The Blockchain’s Social Media Networks are Changing Everything: What Marketers Must Know
The analysts proclaim blockchain is the latest technology to change the world.
You’ve heard it’s about to disrupt every industry — including marketing.
But you’re not sure what the blockchain is, or whether you should care.
You’re not alone.
Turns out, the blockchain technology could end up redesigning social media, and the way we market on these platforms, in significant ways.
Could troll-proof platforms where users earn rewards for opting to see ads be the future of social media?
Let’s jump in.
What is a blockchain?
Bitcoin is the most famous use of the blockchain technology. Bitcoin is a digital currency invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, and the blockchain is the technology that makes it possible. (An interesting aside: Satoshi’s identity is a mystery; no one knows who he is or whether it’s a pseudonym for a group of people. He vanished as Bitcoin was taking off and owns one billion bitcoins.)
The blockchain is a public and distributed ledger. Public as in anyone on the network can see it, and distributed so everyone connected to the operating system has a copy.
What’s so AMAZING about this?
Let’s think of a bank’s record-keeping system to track all the transactions it processes. Only the bank can access this ledger. Even your private chequebook (back when people still used chequebooks) is a private ledger, only accessible by you.
What’s revolutionary about blockchain is anyone on the network can view the record of transactions. The operating system decentralises the ledger and people on the network confirm transactions. You’d be able to follow a money trail easily, and there is no central financial institution recording and vetting transactions.
Each time a new transaction takes place, it’s grouped in a pool along with other transactions. Miners — users in the network with supercomputers — compete to confirm the transaction. To do so, they must solve complex math problems. The first miner to solve the problem and validate the block receives a reward. The validated block is then chained to the existing blocks in the system — the blockchain.
The blockchain system records every single transaction ever made. It is permanent record and past transactions cannot be altered and because they’re all linked together, this is virtually impossible.
Your user information is encrypted, and while everyone can see the record of the transaction, there is no information to identify individuals.
Collin Thompson has a simple, yet detailed, rundown of how the blockchain tech works in a post on Medium over here. And here’s Nakamoto’s nine-page white paper.
I’m still trying to fully comprehend the technical bits, but Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the world’s leading Bitcoin and Blockchain experts, makes the argument that very few of us REALLY understand how the internet works. The majority of the internet’s 3 billion users don’t know the name of the protocols powering the World Wide Web, yet this hasn’t stopped us from embracing the internet. At the start of the video Antonopoulos speaks about one of these protocols, before offering a fairly straight-forward explanation of the nodes on the network.
What does any of this have to do with social media?
All has not been well with the state of social media.
Fake news, trolls and growing concerns about the volume of information we shared with social networks are turning some users away from the platform.
Blockchain-powered social media networks start to address some of these concerns
Because data stored on the blockchain is encrypted, your private data is just that — private.
This post on TechTalks sums why this is especially useful for social media applications:
“When you port social media to the blockchain, the immediate benefit users will gain is exclusive ownership of their data. This means Facebook will no longer be able to obscurely store user interaction data on its servers or peek into the content of chat feeds without user consent. Everything will be encrypted and stored on the blockchain. Alternatively, users can store the data on an off-chain store such as a cloud storage provider of their choosing like Google Drive or Dropbox. Since the data is already encrypted with the user’s private key, those cloud providers won’t be able to read the contents (but they will be able to block access to it, the trade-off for adding a little centralization to the mix).”
Because we’re more aware — and protective — of our personal data, users are more discerning with what they share with social networks. Blockchain-based social networks appear to offer a new path forward. These are networks that talk about scoring users on their online behaviour towards others. They’ve also committed to keeping our personal information private, and if you do decide to share your data with advertisers, you get paid. Yes, you get a share of the ad revenue earned by the social network.
Let’s have a quick look at a few of the social media apps in this space.
Steemit is a blogging platform, a bit like Medium. User earn tokens when they post content on the site. You can earn tokens for commenting, voting and creating content for the site.
All content, votes and a record of rewards is permanently stored on the public Steem blockchain.
When you sign up on the platform you’ll receive a reputation score. You’ll lose points if you’re down-voted for posting abusive content. If your score falls to zero, your posts and comments will be hidden and it will be much harder to earn rewards or gain new followers.
Users known as a Steemcleaners will sweep the platform to root out abuse, spam or plagiarism.
You can exchange your tokens for cash. On its website, Steemit said its paid out $US22 million in rewards and has more than 300 000 user accounts.
Sapien allows users to customise the site according to their needs, e.g. to aggregate podcasts, as a blog, etc.
An interesting feature is users score each other’s behaviour on the site. like Steemit, the reputation-based model wants to reduce the number of trolls online. (Hey, Black Mirror fans, doesn’t this sound familiar?)
Users will see no ads until they opt in, and then they’re paid a share of the advertising revenue earned by Sapien. That’s a radically different approach.
Indorse is similar to LinkedIn — a professional social network. Users will add skills and other credentials to their profiles, and these will be anonymously verified by other users. Once this is complete, the profile is added to the blockchain. Users also earn rewards for maintaining their skills.
Most of the new applications are still in testing mode, and you can join the wait list to become a part of the community.
Bitcoin — and the blockchain technology — made its first appearance after the financial crisis in 2008. After trusting banks to keep our money safe from the bad guys, the world realised the banks were the bad guys.
Now ten years later, we’re demanding more from the social networks we’ve let into our lives. We’re calling on them to care, and they’ve started to step up.
Blockchain-based social networks show us a new way to shape online experiences. A safe space based on connection, trust and mutual respect: One where the user is in full control. We know it’s possible.
Have we started the journey toward this noble goal?
