Social media in its current state is more centralized than the financial system was prior to the introduction of Bitcoin. A prime example is the recent fiasco with Elon Musk taking over Twitter as the major shareholder. This is no different from any dictatorship, when one party has the penultimate decision to set a policy for countless people to abide by.
Similar to how blockchain technology has disrupted the financial sector by introducing a new way to govern and handle currency, letting the individual control their own assets with full transparency, we can do the same with social media, using smart contracts, decentralized databases, and take back control over our creations: our posts, comments, and shared media.
RADIAN hopes to be the forerunner, to light the torch and lead the path for the revolution of forever changing how social media should be, and for the better.
The issues with the current social media platform business model:
The current Ads-driven business model that social media platforms adopt(Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) works like this:
- Users generate content for the platform
- Users browse the contents of the platform shared by others
- Generates revenue by displaying ads for the users to see when they use the platform
- Deny the ability to have the content of the platform be run on any other app
To put it simply, popular social media platforms today must have exclusive access to its user’s content for the ads-driven business model to work. Let us use Twitter as an example. Allowing competitor apps to run on their content will lead to losing the attention of their users, leading to less users browsing their feed, therefore less revenue generated from the annoying ads they display.
With the explosive growth of social media, and with more people than ever actively engaging and connecting online, businesses seeking to advertise their own products have increasingly higher exposure to being negatively affected by where their ads are shown. When a company endorses a celebrity or sports team, they are seen as actively encouraging and supporting them, and all the actions they commit. The current business model therefore means that these platforms need to actively control what is and can be displayed on their feed, having full centralized control of the narrative in a sense, you do not want to lose advertisers because they do not want to be associated with a site that allows illegal content now would you?
Funny enough, when social media was still in its infancy, Twitter and Facebook both had an open model that actively encouraged third-party developers to build on their APIs. In the early 2010s you could find alternative clients and browser extensions to use your social media platform of choice. Why did they let their APIs be publicly available? Because with an “open model” where you let any developer build on your platform is great for reaching more people. User gains define the success of social media platforms. In a sense of the word, the decentralized business model was the optimal strategy, encouraging innovation, therefore better apps, and ultimately maximizing growth.
The Current Situation:
The current ad-based model for social media platforms works like this:
Picture a black box in the center, this is the platform(aka tech giants such as twitter, facebook, tiktok). With this in mind, now picture 1 balloon on each side of the black box. The two balloons refer to the dependencies of the black box(social media platform). The users give clicks and content to the middle black box. The black box in turn gives the user interface to play with. The black box then sends the users clicks to the advertisers and in turn receives revenue from them. The current model has everything running exclusively through them(the black box). The platform holds all the content generated by its users and can use the content to generate revenue however they want, such as selling users data to creepy call centers, or even worse, to our data hungry machine A.I overlords. Imagine a world where a computer determines what kind of person you are, controls what you eat by sending you targeted ads the AI thinks you would like based on your location history and search history. Yeah, it’s already happening.
Introducing The RADIAN Model for a Decentralized Social Media Platform:
- Users interact with a smart contract to create an account with their crypto wallet address, their account profile is bound to this address.
- Every content post, comment to a post, follow and upvote of a post by the user on RADIAN involves signing a custom smart contract that verifies and then converts the data to a custom nft that they hold.
- The nft holds metadata of the content uploaded, storing video and comment posts as an ipfs link, and an arweave link as backup.
- Every interaction with the frontend/interface of RADIAN the user makes is signed by the individual, and all content created is owned by the individual as an nft.
Technical issues to solve:
In a traditional platform/app, when a user signs in to the platform, the username and password inputted from the front end interface is sent over to a backend server that stores all the existing user’s usernames and passwords. If the combination exists in the database, a message is sent back to the front end with the credentials to use their account on the platform alongside the permissions to their data from the backend server. When the user decides to post a tweet, the 1s and 0s that make up the tweet are first verified through a function that makes sure the tweet consists of a string of text and nothing else, then the data is sent over to the backend to have it stored in database somewhere that says that this tweet belongs to this person and created at what time. With the advancements of technology, processing powers, and cheaply available rentable servers such as AWS, all these steps are processed in a matter of seconds. As with any decentralized app being developed on a blockchain, scalability bottlenecks will be an issue.
This is only possible with the decentralized model. Why?
We have already discussed how today’s social media platforms generate revenue, but how will RADIAN generate revenue, and how can our user’s monetize the content they create? Instead of shareholders deciding on new feature implementations, future roadmap, changes to the platform, a governance token will allow users/investors to vote with the weight of the vote based on the percentage of tokens they own compared to the total circulating supply..
How can users monetize their content?
Some things you will be able to do on RADIAN on launch include:
Being able to sell your posts to other members of the RADIAN community or on Opensea/NFT marketplaces.
Being able to sell your entire profile: use cases include……(*use your imagination*)
Tipping feature, showing how much you appreciate your friend’s post about tomorrow’s upcoming Luna crash with a crypto gift directly to their wallet
Why is data storage centralized?
In 2021, Amazon’s AWS held 31% market share in cloud services, with Microsoft’s Azure in second place with 20% and Google Cloud Platform taking third place with 6%. When someone pulls the plug on an AWS server warehouse, half the world’s internet services go down. If a company uses AWS for their database storage needs, they are reliant on AWS to not go down, the particular linux machine to catch on fire etc. If Amazon suddenly decides tomorrow that they will be doubling rent prices, unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it. You can either stick around or start all over again with building your backend infrastructure.
What is IPFS/ARWEAVE?
IPFS is decentralized because it loads the content from thousands of peers instead of one centralized server. Every piece of data is cryptographically hashed, resulting in a safe, unique content identifier: CID. Store your website in IPFS to avoid censorship and a single point of failure. Your personal IPFS node goes offline? Don’t worry, the website will still load from other nodes across the globe serving it.
With RADIAN, every user’s data is stored on IPFS. Instead of asking Twitter for permission if you can see your favorite basketball player’s latest tweet, we give the users control over who gets to see their content. We just provide the tools to do so.
Why will the Decentralized Model Succeed?
Case in point:
Why do Youtubers constantly complain about their videos being pulled down, Politicians crying about their twitter account being disabled, Facebook taking down drug trafficking group pages? Because it’s in the best interest of these giants to do so. The early days of the internet was like the wild west, anything goes, but with the internet now being run by a select few powerful giants come with increased responsibility. In combination with the advent rise of “cancel culture” where one wrong move can lead to the downfall of the company. But what if instead of having these large corporations dictate what we should see and what we can say online, we delegate responsibility to the individual user. Let’s say you want to become a youtuber and create prank videos in hopes of making some money. He needs to pass a set of requirements namely consistent viewership retention, consistent uploading of videos. You are granted monetization of your content after a year of hard work. You then realize youtube takes 70% of all the ad revenue generated from your content, and to add salt to your wound, half of your videos have been demonetized because you mentioned the word “Covid” in them. On the other hand, we have the decentralized social media model where there isn’t a terms of service(TOS) to abide by, you can choose to be anonymous if you want, post whatever content you wish to post, and see whatever your heart desires unfiltered. Your photo uploads, posts, and group chats saved forever on a permanent blockchain that you exclusively and solely own. Oh and did I mention no ads??! With the ever growing adoption of cryptocurrency, development of decentralized apps, it really does seem like an inevitable transfer of power from the fat greedy old pigs to the underdogs. Power to the people! (EA SPORTS).
Conclusion:
We aren’t your typical tech giant that wants to force our ideology on you. You decide.
