What's Next
Social Media — Is it the next industry to have its “blockchain moment?” It certainly seems possible, given recent events.
As the two giants of this industry, both Facebook and Twitter dropped double digits over the last week of July. With the added weight from the high-profile scandals involving Cambridge Analytica and the never-ending fake-news saga has started to reclassify these social networking organisations by branding them as spying and ad-serving tools.
Both market drops were prompted, to some degree, by the same inescapable fact of having the ability to moderate. As the two industry giants have grown to historical sizes, it has become more expensive to moderate and uphold data privacy of its users.
Transforming into a new Ecosystem:
This has resulted in social network users to start looking for a new breed of social networks that respect their privacy. Maybe Blockchain led technology innovation can rescue by creating a new product offering within the industry — A Decentralised Social Networks.
Beginning of the Change:
We at Provena Group can see that the change is in the air and startups like Diaspora, Sapien, Steemit are starting to emerge offering decentralised social platforms using blockchain technology.
A Decentralized Social Network, built on a Blockchain technology platform, its users virtually own the network and not by a central authority or organisations such as the like of Facebook or Twitter. Any decision to introduce new features in the Blockchain based Social Network is made by the consensus of its users and not by a central authority making it transparent and trustworthy ecosystem.
A transformative change to the Social Networking industry has commenced, and it may be some time before users enjoy mass adoption, but these developments, led by the Blockchain Technology will help address these daunting problems within the current social media landscape.
These new breeds of decentralised Social Networks the like of Diaspora, Sapien, Minds and Steemit and not only working to address the current industry challenges but are also rapidly evolving to include a marketplace, various integrations, and third-party applications to promote the core critical values of:
Privacy — One of the most compelling justifications for a decentralised social network is allowing the user to be in control of their data. In other words, you own it and control it as you see fit. Targeted advertising is profitable but inherently flawed because it exploits user data and infringes on user privacy and by reducing, if not entirely removing the middleman, a third-party intermediary like Facebook or Twitter will help address this challenge.
Democracy — with the introduction of democratic framework users will have the final say over their communities and can be incentivised to contribute.
Free Speech — This is where it all started for Social Networks, the fundamental principle of free speech and it is essential that this should be protected. The new decentralised social network-based platform will have the ability to maintain one of the critical use cases of social media.
Examples of a New Thinking:
Diaspora is one of the new and upcoming social networks build on the Blockchain platform. With over a million users, platform relies entirely on independently owned nodes working together to form a new social networking platform for its users. Diaspora’s platform developers also refuse to bring ads to the platform or sell it to major corporations.
Steemit is another example of a new breed of social networking and blogging platform that uses blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers.
Sapien is a social news network built on a popular public blockchain Ethereum. It is an excellent example of a decentralised social news platform built for user privacy and customizability. Sapien is a highly customizable, democratised social news platform capable of rewarding millions of content creators and curators without any centralised intermediaries.
We @Provena Group have no hesitations in believing that Blockchain Technology also known as DLT is a Game Changer that has started to play a vital role in the 4th Industrial Revolution.
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