownership could be taken away from you. I can just give a simple example of how Zynga was owner of nothing on Facebook. It means that actors on social networks wonât invest fully if they arenât full owners. Some will be there for the quick gains, not the long game.
Public keys arenât that complex to manage, it's just not democratized yet. Tools available to manage keys that are user-friendly and give the user full ownership arenât popular. Donât cite GnuPG as an easy and available tool to use, itâs not.
Moderation is an extremely hard problem but current platforms are awful at dealing with the problem and they dragged their feet for decades before really taking the problem seriously. 13 years ago I was working on that very important issue on a social network for skiing https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/thread/355407/Karma-and-registration-just-got-updated Yes!!! 13 years ago!!! 2021 and you can only positively rate content on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. Mind-blowing! Anyway, there has to be a social network karma budget or something so people can easily spot who is shady and not.
Social media has one of the hardest problems to solve yet until it can blow past everything we can imagine. We need to solve the problem of interplanetary social identity first. Itâs an extremely hard problem to fix yet how can you spawn a company that is sustainable solving that single problem?
I personally have an idea in the back of my head of a mix between a public key tree in a blockchain store to create an incorruptible data store of verifiable identities online but I would need to be an expert in cryptography first before I can write the whitepaper for it...