Social media has become an important part of our life. These platforms have become a primary source of news, entertainment, and even revenue for some. While the influence social media platforms exert in people’s lives is indisputable, there are legitimate concerns of equal gravity plaguing these platforms.
The blockchain has been recognized as the silver bullet for social media, which has long suffered from censorship, data collection and surveillance capitalism. In recent years, innovators have created several blockchain-based social media platforms to combat the challenges found in “traditional” social media.
SubSocial — A Decentralized Social Platform on Polkadot
Subsocial is a solution to the problem of censorship and control that reigns in the social networks we use every day (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Medium etc …), their centralized nature means that at the head of the service there is only one person who supervises, controls and makes decisions regardless of your will (ban, block, silence, censorship) and more. The ability of these big tech companies is to monetize your data, gathering information and defining a precise profile that will condition the browsing experience.
The PolkaDot ecosystem is growing rapidly, the solutions to create decentralized services linked to traditional finance have been the proponents of this incredible innovation, Gavin Wood (Founder of Parity and PolkaDot) has expressed himself positively and it is logical to expect the proliferation of decentralized solutions on the Social Network side.
The Social Dilemma
Why don’t we pay to use the services they offer? The answer is simple: “If you are not paying for a product, then the product is YOU”. We are all, some more or less, glued most of the day on social media, we constantly check emails or surf the net.
Quote deliberately taken from the film The Social Dilemma to highlight that decentralization has a cost, the use of SubSocial takes place by connecting your PolkaDot wallet without the need to make a normal registration with username and password, your identity will be your wallet.
The interaction within the social network, such as a like, a comment or a post, involves sending a transaction for each action performed and a commission must be paid to ensure that it is accepted by the blockchain.
Problems and Solutions
There is a number of global problems in today’s social networks that Subsocial is trying to solve.
- Global censorship — Tech giants have a monopoly on content. If the President of the USA can be silenced then anyone can.
- Lack of customization — Platforms user interfaces have a limited number of options that can be changed.
- Unfair monetization — Centralized platforms extract too much value from their creators. Limited payment options on most platforms.
- Algorithm dictatorship — There is no ability to change the algorithms that feed us the content. The algorithms are not aligned with user well-being.
- Monopoly on Network Effects — New social networking sites struggle to gain traction and compete with centralized platforms because they do not share their network effects.
In addition to solving the above-mentioned problems, SubSocial added unique features and new concepts:
- Serverless Public Timeline — Same as Twitter but you can put the whole web app on to IPFS and remove the need for a centralized host (no need for AWS).
- Moderation — Censorship-resistance at chain-level, but users set rules for their own space. Think of a SubReddit that has transparent on-chain moderation
- Roles & Permissions — Built-in and dynamic roles to manage your community with fine-grained permissions. Think of Discord roles and permissions.
- Spaces as DAOs — Spaces can have multiple owners who can control the community direction and decide who receives monetization rewards.
- User governance — Subsocial token holders own and govern the network. This is how the network upgrades. The governance mechanism is the same as Polkadot and Kusama.
- Treasury — On-chain pot of funding for development and promotion of the ecosystem
Conclusions
If you want to learn more and learn more about SubSocial, you will find this video interesting:
Ready to join social networking 3.0?
On Subsocial you have full control over your data and its monetization.
