We Need A New Breed of Social Media

In today's livestream I'll be discussing how our current social media platforms are failing us as individuals, entrepreneurs and as members of society. I'll also be reflecting on how we could leverage blockchain technology to bring about a whole new paradigm of social media apps.

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Hello, and welcome once again. Hi, I’m Dennis Lewis. Ah, these are the soliloquy is from a very secluded soapbox under lockdown, trying to keep mental faculties sane. And, you know, today I’m going to talk to you it’s going to be a little bit of a rant, it’s gonna be a little bit about hopefully opening your eyes to some some new ways to think about things. But before I jump right into the topic, you guys know by now if you’ve been listening to the live streams, you know, I’m really keen on the idea of actually using blockchain technology cryptocurrency smart contracts, distributed apps to make real change in the real world. I firmly believe that, that the technology that I’m taught that I just mentioned, those technologies are capable of bringing about remark changes that can improve lives everywhere. But we haven’t done that yet. We’ve we’ve focused too heavily on the speculative financial part of blockchain and crypto. You know, people are staring at coin market cap obsessively traders are going wild. All of that is great. I’m all for it. It’s wonderful. But it doesn’t produce anything it you know, we don’t actually deliver on the promise. And that I was just talking earlier with a with a with a buddy of mine about this, that, you know, the technology is, is equally important as the internet was in, you know, early 2000s.

And the The problem is that the potential is there, but the reality isn’t, and we’ve got it, we’ve got to do that. We’ve got to actually fund and build projects that that changed things. And you know, we’ve talked about democracy, we’ve talked about transparency we’ve talked about, we’ve talked a lot about different subjects. But today I want to talk about a subject that I think is really ripe for, for using this technology and bringing about something that is fundamentally different and fundamentally better. So what I want to talk to you about is how social media today is failing us. And it’s failing us on so many different levels. It’s failing us as individuals, you know, we are we are the product that is being bought and sold on social media today. Doesn’t matter if you’re talking about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. All of these platforms consider us as the product Their entire business model is built around that paradigm. We come in, we give them our attention and our eyeballs in our brains for free, and they take that precious treasure that we are giving them and they sell it to other people, okay and businesses and they sell it in super sophisticated ways that creep under our skin, okay, they have literally and as a marketer, I I appreciate the value of the ability to target that, you know, pay out for platforms like Facebook, give us as marketers, but as a as a human being.

I question the motives and I questioned the benefit of this. Because one we’re being the product so it fails us as individuals. It fails us social media is failing us. as as as a society, okay, I mean it is the, you know, it is the mechanism for transmitting, you know, misinformation, untruths, conspiracy theories division, you know it is what is separating our society into very isolated silos and never met Never better said about isolated than right now of people that only listen to one idea and they they echo themselves back these echo chambers and you know, and and it’s also open to you know, nefarious manipulation and you know, obviously, you know Russia is very good at that but I mean, it could be China, it could be big corporations, it could be you know, there all sorts of, you know, there’s no there’s no limit to organizations and, you know, power powerful Organizations that that that are more than willing to take these platforms and use them for their own benefit regardless of the damage that that might cause okay i think that that sorry about that I don’t know exactly what happened I think my air pods went on a vacation there maybe that was probably Russian interference there you were seeing it real time live.

I you know, there was via satellite they were coming in and shutting me down. But here I’m back. And I’m using You know, one of these platforms right now to talk to you. So, you know, jokes aside, there is no you know, there’s no shortage of, you know, organizations people, you know, with with unscrupulous desire to take advantage of the platforms that exist right now and use them for their own benefit without even considering, you know, the costs involved to, to us as society and to as individuals. So, I think that we could all agree that something is is wrong with the the entire model. Okay, it isn’t serving us well. And the question then is, how could we envision and how can we build something that allows the same freedom of communication the same freedom of engagement of interaction that we have, you know, that that the benefits of social media and reduces or eliminates some of the The downside? And you know, one of the questions and and for today’s conversation I really want us to focus on how can we do that using blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

And there’s three areas in my opinion that we really should be thinking about. One is participation, two is truth, and three is reputation. And we’re going to see that we can use blockchain to improve all three of those. So let’s think about participation First of all, and I asked people this all the time. When is the last time that Mark Zuckerberg sent you a check? for sharing pictures of your puppy on on Facebook? Okay, I have I went back to my bank statements and I have not found one single check from Facebook for sharing pictures of my ferocious Pitbull puppy Skye, okay, she’s not quite a puppy anymore, but she’s still she thinks she is he’s she’s crazy. By the way, anybody ever leave me a comment and ask to see Skye on live on one of these videos, and she’ll come on, but nobody’s asked so far. So she’s still in hiding. But you’re missing out. She’s, she’s awesome. She broke my arm once, but that’s another story for another day. But going back, you know, I haven’t gotten anything from Mark Zuckerberg for that. He just maybe he forgot. Like, maybe he’s sending you all the checks. I don’t think so though. Likewise, with Twitter, you know, LinkedIn isn’t sending the money for doing these live streams. You know, the only platform that kind of gets there a little bit is YouTube.

Okay? And, and even still, the, the amount that is given back to the creators of the content is, is very small compared to the revenue they generate. And when you think about it, this is because of what I was talking about earlier. It’s because we’re the product and not only are we being in sold, but we’re providing the the means to make that transaction possible. Every time we share content every time we folk we, we consume content on these platforms. We are you know, every time you leave a comment every time you do it like every time you do a share, you are contributing to Mark Zuckerberg bank account. Okay, flat out that’s it your puppy picture goes on Mark Zuckerberg is happy and buys a cup of coffee. Okay, it is that way. Okay because they sell the the the engagement that your friends and you know and your family members and the people that know you and follow you have with that picture they’re selling that time for to advertisers who are taking advantage of the good feeling they’re having, looking at my puppy and at the same time they’re putting an ad on top of my bottom and they’re tracking in there. And they’re and they’re measuring everything they can, okay? And not only when you’re on the platform, they are measuring you everywhere you go on the internet, they’re following you around and they’re, they’re literally stalking us.

Okay, that’s just the reality of what’s in the system. So this isn’t fair. I mean, if I’m putting the puppy picture, I’m putting the eyeballs and I’m putting the attention and the engagement, why am I not getting paid? Why am I not participating in the benefits? I’m not saying I should get it all? Of course not. They put the technology they keep it going, they do all sorts of they build the thing. That’s great. I’m tats off, but it’s not fair. We should be participating and that is definitely something that we could be using. cryptocurrencies integrated into a new social platform to make that possible. You know, if I share a company’s post, that company should give me something in return because I’m helping them I’m I’m doing them a favor, I’m doing work, okay. And you know that I should be rewarded for that. So, and that is, you know, that isn’t something far fetched. It’s not something that hard to build. In fact, you know, it is being done. I mean, you could go to there’s a platform called steam it you can go to steam it right now and or high adapt blog, which is a fork of steam it and you can you can get, you know, paid in crypto for for posting or commenting. And that’s great, but it’s very niche and it’s very, it’s very simple still. So participation, one thing, second thing is truth. Okay. You know, we should have some mechanism for determining if the content we’re consuming is true or not.

And we’re seeing it every day that it’s it is you know, there are deep fakes. There is misinformation campaigns. There is influence campaigns by foreign powers buy brands by you know Michael Bloomberg buying up influencer or you know just a diamond get spending 50 million bucks on influencers just to post about him when he was the candidate not because they believed in his message but because they’re being paid to. And they were being paid to with you know, and and it was it’s a very gray area we many people didn’t even realize it they were just saying, Oh, this guy followed by like is endorsing this this candidate must be good guy. You know, there that’s getting into some very gray areas. Okay, so and and i mean look at the look at the torrent of lies, you know, the the that are coming out of Washington DC and out of the White House. You know, and and so many of us so much information is out there that we don’t. we’re overwhelmed by information that we don’t know if it’s true. So imagine a concept called the truth challenge, where you could any user could challenge the veracity of a post. And it would, it would cost them something to do so, that or at least they would have to stake some money. And, you know, and in order to, you know, in order to, you know, verify them, then the person who posted would have to either take the post down or respond and stake even more to say, I vouch for my content, it is true.

And then not that, let’s imagine that little bucket where we pour both the Challenger and the challenge he had put some money would go to another user or group of or panel of users who would determine you know, in exchange for taking that money, whether or not they determined it was true or not, and they would give a verdict. Okay, they can be done. Come pletely decentralized doesn’t need to be a truth police. It doesn’t need to be Facebook studying and determining what is true and what is not. It can be done by, by us by its users in a decentralized democratic way. And if the verdict, the challenged party wants to, you know, to appeal the verdict because it’s been determined is wasn’t true, then that appeal should cost more and it should involve a bigger panel at truth in the truth channel in the truth panel, but you can do this this could be built into a social media system based on a you know a cryptocurrency you know, blockchain technology where that truth challenge would then either eliminate the the the post, it would be marked maybe as challenged but prove it but with a you know, and the verdict. It there’s so many different ways you could you could make this work, but it would be a fundamental way First of all eliminating a centralized authority like Facebook. You know, Facebook is not it’s like determining, you know, is a is a woman breastfeeding or baby obscene? Well, of course it’s not you would have to be stupid to think so. But Facebook does in most cases, they say, Oh my god, no, cover that up.

That’s that’s a that’s a woman that’s sexual. It’s not it’s it’s the way you feed babies. Right? Okay. Don’t give me up on that. But But why should their standards be the standards for the whole community? Why couldn’t you allow the a community to determine things like that through to through challenge challenges? And yes, of course, if you’re, you know, if you’re going to challenge a post and it should, you must, you should have enough at stake you should be willing to put your money where your mouth is if you really believe it. And if you don’t then you know, if you really think it’s if you’re just doing it to be a bother then you just To lose your money, okay? So those would be truth challenges. And then the third is reputation. And reputation is am I a, a reputable source of an member of the community, you know, and one way would be to, to, you know, reward good behavior in the community with crypto and to penalize bad behavior. And, you know, there we could we can talk about all sorts of different algorithms that that could be used to do that, but by doing so, now, we have three pillars that sustain a social media paradigm that is much, much more solid. It’s much more, you know, usable by by, by by the people and we could we could feel safer in these communities because we wouldn’t be just the product being bought and sold. So this is a you know, if I this is the No, but really, this is kind of just the in a nutshell what I wanted to talk to you today about, but I’d love to hear your feedback.

Do you think social media needs a change? Do you think that these ideas and I’m talking to you about could be could be done and you know, I would you like to help me build it? Well, you know, leave me comments below. Let me hear what you think. And if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you want to send me a check for some puppy pictures, leave me a comment. I’ll get you my address. I’ll give you my you know, I’ll make that happen. There’s no there’s no problem if you’re, you know, if you want to prove me wrong and say, Hey, no, I’m here to pay for those puppy pictures. I I’ll make that you know, I’ll give it make it easy for you. Likewise, if you want to, you know, if you if you just want to share your opinion about this topic, let me know and if you’d like I’ll have you on in another episode, and we’ll talk it out. If you think I’m full of it will argue and if you think you you’ve got a better idea, then I’ll let you have a chance to Explain your idea as well. So, with that in mind, thank you very much for listening in. Shameless plug gab, Behold the crypto openers. That’s my book on Amazon in Kindle version or in a paper version, get a copy. It’s a fun read you like it. It’s all about ideas, just sort of like what I’ve been talking about today, and about becoming a true crypto printer. So thank you once again for listening in. I appreciate it very much. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you tomorrow.