Reclaiming control of our attention and data how should we build the future of social media

this panel on web3 social media my name is Eileen I'm going to be the moderator for this panel um and why don't we just kick it off with some introductions from all of you um I'll just go yeah your name um yeah hi my name is Sammy sammyway I'm the co-founder of CEO of t-square time squared or you can call us T2 uh we're a social network around what you read hi I'm Katie I'm one of the co-founders of seam and also a contributor at friends with benefits and cabin now hi everyone I'm Sarah share I'm one of the co-founders of Meme m-e-e-m and we are building tools for portable communities so kind of communities that are defined outside the bounds of any single platform awesome thank you guys um would you just say uh take a moment and say a little bit more about how your platform uses uh web3 technology and a bit about the structure of your platform just a couple sentences yeah sure I can start so we as I mentioned are all about communities and so the atomic unit for us that we're building on top of is a community agreement so that's a smart contract where you're defining kind of all the nuances of your community so who's in it what are the membership requirements what are the responsibilities the permissions the roles and then that Community travels with you as you engage with other tools web3 or web 2 tools that can respect the kind of the terms and and nuanced conditions that you set so we've built that smart contract um and now we are building apps um that actually plug into it on top that allow a community to collaboratively publish respecting the roles that have been determined we are focused on on-chain Creative attribution and remixing as we talked about earlier so the opportunity for users to share in the upside of what they create and what they contribute to social platforms we have a primitive called blocks and right now users can build and remix blocks and they can share in the upside over time as other users create their profiles and use those blocks to make it feel custom to them so the creative attribution is the big thing that on chain remixing is going to be based on and is going to benefit people in a way that web 2 social actually can't yeah so on T2 we capture two of the biggest opportunities that web3 brings so the first one is to empower Niche communities that uh coordinate around the kind of content that they want to see and then the second is uh to give to use data sovereignty and social graph composibility to have to help users maintain power over where where which platforms they want to come in uh plug into so very aligned with what meme is doing thank you guys so um my first question for you we've been talking a little bit about what is what is blockchain good for for social media and what is it not just yeah popcorn style I'll start um who here has ever deleted something off of their social media profile I like to delete stuff and as you all know since you're here at eat Denver it's really not a great option with blockchain um in the lens protocol documentation for example they say explicitly that you know they educate people building on their platform it's actually not possible to delete something you can hide it if you're the owner but it's not possible to delete it unless it's stored in a centralized way so I think decentralization has a lot of really amazing qualities but being able to delete the stuff you don't want anymore is not one of them yeah that's a good one um I'll start with what it's good for okay so when I think about my Facebook social graph that's not a community right like that's defined roughly as everyone I've ever met that still has a Facebook account that's not a community that would exist in any other context so Facebook's defining that for me so when I think about what blockchain is good for it's good for that portable identity not only at the individual level but at the community level right so I as an individual who has a profile on Twitter and Instagram and all and Telegram and an email address and all of these aspects to my identity can show up and participate in communities across all aspects of My Life um defined by me so communities that are meaningful to me so I'm a parent in my school district I'm a resident of my neighborhood I'm a member of the meme team so that notion of being able to take your personal identity and then your community identity with you as you travel around the web that's what blockchain's good for and I think it's really powerful um in terms of what it's not good for besides what what Katie mentioned I mean it's still really unfriendly to most users right someone this week mentioned that like five percent of all web 3 wallets that have ever been created are here in Denver this weekend which is like amazing and also just speaks to how nascent this world is so there's still so much to do to connect these building blocks and make it actually usable and meaningful for the majority of people yeah uh building on top of what you guys uh both latched on so there are a lot of really hard uh difficult Tech decisions that we have to make uh when we're building so for example on the topic of wallets and access um right now we are in closed test mode so we just have metamask integrated but what we need to think about next is how do we abstract all of that away from the user so they shouldn't have to care about what wallets to use they shouldn't have to do the research about what wallet is good for them for for the applications that they want to use or for what social graphs that they want to be on so um yeah the idea is that all of that that we they don't have to make that decision they can have a very easy onboarding experience we have some Partners in mind that we want to um explore that with but in that process of exploration it's a lot of micro decisions as well is do we trust someone um you know to deliver on what they promise do we trust that they are going to stick to the values that they say that they're building on top of right now so not just the tech stack but the value stack um and then the same thing goes for data um uh so revocation and deletion of data um that's possible in some instances you know it looks it looks different in um from the user experience side but we're talking also with partners that can potentially solve some of these Solutions at least for most users who don't care about uh what it is what goes on in the back end um so yeah a lot of difficult decisions I give a talk earlier about you just you just have to make a decision and own it and have have confident that something's going to go wrong at some point and you might have to rebuild a piece of your infrastructure and that's okay at the end of the day you you put your user values in the middle so what may be good for users today may not be good for them in a year's time and you can just pivot just to follow on to that I think those are great points and I think with social media as we've seen with Facebook and Instagram there have been a ton of unintended consequences of based on how they've designed their incentives and so especially in web3 it's good to be cautious But ultimately you have to move forward and you have to make decisions and you might not know what the sort of outcome of that is going to be and just going forward knowing that you will make mistakes and have to correct those is just the only way that you can actually innovate with this technology and not wait around for someone else to do the work so yeah absolutely and I think uh someone was saying yesterday uh the kiss of death here is even if you do all your time you think you're doing a lot of due diligence about the tech that you're using it's changing so quickly um yeah you just gotta Dive In yeah I mean I think that's a big reason that we uh as users could trust could could make that decision to trust the platform because you're the ones doing that doing that research and that iteration um will you will you say a little bit more about um kind of the the challenges you face about um like yeah navigating this new space what what important questions have you been thinking about um so that your users can trust you um yeah so actually we we have in terms of communicating to our users we had um I think for the for the most part of last year we had to figure out what exactly because we want to be so many things right everyone it's got Grand ideas big Ambitions and we want to be all these different things for for our users um and we spend a lot of time distilling what that means uh and how we can do it step by step um so that was a little bit that was a lot of decisions there in what we communicate and when we communicate it and the language that we use to communicate because so much of the problem in the industry is about the language that you use right what's in the name um so yeah that's definitely um that was top of our mind for for the last uh year and then moving forward now it's a lot of the tech decisions that I was touching on earlier yeah I think the biggest it was interesting we started working on this project last year which obviously had a bit of a different energy than this year and there was a lot of talk around how to incentivize good behavior and like should we launch a token and should we give people token rewards for doing things that we think are good on our platform and um I think that in hindsight I'm really glad that we didn't just jump in with both feet especially around a token um but there will be a right time I think at some point to do that and going back to what we were saying before the question is just at what point do we dive in um and do we wait out certain Cycles in the market do we avoid things like airdrop language so that we don't sort of trigger a behavior that we've seen work negatively for other Platforms in the past and just trying to learn as quickly as possible and then again execute at the right time and then try to kind of make sure that the consequences if it goes really badly like explore bad path and be ready to deal with that if those things do happen unfortunately yeah that's a that's a big one I mean one thing that I think a lot about is how do we start how do we sell the benefits of web3 while also obscuring the crypto for people that find that really scary um and so that's a really fine line I think in education so even when we think about things like well one of the benefits of web3 is you can as a community sort of choose your own algorithm right that's incredibly powerful in theory that's really user positive but most people don't understand what that means they don't understand the notion of a wallet it's like how do we how do we explain to them how much transparency exists because of the technology in a way that's still accessible to most people so I don't think we've solved that um but something I think a lot about the the language it's kind of like you have to come in and Survey what people believe for example we were talking last night about what does it mean to own your data in the context of social media does that mean that you get to benefit from the upside like I think Instagram makes somewhere around three hundred and twelve dollars per user in Revenue as of 2023 so should you get that 300 should you get 30 of that is that what it means to own the upside of that data um and I don't think that anybody has really that I've heard of or that I've talked to settled on a thing that feels like the next best practice that's happening so it's kind of it's interesting and exciting to figure it out but it's also there's a lot of language to unpack in the meantime yeah so one other thing we were talking about was um along these lines of owning your data like what what do you really want to own like something that I brought up was like I really want to own like your social media influences who you are like what the algorithms are bringing you influences who you are and what you like what you take in and kind of become that um and so I was like I really want to own those levers and it seems like something that's something that web3 can really make possible um so I kind of want to get back to like getting a vision of your platforms so something I like to think about with social media is uh it's kind of like a you put on a different mask for every social media so would you just like describe in a few sentences what is what is the mask that you put on for your platform what is the what is the outfit what is the personality like sure so I'm going to answer with a non-answer which is um we let you put on a mask as a community so the idea is using our smart contract you basically create a single credential at the community level so you define what that Sovereign identity is for your group um and then that's like your community's mask as you engage with Tools around the web um so that mask could literally be anything um but you define that um yeah that's a really good question actually I don't I don't think I've ever uh talked about that in a context so um yeah the t2 brand is very much um it's uh you can see it it looks like a beautiful magazine right um so uh that's kind of the look and feel of it the the texture um uh very beautiful look and um you get the you get the sense that our early users are intellectual uh you know whether they're scientists uh web3 innovators um uh literature uh Community folks um yeah that's kind of that's kind of the the starting the starting point for us and we wanted to speak to that audience uh intentionally so that's why we went with the brand that we went with um but more than that we also have you know customization options for uh for our communities because uh T2 is kind of like so we work in some similar ways as Reddit so we have these subreddits what we call territories where people can coordinate around a particular Niche interest and they can read about uh working in that particular field and so obviously then they they would also take on their own identities we're still trying to figure out one of the decisions we're working on is uh what kind of tool do we give them to create those identities you know do we go with the typical well you can upload a splash banner and you can upload your logo and icon but uh maybe there's something else that we can play with those also we're exploring with that yeah so one one of the things Sammy I really liked about um your description on your website was this uh call to sharing with more depth um can you do you have anything to say about that uh can you expand on that question it was I don't remember exactly what it was but like um something that I think about with social media is it tends to be kind of kind of shallow I'm just like scrolling and your platform seems like it's inviting people into more more depth and yeah connections so from from the user experience side we focus a lot on creating a tool that people can use to deep read so we call it a deep read um which means you have a very distraction free interface um you can you can choose to socialize outside of the reading experience but uh that the Deep read is really a core part of of um the productive nature of our community so to be a productive member of our community is to deep read essentially so have a habit of deep reading bringing uh your insights whether it's passive or active um through Reading So yeah thank you uh I think this Katie will get you some space um but I I think this brings us to a really important topic which is like what do we want our social media to be for um because we have all these platforms I know the way that I use platforms is like very distractible um I'm like always scrolling on Twitter um which is what it is um so yeah do you Katie go oh yeah I I love the the is it deep reading you said yeah I love that so much and it couldn't be more different from what we're building it's we call seem crypto Myspace when we have to describe it to people in two words because Myspace was a kind of weird zany experience where you could break the platform the platform wasn't built solidly enough that you couldn't hack into it and once people found out that they could personalize it and customize it it was like amazing because you would go from profile to profile and you could see who someone was in a way that Myspace wasn't prescribing and so one of the issues that we have with existing social media you know the Facebooks in myspaces of the world or the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world is they really give you explicit constraints they tell you where to put your bio they tell you what sort of like square or Circle your profile photo should be and our profiles are built with blocks as I mentioned before which let you basically make your profile look however you want it to look each of these blocks is built from an SDK which is open so anybody can go and build any block that they want to build there's been a pixel art block that's been built by our community we have a giphy block where you can put a Spotify playlist and we just want full self-expression we want people to dial themselves up to like 110 volume to use that and so when you say the mass question and again we talked about this last night I don't know how to answer that because I don't think we want people to have to put on a mask I think we want them to feel like they can I don't know it sounds cheesy but like take off a mask and portray themselves they have the tools to to show who they are in the way that makes sense to them yeah can I add on to that because I think we're going in like a really nice uh like increased modularity and so I'll just keep going with it which is you can think of what we're building as basically the admin panel for a community and so what we imagine is that communities will actually build their own sort of clients or front ends on top of our protocol so not only like would you have your own customizable profile but like you could have your own customizable front end for your community altogether so um yeah similar ethos and a different approach yeah it's so interesting I think that like the choice of what constraints to impose it really impacts what kind of content you can share like um for example that what I could share on seam would be like you have this kind of game gamified interface that's like really fun so I might like post my music but versus on um on T2 it's like kind of this depth of sharing it's like like Twitter versus Sub stack I'm just like different different types of sharing and then like for your platform you've got you could use both right you're like with my community I want us to have a scene profile I want us to also use T2 together I mean um it's you're defining for your community which tools you want to use together and then that Community agreement like plugs into all of those so and I would love to talk about remixing in the last few minutes yeah sure um so what's what I think is cool I love Tick Tock I spend too much time on Tick Tock and what I like about it is that you if you're creating something you don't start from scratch most of the time you start from an existing Trend or sound and the opportunity that on-chain creative attribution gives us is that if I make something and then you know you decide that that's really cool and you want to use it on your profile it still points back to me with tick tocks there's a sound that you can find there's a filter that you can find who else has created something you can see there's a sort of a centralized point of creativity that you can build off of in interesting ways and I think that lowers the barrier to entry for creativity I think social media has been a lot about like the mask like how do I fill in this profile what profile photo do I pick for this type of community and so when you're remixing I think you can sort of participate in self-discovery a little bit too and I think everyone is creative I think everyone should have the opportunity to do that and I know you also think a lot about remixing Yeah we actually started um down this road uh when we first moved into the web 3 space which is you know what would it mean to um take an asset and put it on chain and then every variation on that every remix version becomes basically a child nft of that and so you have this whole eventually like a whole story of you know where something originated but then all of the different flavors of it and I think it's really powerful when we start thinking about every asset as you know containing metadata around who did what with with that asset and um you know these like canonical objects that contain then all of the remix versions of them like I think we're just at the very beginning of exploring like what what can be done with them yeah this kind of brings us back to I was just gonna say I feel like it also pertains to like research and academic like Academia has been using remixing AKA citations for a really long time to point to ideas and so social media just has been behind in letting people point to each other's ideas but I think there's a huge opportunity or there's also there's just like precedence that's been set in any type of research-based work yeah one of the very ambitious goals we have at T2 is to build in micro attributions into everything so if I click on something in your reading history or something or I I mentioned uh Sarah in one of the things that I'm writing I tag you as an object inside my content um then there should be some kind of attribution to to the two of you um so a lot of a lot of cool ideas you know trying to build basically essentially everything becomes an item what we call an item which is an object in programming yeah so um you know a human and another article or another article maybe possibly even outside of T2 and how do we bring it out together um you raised a really good example actually just starting with the Academia um so many problems there with with academic publishing and one of the key reasons I I was personally interested in it uh in in in what teacher was doing was um and why the reason we start with one of our early communities is uh academics who are in any kind of science so any kind of stem there are also current really our strongest community on C2 they love writing to a general audience right and and we want to bring in that uh the the attribution stuff that they're familiar with into their experience as well very soon so yeah yeah this is like kind of bringing it back full circle for me about like this question of ownership what do we want to own and what is what is the powerful thing about web3 is like the Network's knowledge like that's I'm just like wow um do you have anything more to say about that like how are you networking knowledge um and how I think it's a really interesting design challenge uh and depending on the kind of media like Tick Tock using sounds and filters and I guess those like templates cap cut templates those are they're sort of Primitives I think each platform will probably have its own Primitives around what is being remixed and and what you need to point to in terms of ownership so I really I think it's kind of a cool and unique challenge I don't know that I can I don't know there's generalizations I want to make yeah um so for us the long-term vision is definitely a combination of knowledge wrap and a social graph um but that comes back to the problem of well if we're using uh decentralized storage or unchain storage even how how do we how do we work around the the privacy issues um and obviously I I would say that's almost a solution for someone else to offer me I'm posing the problem as a builder of a social network and the innovators out there can can present solutions to us right so yeah again we think about it at the community level so we say like not your uh not you not your contract not your community um so it's like your community should own all of the data around that Community all of the nuances all of the roles all the permissions all of the tools um all of your data as a group together and that could also be you know owning your algorithms owning your moderation preferences like your community owns that and it's on chain and then you run up into the privacy issues again with under a minute to go I'm sure that's efficient anything else uh we got a minute left uh anything else that you you guys wanted to say show maybe we can talk about where we where people can find us yeah so I'm on T2 and lens um so I'm Sammy way with two eyes at the end on Twitter and then on lens on sammy.lens um you can find me on seam it's this great new social platform it's s-e-a-m-s-o and we just launched friending literally the day we arrived to eat Denver so if somebody wants to try and use that and break it that would be very helpful I'm also Cather Holt on Twitter and everywhere else um cool yeah we would love for you to check out meme um m-e-e-m.wtf so um we're playing around with a new tool that lets your community um decide together in your Discord what to publish to a shared Twitter account um so you can try that out um and you can find me on Twitter uh I'm at shupal s-h-o-o-p-l-e and I'm Eileen vert on everything you can find me at ileane.freaking.rocks thank you