LFGrow | Get Creative on Building on Lens
ETHGlobal·Sun, Oct 9, 2022, 12:00 AM
Join Ramon Marc and Rich Cahill for a discussion titled "Get Creative on Building on Lens," part of the LFGrow Summit, which kicked-off a two-week virtual hackathon aimed at builders interested in using Lens Protocol as the foundation to create a social platform with digital ownership-first experiences, tools for transparent moderation, censorship-resistant ways to publish and profit, and much more. ---------------------------------------------------- Follow us: https://twitter.com/ETHGlobal Check us out: https://ethglobal.com Email us at: hello@ethglobal.com
Transcript
[Music] [Applause] [Music] all right welcome everybody hope you had a good uh quick five minute break and with that we are ready for our next talk so next talk we're going to talk about what does it mean to kind of get more creative on building on top of lens and for this panel we actually have three uh amazing people so we have rich ramon and simon from we3 and they're going to be talking about all the things that you can do and how you can extend your creativity with with lens so without further ado let's welcome all of them here on stage and unless and to turn their videos on and i'll let you all get started hey everyone uh nice to meet you um i think we should we just get started kartik absolutely yes also uh we should have flipped the video on so uh the lights you can see as well one second just going to the start of our slides okay um give me one second can you see at least my slides for now yes okay um okay cool um so okay uh rich simon are you guys ready too so i can kick it off absolutely go for it good okay cool so uh welcome everybody thanks for being pro this is talk number three four uh so still staying with us and excited to have uh quite a few folks here to kind of like listen to what we have uh uh brought to you today um today it's a lot about kind of like what can you do with lens and what like how to think differently about what products or innovation you can build on top of it and uh kind of like what where where this could lead so i think we already heard a lot from stani and uh josh and david of like what lens is so i shortly just kind of like want to introduce us in the call and maybe uh rich and simon once you talk you maybe can just introduce yourself very shortly who you are and kind of like what you do but uh i'm ramon i'm part of we free we free is a web-free design collective so we're a bunch of designers who realize that webfree is growing exponentially and it's one of the most interesting area for design to come in because it's early because we don't really know yet how to use it best because it's still hard to use and so we came together and we realized there's a lot of space for making the space more accessible more inclusive opening it up for the next generation of users and uh we pre primarily do this through helping through product and uh brand strat product design and brand strategy and really help kind of like building narratives from like early ideas to actually bring it to the market uh maybe a little bit of how we got involved in lens just to kind of like as a little bit of disclosure we have been working with them since quite a while in the background to really shape the brand and the the brand itself of lance but also kind of like help expand what lens could mean for the ecosystem i think stunning was saying is like it's really about building an ecosystem and so what we have been tasked to help out in the last few weeks is really kind of like pushing the edges of like what lens could do in several places and really help to kind of like shape that so with that i would love to shortly talk about why uh we or we believe or i believe uh social graphs matter or what social graphs are being a designer in that space i i think it took me quite a while to understand what the hell is a social graph why does it matter and uh i i or we use the metaphor of kind of like it's a little bit an iceberg so like we know social media we know news feeds we knew friends list we know that it matters to have friends online or being able to connect to them and like write with them through messengers but it's really kind of like just the top of the iceberg that we really see here and there's like there's so much data and connections and content or connections that below the surface that are part of the social graph that are not really accessible for us but they're also kind of like the bread and butter of like the traditional web 2 platforms like facebook twitter and all of that so kind of like i think from for most people that coming to the space talking about the social graph it's really just kind of like the top of the iceberg but like what is really exciting is like what lies below that and what we mean with that is like that basically everything has a social graph right when we started to explore lens it was a lot about like is this social medias is this a new news site is this a feed is this a friends list like what is it really and the reality today is that basically everything that web 2 touches and potentially web free will touch too has a social graph has a social component where we connect with each other being it from sending and transacting from one wallet to one wallet kind of like following someone's on chain activity to kind of like the more traditional web 2 applications like twitter or all of that so when thinking about where lens is going i think one thing a wrong button is this is bigger than decentralized twitter i feel like when we start to ideate in this space we often end up with decentralized twitter a new news site it's like the the go-to things and we really wanted with this kind of like exploration and what we're going to show you today to kind of push what what an open graph can enable for an ecosystem itself what we what we mean with this is that a social graph tetris obviously social media and news feeds right it it's about how the a news feed is curated what we're seeing there but like we start to zoom out there it's as much about music movies and entertainment right we share playlists we get recommendations we play together we watch things uh let's play video on twitch together so it's kind of like all of those has a huge social component how we kind of like connect with each other and do things together and like that can be even broader in the sense of like uh in in the realm of like uh matchmaking so like it's it can lean from car uh creators matching to create something together on tick tock through a duet to kind of like actual matchmaking through dating to finding collaborators in a dao so like a lot of those are built on social connections and and doing that so it's like web free is already inherently social and we need to get to the next step there and that can and i think like when we think about where social graph can be helpful it's as much about social media the metaverse governance shopping working gaming it really can encompass all of this which makes it sometimes really hard to start but also kind of like shows hopefully how broad broadly applicable like a protocol like lens could be so with that we wanted to kind of like highlight what are some core challenges that we think we can address through new new experiences and new product design and one thing is there's a huge chance to kind of like give more power or control uh to users so we surround like with web 2 facebook twitter snapchat you name it tiktok we surrendered a lot of power and control for convenience right we give away control over over our data with sign in with google and now we have wallets so like we're really kind of like in the state of empowering the user again but like this empowering is also kind of like frightening but like it's actually really kind of like a new paradigm shift for social media that you're in control of your social graph of your connections and that you can shape it and control it and that's quite a novelty so like the question for us really should be so how might we balance the control and the power that we gain with kind of like also ease of use through better ux and ui design here so that we still get some of that convenience back number two that we think is super valuable here is like around uh insights and the the reality is we have a information asymmetry in the current uh social graph world right uh platforms like spotify like google like all of that they have a ton of data on us and we might potentially even have access to that but it's really hard for us to understand and acting on that like so platforms often more know about ourselves than we do and i think with opening up the social graph now of that again this power of insight this reflection and understanding can shift back to us so kind of like how can we use web-free on-chain uh activity this general more transparency in this space to to give not just not just to create more trust but like also more insights about ourselves so what if if those open graphs that we talk about kind of like really allow us to understand and reflect about ourselves our communities and new ways next i think it's important to kind of like acknowledge that lens is a protocol not a platform and um i i still stole this one from one of my favorite paper called like i had platforms uh protocols on the platform but i think that this kind of like idea of like portability that you're able to choose how you experience content or being in control of that or moving moving your friends list or your friends list is moving with you and doesn't have to be established again it's quite a big change in like how we understand like uh open graphs itself so this idea of portability is not novel for us i feel in web3 where we have wormholes where we have talk about cross chain and like we're trying to figure that out but like this idea of like that social media is not a unique universe a world garden but it's more like the marvel cinematic multiverse where things can coexist and connect with each other i feel is quite a novelty and like so thinking about this what we're going to talk about is kind of like leaning into the last point is the more power we have the more we understand ourselves and the data that's established through those places and kind of like we create more portability that allows us to completely rethink what a front-end could be like how we interact with it right it's like if you don't like how what data you get out of the front end or if that could be more like you you move on you build your own and like that that is a quite novel approach to kind of like go often also going a little bit more back how the internet was like a long time ago so what this allows us to do it's kind of like it allows to kind of like lead with better design because there's more competition hopefully more choice and like also oh not everything has to be broad you can also design for for niches itself so with that that's kind of like a little bit an intro how we got excited about working with lens itself and like why social graphs matter and i'm handing this over now to uh rich and simon to kind of like dive a little bit into uh some clusters of ideas that we had so far um rich simon i'm going to mute myself but please free to move on nice um thanks ramon um yeah so we've got a few ideas that we've been tinkering on you know obviously such a such a big space such a big area so much opportunity of where to innovate so uh where do we begin um well we've sketched out a few um ideas that we'll share with you just to get the juices flowing and you can consider these as kind of like interesting territories to explore um some of them are really kind of like the natural breaking points of where web 2 social media sort of breaks down or where you might find the cracks there um and other areas are really where sort of web3 enables us to create something net new um so you hear us talk a lot about what ifs we'll be sort of posing a few questions i really really these are just kind of prompts against which we think um would be interesting to explore so you know let us know what you think riff with us ask questions and uh throw ideas down in the chat as well so let's uh let's dive right in yeah absolutely you're going to hear a lot of what is from us uh for the next little while so so settle in uh but we're kicking off with some ideas around uh lens tooling because uh when we're we're building something new here something from the ground up which means that you know we get to start pretty fresh we get to set up the tools and the systems that help make us make the most of that sort of like green pasture of new social um the issue is right now much of today's tooling for social is completely boxed off it's like pretty hard or impossible to change or to interact with so it's it's really exciting to start to think about breaking that and giving users the power of the tools that make the most of that new social so we've been thinking a little bit about some tools that people can create to get the most of their lens social graph and if you give it a little scroll now we've got one here all about verification because right now verification is controlled by social media platforms and not really the communities that grow into them or grow to use them and that can like stifle the innovation or it can lead to even verification being a centralized platform swim cough cough blue tick uh so what if social media verification meant more than just being a real person what if it instead sort of captured any kind of label that was meaningful to community or to an individual or set of individuals it's like broadening this kind of uh this idea of verification to an extensible system of tags that could be attached to you know users to communities even to posts would help us open up a rich new set of experiences so again some what ifs like what if a distributed fact-checking community could tag post that's researched and evaluated as like trusted maybe what if a curated collection of articles uh written by award winners could easily be created and automatically kept up to date what if an idea could even be traced back to its roots um and its tree of posts and replies and lastly what if a company's online profile could be tagged with this global carbon footprint but speaking of influence and that sort of like sense of meaning to community how about kind of getting a sense of where you as an individual community stand in your graph yeah so um another thing we're sort of thinking about is really the you know what's the default visual expression or sort of the visual viewing paradigm of your social media experience and you know today the typical just to give it some context so you can sort of understand where the ideas are coming from but the typical viewing paradigm really centers around like an infinite feed of content um it's designed by the businesses and the platforms really to drive as much engagement and as much consumption as possible and i don't know if you guys have seen the social uh dilemma but uh the guy that you know invented infinite scrolls sort of often regrets kind of how that's led to a lot of mindless consumption so you know things like your relationships and what you actually might learn about them um seem to be things that are really like secondary features in in today's social media experience so uh you don't really see those things that they're just they're just lists of contacts in secondary features um with something like the open social graph though i mean i think what's interesting here is that because this is these experiences are being powered by that data it's like this ever-growing model that's capturing information about your relationships with people you know groups and communities and even businesses now that we have ownership over that what's also interesting is that we also have um choice uh or possibility about how data is actually expressed or visualized so you know the question that we're exploring here is uh you know what other ways could you express or visualize your social graph you know what other new paradigms might we create to view your experience and in this little illustration we've got here my digital roots um you know we're imagining something more of an interactive graphical view it's like a sketch but of what your relationships look like and this is something that could emphasize relationships over content so you can imagine different filters and and different toggles you switch on and off to kind of you know explore your network um but you know what else could it do perhaps it could actually help you see the degree of your influence or your reach or even your exposure to different types of people from different groups perhaps you could also even see like timelines of your relationships and how your connections have flourished or diminished over time and you know perhaps even understand more insightfully like things like your frequency of contact or the dynamics or the interactions of your exchanges with others so there's a lot of insight that can actually be drawn that we're not privy to at the moment in sort of web 2 social media and these are things that could be interesting and when you sort of frame it in the idea of like you know could you actually improve your relationships with people it starts to become quite interesting and then you think about um what could this mean not just to your friendship circle but when you start to consider teams or professional networks like what happens then um and uh yeah to sort of like close out this little sort of territory like ritual sort of uh chime in now on um what tools could be like to make most of your experience with it yeah you give us a scroll there i'm on yeah so right now um you know we're all using the web and we're all subject to these really opaque algorithms that are kind of ruling the current social media experience you know they're deciding what to show or even what vanishes into the ether and what doesn't get seen by users and we've got very little sort of influence over what we actually see um because those algos are trade secrets you know we're unable to show how the inputs and the interactions can influence the kind of contents that we might then consume so what if we were able to have greater control over our feeds over the way we can assume different media across platforms set our own rules even our own standards our own algorithms by which to kind of sort filter and discover that content then the open graph uh not only allows anyone to build their own front-end experiences but also perhaps the very engines themselves that define her content uh breaks through to the surface you can infuse a point of view over which content should be prioritized and filtered based on different needs and different tastes at your own whim so a few what ifs what if you could choose from multiple open source algorithms or lenses by which you could view your lens feed what if there are easy ways to manage permissions around what personal data a front end might use to personalize recommendations or what if those algorithms were like completely transparent and tunable to this point that you might even be able to jump in and sort of change a change of lever to see what you what you're viewing and then this is a fun one what if you could even flick a switch and have a completely different content experience even like view the world through the eyes of your friends celebrities are like total wild cards from the other side of an echo chamber but that's enough about those kind of foundations that kind of tooling what about what we should do specifically for creators yeah so i mean obviously this is you know when you think of web 3 and social media it's very much synonymous with creators and the creator economy it just feels like there's so much potential to create new types of experiences for creators but also for fans as well and i think like we're interested in um also how you can sort of foster connection from nuanced data around tastes and preferences how can that inform empower new types of connection between creators but also between um creators and fans um so if we scroll down a little bit one of the things we're wondering about is the idea of collaboration and and how matchmaking could serve um greater collaboration how how lens sort of might facilitate that and to give it some some backstory i mean today you know creators around the world you know they collaborate with fellow artists and writers and musicians and brands um to develop fresh content and often it's about furthering reach and actually growing audiences as well as you know experimenting with different types of content um and you know you tend to find that it creates new dialogue can bring communities together and all that sort of good stuff but i think what's sometimes challenging is you know how do you find and signal that you're sort of looking for this sort of collaboration whether it's for like a project or for an art piece or for a dao or for brand how do you find the people to work with um so the question we're exploring here is you know how might we use our insights in the open graph to match creators together and catalyze new content and create collaborations so how do we make that seamless more easy and we're thinking about tools for things like audience insight and matchmaking so in our little sketch here you can imagine a creator is seeing different types of potential matches or collaborators that are being served to them and here we've got a kind of like a tinder style where you're where you're seeing different types of folks perhaps matched on certain criteria or content preferences or perhaps it's about you know like how you're signaling certain project ambitions um and then next to that like the idea of like this merged graph so this is interesting when you have like a visual overlay you know what what if you could have two creators that could easily and perhaps visually compare and contrast their audiences um to see where they overlap in taste and preferences but also to sort of see the gaps and the differences where they sort of might grow so these are a few ideas just around uh matchmaking uh within the context of creators but matchmaking of course is a theme that is going to run through lots of different verticals as well so you know what as you as you take this forward you know think about like what does this mean across different platforms or even gaming um or finding collaborators and dowels to start projects together or even dating um but that's sort of a little bit about the creators now let's sort of think a little bit about the fans as well yeah what about flipping that about the sort of the fan experience um because fan engagement is obviously huge for growth um and access to you know maybe if your creator access to the data about your followers you know or is pretty limited on today's platforms it means that you know it could be pretty tricky to have sort of like valuable interactions or even even any it's all discussion to understand the sort of your fans and your followers oftentimes it's even like fragmented across different channels across different apps uh it's really hard to have a sort of central discussion uh to engage in sort of like feeling across different channels so we're thinking about how we how might we provide creators with tools and resources better understand their fans even deepen their relationships and really unlock the full value of their fan base um i'm thinking that in the flip side as well how can we also like bring it open up for fans to basically get closer to the creators when you know as their time is valued as well and their their engagement is valued so like lens could potentially enable creators to engage with their fans in any way they want and really get a 360 view of their fan base of their followers maybe giving options to engage or to build connections that otherwise might not be possible so i have some just ideas what if creators could really get reports and breakdowns on who their fans are who's consuming the most content what they love what they like who are they from get a sort of holistic view of everyone that's involved and then maybe on a recognition point like what if creators could even recognize individual fans with rewards perks personal experiences maybe and gifts perhaps even some direct contact as a way to sort of thank them for that support um and show them that they're a valued fan but then onto monetization over to you simon yeah yeah yeah so um yeah this one's really about monetization commercializing content and um uh you know this is something that i think bugs a lot of creators today and it's very difficult to find a way to have a viable sustainable living on on web 2 sort of social media you know there's always a few issues at play i mean platforms take a large cut of any profits you make anyway um but also creators aren't always just free to focus on their content because they have to worry about how do they beat the algorithm you know how do they climb higher in the rankings in order to kind of better position themselves to monetize um their content and while also having to you know maintain towards community guidelines or guidelines and rules set by the platforms which seem to be ever changing so it's it's a sort of frustrating loop that i think a lot of creators get stuck in so really it sort of feels that um it's a system in which there are limits to the freedom uh of how you might sort of thrive both financially and and creatively so you know one question we're thinking about for for lens and uh what it could imply for creators is it's really like what if you could release some of that pressure you know um and what if you could put more control and better tools back into the hands of creators um in how they commercialize their content so they can both thrive financially and and creatively so you know um obviously with nfts and sort of the boom there like creating content on chain is gonna enable new forms of monetization uh different systems and and also the way uh that could be tuned and targeted towards different audiences also it kind of lowers the barrier for new creators to enter the system they don't have to fulfill you know minimum audience sizes and things like that to kind of actually participate and actually enjoy some revenue from their work um so a couple of ideas here like one of them is this idea of a dashboard right so monetization dashboard you know what if it was easy and simple for folks to um or configure different options or systems by which to monetize their content so in the sketch you can kind of see you know maybe it's an ad model the traditional admiral model that i switch on and a match made to brands perhaps it's pay-per-view or sort of surge pricing or even subscription and on the right you know perhaps i can just customize each post in different ways for for different audiences maybe there's members i have or early bloomers or just like what is it for everyone else um but also you know beyond this too you know with content sort of minted sort of released on chain i mean um we're also imagining tools that can track content across apps built on lens so that creators can you know monitor and track and receive income or royalties for or attributions for any content that's used by other creators on on lens apps and then the middle idea here is around membership right so um obviously we're seeing this in different forms on on certain platforms like patreon etc but um you know what if creators could design their own membership programs and where they define the tiers of access and different perks and rewards that their different audiences might have and um also can they even pull in their audiences or that top fans into their into their kind of orbit and actually help them grow and incentivize those fans and audiences in different ways with financial rewards or tokens so tons and tons of opportunities as it comes to uh monetization um and then now sort of back over to rich for a little bit on uh dowels yeah i hope everyone's clinging onto their seat in this avalanche of ideas but we're getting there but um yeah on to dies because thousand collectors they're like integral to the the way of thinking even the identity really of this sort of web 3 social world but often times the tooling and front ends that we work with today they're they're you know they're they're uh limited uh you know for for individual use um or potentially even the ones are sort of there's less of a social aspect to them it's more about sort of the hard financials or the governances as we heard earlier we've been thinking a little bit about how dyers can have a sort of collective presence giving them you know almost like a social soul of their own on the social graph so you give a little bit of a scroll there there we go lovely uh yeah so like social media today really is built for individuals um and groups and companies like do have profiles um the user experience is you know still orientated really around an individual person who controls the organization's account or perhaps you know maybe a team in bigger organizations and alike as well and those platforms really are not set up at all for any sort of decentralized or ad-hoc communities that may have you know a range of ways of organizing themselves that it might not fit into these so strict buckets so like what if there was uh different voices in a community could come together under one profile maybe one pop-up ad hoc profile without giving any one person complete control and we kind of have this you know we have multi-sig crypto wallets where we can you know let a group of people follow you know a collective policy for transferring digital assets so how about that for sort of a profile if you like for for managing you know a social presence of a collective yeah what if a community could have a profile and a publication channel with a user interface that really suits its governance style its tools maybe what if you could have pop-up sort of uh communities around these things what if there was like local fans of taqueria in los angeles were able to compete to win the right to post a review under under a shared account and then what if digital native companies could easily distribute control of their social media feed to every single employee so that everyone kind of has an ability to contribute to to the presence on the web and if you give us another scroll there um yeah we've got a sort of sense of how you can make decisions about identity uh but how do we sort of get a sense of the members beyond just uh you know a pseudo-anonymous address and those have become obviously significant organizational structures in the web through space bringing in completely new ways of organizing communities treasuries voting on change distributing funds but you know they're focused on right now maybe enabling the sort of the financials and the operations and they're becoming increasingly harder to manage and they're becoming very fragmented and siloed across lots of different platforms like we all know the discord problem uh so what if ours were built on a suite of tools that really helped to integrate not just governance and finance but also a sense of identity and a sense of community and communication and those on children tools for diaz renault they're you know they're typically centered around the voting and finance like i mentioned and they're uh by default sort of pseudo-anonymous with no identity no sort of social presence um attached to any sort of voting or anything but what if you introduce sort of social connections between individuals and content represented on chain then tools can expand to include that social and productivity features that otherwise you know would exist you know completely off-chain in other different silos so one of those at a dashboard for members that automatically showed the collective interests maybe the authorship and the favorite content of its members what if those had a set tools that enabled them to have one view of their operation their communications solving that discord problem and what if those uh had more elaborate voting systems based on group membership allowing some communities to run in sort of representative manners perhaps with boards of committees empowered to make certain decisions alone we just opened uh opened three sort of boxes just now but there's a lot more to explore and i'm going to bring it over to ramon to take us home with the wild card section thank you so that that went broad um so we talked about kind of like the idea of like an open social graph and how empowering that can be we talked about kind of like building potential new lens tooling that kind of like helps expand the ecosystem system itself we talked about kind of like the idea the ideas or concepts that kind of like to to evolve to create the economy itself and we kind of like we know that dao tooling is a huge emergent space that needs a lot kind of that that is growing and thriving right now and uh needs this social character so kind of with those things one thing where we wanted to end with or go now is like looking a little bit more and like how could this manifest itself into front-end experiences or looking into that space and so we have a couple of sections here that we want to run through a little bit to just inspire you to kind of like see how the world is already super social but it can can now like where we can hopefully now put a web-free twist on it or make it more web-free native and a big belief we we have a big belief that music isn't inherently social we go to concerts we share playlists we have a deep connection to artists themselves and like we want to like like we want to get like be connected to them we often are more willing to pay to an individual artist a significant amount than to to kind of like to a service so kind of like how can we rethink the relationship between an artist and uh us and create novel music platforms that take this web-free mentality of ownership and relationship together and kind of like build new uh primitives uh that are that enable new things to do there i think it's also going there with uh with the the gaming world that is social by default right it doesn't matter if you play alone together in with others around you in in a in a game like fortnite roblox or all of this but like those game become more alive if they're if there are real people around you that you can interact with but gaming is not just inside a game it's like the whole world of of twitch discord all of this this kind of like economies and worlds around games itself that like even in this even in this chat right now we have a chat going on on the side where we have a conversation going on and that we use the prompts to bring it into our live conversation right now here so kind of like how can we move from those very broadcasting tools to kind of like more interactive elements and conversations and like that that bring multiple worlds together in novel ways so so one way is like how can we how can play be even more social like what would it be to build the uh ios game center on top of lines to easily find friends to play against with like we all probably had our wordle moment in the last couple of weeks where we just kind of like also loved to show up how good we were on twitter or not as me but like the idea is kind of like we love those connections we love to compete we love to kind of like like comp challenge our friends and like a lot of this kind of gaming is super social so but right now it's locked into specific world so can can we do this even make more social and but this makes me also super interested about is like i spent way too much time building up my gta 5 character in gta online and like that is a part of my identity too what if an online an in-game character has its own social graph too and how can we build those world around that one thing that we haven't touched yet but like we want to go back is yes we talk a lot about lens tooling and like dao tools and all of this but like e-commerce is one of the prime reasons the internet exists and thrives and grows and like what we know from history is that wherever you establish a market a community will build around it no matter if it was the silk road a marketplace in a in a southern european city that the whole town is coming together to kind of like exchange gossip and news and whatever happens around it like markets build culture right and like even like looking at like the like marketplaces like d-pop or facebook they're in they're extremely social too and i think we can go to the next level like where we can actually see what our friends are up to what our friends are recommending what what they are using right now or not using where we can maybe get early access to it and even like rich was talking about uh rethinking algorithms based on our preferences there's a lot of like ways how we can rethink shopping itself and like let's be honest like instagram turned into one of the greatest shopping malls in all time so like shopping is social so how can we gain the control a little bit more back and like using it uh for us the other thing is i think we sometimes miss that even the way we work and all of that is social too this talk was created in figma and bigchain right that's how how we at least as our team are working it's like you're following other people around in a file and like you're building connections there too so no matter if you use notion github figma or all of those tools even google slides there's a lot of like social elements and moments that we create and i think again it's it's about kind of like making sure that you find your friends that you can create new assets and all of that together that makes it extremely powerful to think about like what does it mean when we have an open graph and we bring it together with the composability of web3 together with the potential new business models that we can think through that come through defy and blockchains and generals to kind of like create like rethink work social gaming and all of that together i want to end with one of my favorite things is like i think we it's easy to get super heavy weighted in those conversations and one of our like favorite ideas that we just want to leak here and show here is like yeah around the ideas of memes and a little bit background here is like for me the when i think about tick tock or all of memes it's like this is web free culture like someone creates an expression and others start to build on it like memes are composable by default like that's how they work right we're building on top of each other and it creates this ecosystem of reactions and interactions and evolutions and all of those like they grow and like so one thing that we start to think about and even like just kind of like how can we build a social network just around memes and i think that just sure that for us shows um the actual power of lens itself right we can we could build the next evolution of apple music or spotify we can lean into it building a social network but it can be as small or nerdy as just a forkable meme creator on chain that kind of like shows you to build how your memes are spreading and evolving over time and like that that for me makes this super interesting so to kind of like summarize where we ended with our thing is like we we started with that a social graph we really just kind of like at the tip of an iceberg here right we talked about it's really about uh empowering you us ourselves it's about kind of like that this is bigger than twitter and facebook and covers other things and it's really about expanding what lens can be from visualizing our networks to rethinking about how we label things and organizing it through better algorithm it's about kind of like better matching between creators more insights from our relationships between odd fans and audiences a new business model and also kind of like the whole aspect of community itself so this was a lot of talking from our side and we hoped that we at least could bring up the iceberg a little bit and like show a little bit more potential of like how big this opportunity actually is especially when we start to cross-connect the services that we build on top of it all together um i do think we have a couple of audience questions so i think that's a perfect moment to kind of like close this uh conversation and like hear what are some questions so let's freaking build this together awesome well thank you so much for uh going through that amazing talk and um there's so many amazing comments on how well kind of thought out everything that you talked about is as well as uh just overall the the detail of the attention you put into uh preparing this so it was super insightful so the few questions i want to ask and now we'll kind of go to as many as we can until we kind of run out of time but uh i guess so the first kind of question that comes in is from kind of your perspective having been on now both sides like what do you think is a difference between being a designer what too and and now what three like are there any specific things that stand out or or can how do you assess or contrast both i i can't take this one i think like on a crafts level it's not that much a difference but what is different is that you have to think more about building for a community building with others you have to appreciate that everything is composable like if you design a brand it's about you have to embrace memes and that others will take the brand further so it's a lot about giving control away and like and enabling others so i think on that one on a product design lens i think the reality is that we have to acknowledge we are still in a super early nerdy stage it's very technical often you you have to understand some of the smart contracts fundamentals to kind of like like especially in the more complicated like defy areas to kind of like really push what design can do and the reality is i think there's just not as many of us designers out there so you can't find that great inspiration first so we need to find more of us to really push what design can do in this field absolutely and if anyone else wants to add something feel free to go for it i'll move on to the next question all right cool i'll do the next one so kind of the other piece is you talked about uh essentially kind of how you present information and and what will be a good thing about how lens can make that easier but um what would you imagine sort of like the user ends up feeling uh and uh so let's try and read this formula so how do you imagine the users might feel different when interacting with the web through based social media network um like what kind of different emotions would they do you think they might experience compared to the current social uh kind of norms or just networks out there and do you think this is a different emotive experience too or is it just a different way of thinking about where the data is and who controls it at the end of the day and it's a bit of an abstract question but that that is a great question and i don't think it's one that we'll know the answer to until we start to build stuff right and we start to put things in front of people engage reactions um but ultimately i think it's hopefully we'll be evoking an interesting reaction that the whole sense of ownership really is is what what a huge piece is here and hopefully a sense of i guess um i guess a lot of trust has been degraded from some of the sort of bigger centralized or social media providers and i'm curious to see uh anna at least from from research that i've done on other projects about how uh how folk are sort of perceiving those current uh social media providers now versus sort of the newer ones which are decentralized by default and sort of you know have a lot of sort of trustless stuff baked in as well so i think lots just lots to see but hopefully um a little bit of interesting stuff against the backlash of the centralized incumbents i think two things to add like i i really think the the fact that you own your content and you're in control of it and you can decide what happens with it will change quite a bit how we think about cr what how we create content what content will be created and how content is curated i think we haven't touched that space enough that creators are important curators are the next big thing the other thing is like i actually think rage quitting will be a superpower as like we're in the sense of like if your data is portable and you're in control you actually like rage quit is actually something that can be a force for good right where like we're if someone builds a better user experience a better way to moderate the content as you wanted to see that has better privacy section it's not like you're locked into a system you quit and move over and i think that hopefully creates a lot of new competition and innovation of like actually exploring what this world even can be yeah a big plus one to that a lot of stuff that we heard from lee stanley and velaji earlier around this idea of like a race to create the the best front end the most novel the most interesting and hopefully that's just going to drive a great user experience which we're all excited about great and now we have uh the final audience question i want to ask and then we can uh get to the next talk is how do you feel about the real-time distributed collaboration sort of world and web 3 do you think that's going to be interactive like would be like this this call we're in um or do you think that's more on kind of the broadcasting side where we're like uh twitch where people just kind of consuming what somebody's doing but it's not really interactive honestly i think that the reality is uh kovit and corona the pandemic changed the way how we think about collaborating together right i was at ideo before and post-its were my life and now i haven't touched the post-it for two years and like i do this all through through figma and it changed the way we work before that i couldn't imagine it and like the technology might sometimes still buggy not there but like i think real-time async we find new ways and we we use it in appropriate ways right sometimes we want to lean back and just enjoy twitch and sometimes i actually would love to kind of like be the annoying person on the side that can actually influence as an audience twitch for the ones i'm watching playing and like i think there will be new forms of interaction that can be enabled through those things and like it's probably like it's not a or b it's a gradient of things that we are enabling here absolutely well simon rich thank you so much for that amazing uh talk and um this was great so thank you so much thank you bye [Music] [Applause]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.