Balaji Srinivasan, Stani Kulechov, and Li Jin talk about The Network State at LFGrow

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so uh let's get started i want to bring on uh our three amazing panelists uh steinkilchov legion from varian and volunteer investment 29 as our panelists um i want to welcome all of you here i'd like to ask if you turn on the videos and now we'll talk about our round three of basically decentralized social media this has been a very active conversation we've had with a lot of you here and uh kind of the goal is to kind of finally see that this is now being put into action uh a lot of it from our learnings from these chats before and uh i want to quickly uh ask everybody to give a quick introduction on themselves on who you are and what you do so i'll start with uh lee um i would love to kind of understand uh who you are for the audience to know and then we'll go with biology and study hey everyone um lee here and i am a general partner at variant fund we are a first check crypto fund investing in the ownership economy really of the belief that crypto enables digital ownership which facilitates new user experiences across the board and a variety of different categories i've been a consumer investor for many years i previously spent four years at a16z covering consumer networks including social networking marketplaces and other kinds of multi-sided networks and then i left in 2020 to start my own fund investing in the future of online work and the creator economy so it's really nice to be here with everyone today amazing um apology would love uh you to give a brief intro sure yeah um i'm belgium austin former cto of coinbase uh former general partner at anderson horowitz investor in a bunch of web three things twitter and without further ado starting um i'm sonny kolachev i'm the uh founder and ceo of ave so we're a team that we that builds and creates web free protocols and and over the past years uh i would say past five and a half years i've been building uh decent as finance and and now we we have built the lens protocol and kind of like creating more tools for developers to uh build the uh the future of victory uh social um i think myself as a kind of like a more of a technologist and and uh curious community member uh and i'm super excited about the uh the hackathon here a special hearing that we have over 500 hackers which is insane so yeah that's that's my introduction pleasure to be here well we're excited to have all of you here so um i want to start off by just kind of uh being uh just kind of understanding how each of us interpret that when we say essential social media this means different things to all of us and kind of just jumping right in i want to start with biology and kind of get your understanding on when i say decentralized social media when somebody says just how do you think about that and what does that mean to you sure so i mean the way i think about it is if you think about bitcoin bitcoin's back end is open and paypal is not you can print out every bitcoin transaction that's ever happened um everybody in the world can do that with a computer an internet connection just download the blockchain and do it but you cannot do that for paypal it wasn't set up that way only the paypal engineers have root on their database and so that's why i think of what blockchains are is uh they're the next step after open source you go they're not just open source you also have open state and open execution open state meaning the back end is open and public basically every um every record can be printed not necessarily every row in a database it's not a sql structured thing but every every record in the blockchain can be printed and it's also open execution where if you run a node um you are able to see every op code and insofar as people didn't trust a ranking algorithm of some kind the decentralized social media implementation of that people could run the equivalent of a decentralized twitter node or facebook node to actually interrogate the op codes and actually see the ranking algorithm is not shadow banning them or biased in one way or another way or that it is and so once you have an open back end once you have open state and open execution here's some things you could do for example if you had a properly decentralized twitter you could print all tweets you could load them into a database print all tweets at a particular string print the entire social graph sort every follower by the number of tweets they like you could do sentiment analysis you could send antenna encrypted messages to other users using their public private key pairs and perhaps most importantly you could integrate this with every aspect of your back end just it basically sits next to your postgres because your slice of an open state database is actually yours you have root on it it's more like your space on aws or github then your space on twitter it's much less lockdown much less restricted by api so that just completely changes how you build because so much engineering time spent maintaining flaky integrations with these social media apis which can basically just de-platform you at any time and and protocols are just much more much more potentially reliable and stable than that um and and that's that's what this this space means to me amazing i think you'll end up prefacing the rest of the the set of questions as well uh we'll see we didn't go deep into any of these topics but uh what does that would leave like uh how do you think about this thing and how much of this do you agree or disagree with about these views or if i'm not disagreeing nuances on yeah i i would echo everything that biology just mentioned um i think it's interesting to consider decentralized social networking um in contrast to the current state of social networking which is extremely centralized so today the state of the world is one in which there's essentially a very small handful of centralized social networking companies that effectively control all of the means of content production and distribution for all of the users in the world and that really is predicated um or is due to the fact that the data and content and basically like all of the identity and relationships and and every piece of data created by these users is privately owned by that handful of companies rather than being publicly accessible as an open utility or um through that open state as biology was functioning and so the implication of that is that the existing social networking paradigm is actually quite coercive where as a participant um in this landscape if you want to be able to reach people or participate in content creation that reaches anyone you really have to go through this handful of centralized gatekeepers in order to do that so i think of decentralized social networking really as the opposite of all of that where if we start with the base layer of open state then you could have many different developers all building different applications and interfaces on top that showcase that information in different ways and compete with each other to offer the best user experience and there could be a proliferation of different discovery algorithms or different content moderation approaches that really serve up different types of social experiences to users so i think that's a really exciting vision of the world and the implication then is that users would have a lot more choice and agency in the systems in which they're participating slowly and uh and stunning without further ado okay i i i i definitely think there is like uh kind of like what's been echoed is that uh you know decentralized social media it creates a lot of uh choices uh choices for the users choices for the developers and you know the way we have built that too is uh we got this like enormous efficiency by centralizing a lot of data and making it as efficient as possible uh and then using that data to basically knowing and understanding what the users want and and selling them too and the the kind of like a uh difficult task here is that you always need to follow this particular model uh when you build a social media uh business or application and you don't have many choices there so what decentralized social media helps especially from the builders perspective is that you actually can as a builder when you have this kind of like a social graph as the public good and you can focus on actually building um that particular user experience that you you want to achieve or a certain use case or or maybe certain kind of like um i would say build an application with certain values for example maybe you are more interested in building more humane social media or making it more private or maybe the future of social media for your user base might not be uh what's your reach of followers uh in the crab the in the in the graph but maybe you know the quality of those followers and how much engaged there are and when you would have to create a new social media application from those perspective you need to build this big platform effect uh and and to compete with the users and get those network effects and in web3 social what i uh kind of realized is that if you make you know this particular piece as a public good and everyone is pretty much sharing resources which with each other um the networking the data uh what happens is that you can just switch your focus on on whatever you want to build so you have more choices as a uh builder but at the same time it's kind of like a waterfall effect going towards also to the end user meaning that as a user you can start actually voting with your uh i will not say voting with your feed i would say voting with your wallet uh and your lens maybe profile uh amongst those applications which actually serve you the most and that might be the user experience you're looking for on the same uh content distribution um uh platform or it might be just an algorithm you prefer more to use even within the same application because you are not uh stuck anymore on building towards the same uh mode for example you might have users that are more interested in actually discovering new content uh or maybe just getting more uh deeper content on particular uh topics and this allows developers to actually you know like maybe first time ever to compete with with big social media uh platforms like um twitter instagram and and facebook and so forth because essentially everyone who is building on top of a same graph are actually growth hacking for each other and that's like the kind of like uh value proposition from from my perspective and there's a lot of lot to be said about the ownership so you are essentially uh building something that is owned by the users uh you want your profile uh you want your connection with the with the audience especially with the uh nfts and and then you can actually take the take that audience uh kind of like elsewhere or you you can meet them in another application so there is definitely like a lot of advantage there and also compatibility maybe now that we have this common uh i would say like a graph maybe we'll see applications that couldn't be built before because no one is actually in a web to social media sharing those resources uh on on this kind of like a scale and i think that's a very big opportunity for for now all the developers who are uh building social now absolutely i mean i think we're we're all sort of echoing similar themes here which is a good premise to think about alternatives and uh in anabolic you've written a lot on this in the past i'm just anywhere from how to exit twitter to uh just what a good alternative would look like so maybe my kind of question to you is what do you particularly disagree with sort of how existing web 2 uh large kind of consumer social platforms are set up with and what do you think they can do better we can understand the sense of resistant argument but what else kind of goes in in that sure so you know censorship resistance is one way of thinking about it but i think a better way of thinking about it consensual resistance seem like more of an edge case much less so today but an even better way of thinking about it is in terms of digital property rights and one way of thinking about that is in the 2000s um the deal that social networks were offering seemed too good to be true or is amazing deal because you know you had free they gave you free distribution to everybody in the world and hosting and all of these content creation tools and you just had to bring yourself and hit some keys and relative to the 1980s for example or even the early 90s when distribution was very scarce and you you know to be on tv was this huge thing now anybody could you know stream on youtube or post on blogger or twitter or facebook or what have you this was this huge huge huge thing so initially that was a great deal but as time went on um now that's become actually sort of considered the standard package and now what has happened is basically uh rather than being neutral platforms these platforms have a huge thumb on the scale and lots of people are you know whether it's youtube's adpocalypse or their people are getting down ranked in search results or you know there's various issues where as more of life has now gone digital people don't have a share of uh what they're creating and they don't have control over their digital presence becomes more and more more important as becomes a larger percentage of your life one question i ask people is what percentage of your hours are spent your waking hours are spent looking at a screen and people you know realize wait it's actually more than 50 often for many people for many information workers so most of your life your remaining life will be spent in the matrix in some way and if you don't have root over the matrix if you can just be boom just basically locked in a box in that matrix and all the doors are closed and your money is taken away and you know you're silenced like that scene from black mirror where the guy is just mass blocked and nobody can can hear him anymore that's actually possible if somebody has root and then those people wouldn't be able to hear you uh and and you'd just be totally powerless and so you know against that uh the alternative is people to have control and have economic rights and that control means private keys and the economics also means private key so it's it's both the freedom and the prosperity those are kind of you know they they go together people talk about the freedom in terms of sensitive persistence but it's also the prosperity in terms of digital property rights the reason that's so important is crypto creators will be so much bigger than even internet influencers because they get a direct cut of what they create billions of people are not getting a cut of what they create when they do they're going to create a lot more of it and it's going to be a lot more useful because they're going to be doing it in return for cryptocurrency and not simply likes and rts and so on and so forth i think the internet looks very different when that happens um and i think we need to accelerate that absolutely no i i think uh and by the way if i leave sunny if you any of you have any things to add on just feel free to jump in i don't want this to be like a take your turn type of it's a setup but i think you touched on a really awesome kind of theme here and lee you've written a lot about this as well which is just kind of how does this turn uh everybody into an ownership sort of side of the economy here so i'd love to hear your thoughts on what changes in this world and how do we think about marketplace versus social labs or are they the same in this context yeah so i really like to ground a discussion about the shortcomings of the existing social media platforms in kind of the concept of user freedom um where today it's the fact that network effects the combination of network effects plus closed data is a recipe for user coercion and a lot of people will say but creators and users are free to just you know exit from these platforms choose not to use them you can delete your facebook account whatever but i think people who who say that users have a choice i think it's actually quite hollow because there is this pool towards these platforms because they control and represent um so much distribution and network effects that are proprietary to these platforms and so this has created all sorts of issues um for users and creators in the current social media paradigm i recently wrote um a blog post called the creator economies and crisis kind of outlining really the parallel um the parallels between the gig economy and how it's turned out as well as the creator economy where the gig economy had made all these promises to to the supply side about being your own boss kind of being free to work on your own terms whenever you wanted and obviously didn't quite live up to that because the platforms the apps controlled really every level of detail of how the supply side actually was able to work ranging from pricing to intermediating the customer relationship to determining whether or not you could even work on the platform at all and a similar set of issues are now arising on the social media platform social media platforms with respect to creators where you have this exploitation of creator labor this underlying insecurity because the algorithms and discovery is really controlled unilaterally by the platforms as well as intermediation of all of the relationships with one's audience and the result of that is that you have this entire class of social media creators who exist in this kind of state of economic peril where they at any moment can lose their livelihood and access to their customer base so i think that's a huge issue today so i very much agree with biology that like the current state of um the creator economy and the economy that has arisen from these social media platforms it's it's not just about freedom but there's a huge part of the economic opportunity that is lacking because people really don't have a choice in the platforms that they're participating in absolutely i think maybe one kind of question that we get all the time is um if nobody disagrees with anything that's bad said but i guess the question is like how do we think about whether it's psychologically or from my experience standpoint how things would look like if everything was tracked and it feels too transactional like does that take away any of the experience or how people look at any from consuming information to interacting with uh anywhere from their peers to their friends like is that an actual fair kind of counter to having everything tracked and just being being on your own sort of mercy of understanding how you parse that information because it exists there's there's both good and bad about that i think um the good is that all of these basically unmonetized actions people are you know if you think about it like the netflix ceo once said something like our competition is the time you spend you know having a drink of wine with your significant other or something like that right and that's because basically there's 24 hours in a day and they're just essentially fighting to take as much of your time as possible and these loops are built to be as addicting as possible and that is something that benefits that centralized company and you know the thing is on the one hand you can appreciate how hard it is to build these companies it is really hard but then you can also you know appreciate that it's actually extremely um difficult to uh to have something where you know you've got a loop like that which has been optimized for addictiveness on many people and it's draining so much time and then not have that be compensated in some way and so so that's a good part is now people actually get compensated for their time the bad part is as you say things become more transactional i think on balance though there's some good to that too and the reason is so much on social media is empty posturing so much you know is hostility and so on you know it's funny like when my friend said wow there's all these you know if i was a teenager there's all these famous people you know that are online and what do people decide to do when they're kids a lot of them decide to just troll these famous people rather than go and be like hey you know i'm also into art and this is a great artist maybe they can you know teach me something and here's you know like that's like a much more positive kind of thing and i think you could you might be able to get more of that if there's more mechanisms for economic alignment as opposed to simply like zero-sum status right and so uh so that's those are some of the things i think about where i think on balance there's certainly negative some relationships become more transactional we'll probably see also uh once everything has a price um you're going to see a lot of things that you didn't think of as being priceable now have a price like sentiment you know people will be able to trade memes and hashtags and so you'll be able to short and say this social movement i actually don't think it's going to have staying power i think people are going to basically sell on this and probably that'll be like a like a social market alongside it lots of unpredictable consequences so i can't say i know every you know aspect what's going to happen i think on balance it's probably better to add some degree of scarcity to the mix here because otherwise that scarcity is hidden and it basically exists as root on somebody's server instead of put that back into people's hands go ahead yeah i want to add there because uh it's it's actually fascinating because like normally when you look at how uh all this kind of like three uh platforms work you know you have databases and you know you have data in in someone's in one company's database and it's valuable you know but that data is valuable for for kind of like a dats uh party and the stakeholders that that is that the data is shared and and essentially uh what happens is that it's the users that are constantly giving up that interactional uh data and and kind of like a uh signaling what uh you know what kind of things uh you like in life and it's a vast amount of data but you know the value is captured there in in my opinion so i have this like one theory that the value is is going towards uh those stakeholders and and this uh monetization system and the users like we kind of have built previously a system where you know the users are there to use the product and and they're the the customers and we're just shifting in a place now uh and an environment where actually it's you know these networks and protocols built for the users uh and it's meant for them and the value should go you know back to the users and and and it's really interesting because uh in uh blockchain what is happening actually you have you might have the same information of value as you would have in a traditional uh data systems but that's data is kind of like you know it's um accessible maybe but also it's in a uh ledger that is distributed and you might argue a bit even like in a way that's uh because you have the same data in a distributed system uh and you know that you have this kind of like a um transparency there but also the access rights for example that um you might be able to transfer that value or interact with that value or you as a member of the community that builds a bit more uh value into that and i think uh uh there's definitely a couple of uh issues here one is that you know we in the web 3 we transact quite a lot in public we we love transparency uh and we love seeing new information and and what people are doing and using then then it's kind of like up to us building applications and use that value in a way where uh we uh create better applications for us better user experience but also like use the data in a way it's beneficial back to the users but in the first place we we're already getting part of that value anyways but if there is for example an application that it has been built on top that actually for some reason um you know you know you're not aligned uh with how the algorithm processes your data or uh like how it collects some infor additional information it's so easy to just uh change the application and have the similar experience so i guess like taking that uh big player the the social graph and and and decentralizing a lot of components of of social media it creates a an environment where you know those platforms and values they have to compete so you actually are competing uh not only of the user interactions but uh with their values and you want to be aligned with the users because if you as a you know social media application developer you're not aligned with the users uh you will essentially lose them to somewhere else because it's very easy to create a new application when when you have this kind of like a shared resources and i think this should some way drive the the um this kind of like a competition on you know listening the community more better and and also the the users you know maybe now it's time to actually even the off chain algorithms to to actually kind of like express uh what those algorithms are what kind of data they use and how they are actually good for you and if you don't do that what happens it's someone else will do that and they can spin up very quickly and i think this will this is a radical kind of like a change here that we have the opportunity from the developer and user level to actually uh create a new ecosystem to make things better and uh you're not tied into the system and this is something that's um let me mention that you know if if you lose your account in in twitter kind of like for some reason or you're afraid that's like your living hood but now you have the you have the basically the the value and it's up to all these uh applications to show you how you can get most out of it absolutely yeah let's say i think maybe a question for lee and biology what what would you say the ingredients are for like a really good alternative that's crypto and what three native uh for just thinking about new social platforms and i think they'll cater us for the rest of the conversation what are the or what are the are they out there that's right the ingredients for a good alternative to a web3 native social media platform i mean i i do think the single most important is crypto identity whether it's ens or solana names or um you know like orbit or a bunch of other things that are out there right and um the reason for that is if you you know we're gonna probably need a better term than connect wallet uh because it kind of sounds like this thing's just gonna drain your money or whatever right probably gonna you know need something like that but if you've seen like web one web two web three like web one is username password web 2 is log in with google facebook twitter linkedin etc and then web 3 is currently connect wall meta mask or something like that that portable identity is way more important than i think many people think because when identity becomes portable back-ends become liquid like you could have the if it's truly one click and you could truly log into a new service as easily as you load a new web page that means the billion user tables suddenly become liquid these gigantic ice blocks that are facebook's database and twitter's database of all these users where there's lock-in those all become liquid and can flow between platforms potentially as easily as just clicking and we you know the thing is that when you talk about something like that it's kind of like the transition from taking photographs with you know cameras taking photographs of digital cameras at first digital cameras were clunkier in some ways than normal cameras they had worse resolution if you remember the first iphone camera that wasn't the first digital camera the first iphone camera was much worse than a typical but it was portable and it was everywhere and some people used it a lot it got better and now it's way better right and so the same way like once web3 identity hits that flipping and it is you know it's got you know millions of users now hundreds of millions if you include all holders i don't know how many millions of ens users are but once that's there and once you have like services are built for that first um eventually and it'll take a while because a lot of momentum in these things by 2020 not 2025 but let's say late 2020s maybe 2030 you have a crypto phone where that's built in and you have identity that's actually you know fundamentally on your private keys and people wonder how it could have been any other way because your identities linked your money and all your digital property and how could we have ever lived whereas on corporate servers once that happens now exit digital legs it becomes much more powerful that means these big services don't have as much lock-in need to actually you know fight for their bread every single day which is good when it's a huge corporation it should be doing that providing a service to people and then what happens is that's why i said you know what's the scarce resource of each decade right the 2000s it was bandwidth and the 2010s because of social is attention the 2020s i think it's block space just figuring out technically how to put all this stuff on chain and then when we've liquefied every single big company back-end with web3 in the 2030s i think the scarce resource will be loyalty that's to say every single community because people can leave at a moment's notice they're going to actually need to provide something that is more than simply utility they're going to need to provide value to their community and i think so that's where the 2030s go that's loyalty so seeing ahead a little bit yeah thanks for the alpha there's a good post uh one of my friends wrote this called the billion user table on this uh john stokes wrote this post which explains that this is a little more detail uh one quick follow just just as you kind of talked about entity or you just like is the argument that it's a propagation game and not anything else like are you just fundamentally saying we just need more people and that's when you can actually do a mass mover or is it i think i mean well i think what's here's the thing you can do and this is something i've been thinking about at i what i want to see are vampire attacks on you know twitter's like user base facebook's user base like linkedin etc like in the sense of just like you know sushi swap like you know i'm i'm pro unit swap um you know i think hayden's a pioneer and so on and so forth i think in a macro sense it is good that that vampire attack occurred because it made you know you know swap to like a token and someone kind of good things happened i think overall as a function of that right you know when when protocols compete you win right um and so like effectively vampire attacks once you get to a certain scale you could do something where let's say you have a million people with an ens social network or sns social network or something like that urban social network whatever that is that's working right um they all have a hundred friends and so they could decide okay this thing is working we what's our growth strategy our growth strategy is we invite the heck out of our friends and we do the following um uh proof of sperm okay so proof of spurn um means that you are posting let's say a tweet or a post or something that is like your last post your tombstone post on that social network and so long as that's up your tokens or whatever vest in this new thing but any further action that you take publicly on that social network means that you haven't actually exited from it right so something like that would sort of be like you know proof of exit or proof of spurn or something like that where you spurned the old web 2 network for the new one and if you get a bunch of people to do that collectively you're like you know moses parting the red sea right you get collective exit collective migration sort of like the mass migration of people to miami just you know sf is done and now we're all moving together right um and i think you're gonna see something like that online uh where it's like a community migration and then social networks actually start becoming community aware because there's a culture to that community once you have tokens integrated with social networks you know right now you know like people don't really care if someone moves from twitter to facebook to instagram whatever they don't really have a culture the people definitely do care if you move from bitcoin to ethereum to solana to something else like that once crypto tribalism is integrated with social networks those are truly online digital tribes that have a lot of community and association and i think that's going to be very important for the world to come both both in positive and negative ways amazing i i i think this is like a perfect time to kind of think about or rather ask donny on just what made you start lens and can you talk about sort of just overall um how do you address all these things that we brought up uh and historically consistently been brought up about the criticisms of existing social platforms yeah well the the start of the lens i i think it was more of like an accident in the sense that we uh we were um kind of like helping out in a in a uh nfd auction contract and realized that um actually one of our developers realized that you can like be on the current nfc standard there's a lot of things you can actually do a lot of cool things um and uh if you innovate on on the smart contract area and from there kind of like you notice that uh one of the ways to do you can actually uh of course tokenization and profiles but also you can create dynamic uh content dynamic entities and essentially we we ended up um testing a model where uh you have this kind of like a follow nft so uh if i'm following uh balaji i'm the number one follower the number one fan i get the token id1 and if there is let's say ten thousand followers uh you know all of those followed relationships are tokenized on nfps so if i go into my any wallet open c and look at that follow nft it reflects kind of like the latest content of biology so if there's a picture of a cat and reposting a picture of dog the content changes so essentially like we realized that uh actually like trying just having this experimentation um you know you create this um kind of like a permissionless distribution channel between you uh and your audience and this could be a pretty cool thing for uh wider web 3 social and of course like in our team like uh battery social was something that's uh was very fascinating uh and and and you know we're always looking what to innovate in larger web 3 space because we see kind of like the free space as an economy so there's decentralized finance but also in the economy um you have e-commerce you have social you have greater economy and all these different parts but you need like a value network to transact so whether it's whether it's like a monetary value uh or social value or something you know that we didn't even realize that is considered valuable until we we put it in uh on chain and um i think for us like uh approaching the whole like web 3 social uh was somehow um important to approach from developer perspective and and see kind of what kind of ideas we will have because what they learned from the the other protocol experience previously in in dfi is that you never you're never like building by yourself you're building as a community and ecosystem and you you basically want to uh grow together and that's kind of like i think uh lens protocol is very fascinating uh protocol but i i'm pretty sure the the stuff that will be built during this hackathon will be way more uh cooler and our protocol becomes the boring uh kind of like a backhand and i also like expecting that people will build those uh migrators for vampire attack in a some very classy nice uh way amazing um lee i think i want to tap into something you said earlier in one of your answers and uh i mean i would love to kind of get a glimpse of what you think the set of opportunities is in web3 to kind of let people choose their own algorithms yeah i think obviously um in the past few months and years there's been a ton of criticism over the existing state of social media and whether they take too heavy of a hand in content moderation or to light a hand like they're blamed for all kinds of social ills and events that have transpired in the past few years really because there is only one content moderation policy that can be upheld at a given time on a given platform and it's built in this very monolithic way so i think the opportunity is really for users to be able to choose among a set of different options available to them in terms of type of content they would like to see type of discovery experience they would like to participate in and ultimately choose an experience that maps to um like that maps to their beliefs or views and and degree of um discoverability and content moderation i think that is that is kind of the north star goal of decentralized social media i think there's also obviously a lot of downsides to that potentially as well that probably don't get addressed often enough which is you know if the existing social media paradigm has created all of these filter bubbles then a more decentralized social media landscape would probably enable that even more where people would opt into the set of discovery algorithms or the set of content moderation policies that best corroborate their existing viewpoints a thought experiment that i like to pose to people is do they believe that existing social media platforms have prolonged the pandemic usually the answer that i hear is yes like you can imagine a world you know pre-social media in a world the current world in which we do have social media in which world would the pandemic have lasted this long or would the pandemic be longer and most people agree that social media as it currently stands has proliferated misinformation about the pandemic and the vaccine etc so in a world in which users are opting into their own algorithms um i'm not sure how to solve a problem like that to be honest i think it's one of the open questions around the next generation of social media yeah the tricky part there's i'd give kind of a couple of comments on that one issue is that it's not that like necessarily the centralized government sits so well on it either right like that's you know one of the issues is that um you know especially in the west people either react with apathy they react with apathy first and then panic right they only have kind of two modes and so like the sober careful like okay let's do vaccines but not say it's just the flu nor triple mask after vaccines that sort of like you know kind of scientifically reasonable sort of thing was was not as much there and um so it's not obvious to me that the centralized authority will get the right answer if it gets the wrong answer it's catastrophically wrong and so you might tolerate um some people getting it wrong in order for at least one of those solutions to be correct there's more system robustness even if there's more loss in an average case there's less loss in an extreme case and you know the other thing i'd say by the way is you know with spanish flu in you know 19 you know 17 19 18 ish um that was something which was heavily censored by governments it's kind of the opposite of today because like states were gaining power at that time rather than kind of losing power that media was centralizing rather than decentralizing and it was actually a much more lethal virus by everything we can see like about 100 million dead you know cover 19 is not nothing it's going to be about 10 million dead worldwide you know when all said done if we're lucky and no nasty new variants arise that's still pretty bad but it's not 100 million dead we're fortunate it was exponentially ramping in the early days but kind of stopped around like 7 500 dead a day as opposed to 75 000 where it easily could have gone and so the thing is we but but the spanish flu because it's so censored people kind of didn't even remember that it had happened it was sort of literally orwellian like kind of memory hold wiped out and wasn't a common point of reference and so on because governments at that time thought oh if we have control we should censor it to stop panic but lots of people died and we don't know maybe it's because like we've run an experiment um perhaps covet 19 would have spread to more people and we would have not gotten a vaccine on time had you know like folks not taking prevention measures or maybe maybe it would have been exactly the same you know the counterfactual is sort of hard you know there's folks who do this thing at this at the country level and they'll say oh well sweden had this policy others had this policy but really what you want is actually a huge table with individual cases and you actually want to diff that against you know the pharmacogenetics in the background and so to see what actually you know or the immunogenomics rather like what variants might have made you more or less susceptible tldr is i'm not sure that you can say that the kind of very powerful states that exist in the 1910s did a better job um maybe they would have been better but i think they have much higher downside risk if they get it wrong so that's my counter argument lee not not gain saying anything you're saying but the counter argument is centralization has catastrophic risk when it goes wrong i mean i think uh what we're sort of getting to is that obviously there's well to kind of back up a little bit i think it's going to be obviously hard to know you can't run these types of experiments uh counterfactually or or rather just look at that and change some variables and see how this would pan out but uh we we kind of i guess are agreeing on the fact that at the end of the day this is more about how people get to choose their own adventure um in in this kind of world uh whether it's a billion people and building rows existing uh in a single place and everybody having a slice of how they want to experience something or just being able to understand like what uh this would mean if they were to ever exit or just wanting to get more control um and kind this kind of leads to the question of like i mean sounds like we've done this thing with identity and and once you get to skill everything is a social craft at the end of the day and it's even more powerful in terms of things being actionable uh for uh in kind of what three so is this something that i had like any of you uh agree or disagree with uh if so like what do you think the set of the opportunities are because i feel like one thing i want to reset everybody on is every time we say we need a new social network people think it's a twitter or facebook alternative which uh kind of mentally thinks uh puts us in understanding this is like a text communication platform and but there's other different ways of thinking about media platforms it's just like what does that look like and and sort of what do you think about just social graphs at the end of the day that are web 3 native maybe sonny you can pick us up or biology go for it sure so i've actually thought about this a lot and i actually think people don't understand that web3 it's not just people calling it web3 it really is the third web and here's why like let's say the first web the dub dub dub you know that's an open web and google could index that it's actually very difficult to index the open web it's non-trivial but you can do it with crawlers and so on and for example you need to do things like you have a fine amount of download bandwidth and you have to guess whether a given site is going to update and then spend that crawler bandwidth to go and download it and maybe it only update a little or not you know a lot and so you have like cisco prediction algorithms just for whether to recrawl a site and so on and so forth and it's actually crawling is a very complicated thing and it's a million different formats and you have to do wrapper induction all the stuff it's if it's a database populated you know page how do you know you've got all of it are you breaking the web app by crawling it et cetera et cetera then the social web is even harder to index because it's on facebook and twitter and linkedin's servers and they don't want to let you index it linkedin did lose the high five case where scrapers you know now in theory can index linkedin but they're still not making it easy for you in theory individuals can do like a data export but really it's not just data that you want to export it's your identity and your connections other the social graph it's not just you as an individual that wants to leave it is you plus your social graph that's your community your subculture right and so what what people don't get about blockchains is up until this point they've mostly been hosting financial data and it didn't look like you know web one or web two data it didn't look like you know html pages or social pages but now it's starting to as block space increases you have things like deso and mirror and you know urban and capsule social like essentially you have decentralized storage of posts and identity and other kinds of things and the consequence of that is actually profound because among other things it radically simplifies indexing one way i can prove this is already going to be a big deal is anybody can set up something like btc.com or blockchain.com or blockchair.com or so on you can set up a block explorer you may not be as good as the production ones but you can do that because that gets back to the early point these are open state services the back end is open right so anybody can set up a front end for them and that's already happened in fact multi-billion dollar businesses have been built as block explorers either scan and blockchain.com and so on and so forth that shows that the concept of an open backend where you build clients for it is super powerful so the thing is that indexing because it's easier searching web3 is way easier than web owner web 2 because rather than that crawler problem where you have to go and ping a bunch of sites and you know so on it gets all pushed to you you just get a block every whatever seconds you just get a block of all the updates imagine if you got a block of all the updates on the dub dub dub right that's insane now of course they have lots of pointers out to them you wouldn't necessarily you know the data availability problems non-trivial thing to solve but we're solving it that's why i said block space is a scarce resource of this decade it might take a while but we are solving whether it's zero knowledge or many other scaling techniques will be solved in different ways in different times now you have this super parsable thing you don't have to do all this inference maybe you subscribe to a bunch of different chains but still it scoped the problem in a much much easier to solve way and you get something else that i think people underestimate you have a web of trust integrated with everything okay so your digital signatures is a first-class field in every single blockchain that you're indexing in this way and what that means is you know like so the social web had some of that of course because you had identity but you still have fraud you still have fake profiles and so on and web one is even more plagued by this where you don't know whether a web page is written by a human or an ai or something like that that's why google search quality is dropped off to such an extent that's why they've just relied on pure money as the ranking algorithm where more and more of the time their first page is festooned with ads they don't have the sort of non-commercial community signals that's why people will search on twitter or reddit rather than google increasingly to find people real people talking about this but now with something where people are effectively signing their social posts their other content with their ens or their sns or their other identity you now have digital signatures as a first class feature that's huge and they're open they're not like the closed social web and you can also of course include the balances of these users to see how real they are you have a much richer set of signals for effectively integrating the social web with the open web with now the financial web which also makes more money and i think google has been caught completely sleeping by this i think facebook might be the only one that survives maybe twitter uh as well because they've actually you know facebook said they're doing nfts with instagram zuck still runs his company and twitter is actually pretty crypto aware but the others that have not been making moves on this google hasn't even done a block explorer which has nothing to do with you know issuing a token or anything like that i think they're actually in much bigger trouble i'll say one other thing which is a big chunk of google nowadays with google search is actually queries for recent events they don't actually show the historical stuff if you may have noticed it's hard to find historical stuff that means that if it's recent events their index is highly biased towards things that are let's say a year old that means also that if a lot of content suddenly moves to open state platforms which are less than a year old a large fraction of searches on google will move to new clients so they're much more vulnerable than people think because the full scope of what they index and the difficulty of indexing it may just get transformed you know sometimes the way to solve a problem in math is you just define the problem differently right you know and and so this problem has now been defined in a different way research becomes easier it's got more signals google doesn't have the core competency around it and and they could just get boom disrupted like this the direction's already happening in block explorers but they don't realize how important that is amazing um no i think that's that's the alpha leak not not that block space argument um we are at time so i'll just do two quick questions and then we can uh call it i want to respect your time uh maybe just one question that actually just came in from the audience and similar to what you just said biology but i'll have anybody kind of come in is we're obviously seeing twitter and facebook and i go jump into uh integrating nfts and just other kind of website primitives do you think uh like how do you think about competing with them in that world like do you think that's an advantage to them or do you think that just helps them sort of prolong their their relationship with their customers or is that that doesn't matter because somebody will overtake them that's what three native i think is that question for me or leave i just i was like i'll keep that open it's an obvious question i think i want to make sure that from a time standpoint anybody who wants to take the first step can go for it lee yeah sure i mean basically i think i think twitter and facebook i mean crypto is kryptonite to large companies right so because it has risk and you know what's much scarcer than budget is risk budget okay because budget you can kind of make more money but risk especially like regulatory risk pr risk like larger companies once you have an average of many people once you have more risk-averse people in the organization it's really hard to take a risk i i respect zuck a lot for taking you know even if you know i think that they should have started actually i said this at the time they should have started by just integrating bitcoin ethereum you know into whatsapp with like off-chain payments or something like that that's what they should have done rather than starting with uh you know like libra dm but i respect him greatly for trying that when they were already under a lot of scrutiny like only like a founder actually has the risk budget right so companies that are founder list typically don't have risk budget and risk budget is you know this thing is like on any on any accounting statement they'll show the reward right they'll show the financial return but they won't show the risk that was taken to get that return that is not actually accounted for it's invisible to people many times and that's where there's low risk and high risk returns and so i think once you think of cryptos kryptonite to most large companies i'm actually much more bullish on you know frankly places like india israel outside the us for the most part as well as small you know startups and stuff within the west because they don't have the baggage there's a huge internal immune reaction from a lot of web 2 companies either both their their executives and their customer base against web you saw this with you know unfortunately with discord with kickstarter with other companies like this um people will make you know also the kind of neutral argument hey we can't afford the risk whether they agree with it or not so i think for the most part with some exceptions like those two maybe they'll make it and in fact if you look at the history of silicon valley very few companies have actually made the leap between technological eras you know microsoft apple are unique in terms of like reinventing themselves every decade but lots of other companies like dec or like gateway computer they're big in one era and they just miss the right angle turn for the next one right so we'll see but i actually think a lot of them are gonna are gonna fall we'll see yeah i'll just add to that um for for the person who asked this question i think the exciting opportunity in my view with blockchain is to actually build social networks that couldn't have existed in the previous paradigm so social networks that would have been impossible to jumpstart from a network activation perspective or to get past that zero to one stage i think that is the opportunity that now exists with blockchain and tokens um and so i would worry less about or think less about um being constrained to more skeuomorphic social networks as they exist today and adapting that for crypto and more thinking about um what entirely net new social networks could exist that that currently don't and that might sound quite abstract so i'll give an example i think one of the open opportunities still remaining in social networking is to build a local social network like you know 20 years into the development of the internet we still don't have a view into what is happening in a 5-10 mile radius around me there's no app that i can open where i can see in this moment who is around me who's doing what what is happening in my neighborhood in this place where i am and many people have tried to do that but the amount of network density that you need to reach in order for that for that experience to be valuable to any given user is so high that i don't think any app has ever gotten there and so i think that is an opportunity and perhaps the solution to that is leveraging tokens to get to that level of network liquidity i agree sorry go ahead i just want to mention that i i think what's significant significantly different now is that you know many of these um you know social media website social media platforms they they are very big but i think what's what's gonna happen is that um when we have a a kind of like a decentralized graph and uh you you lower the barrier to enter to the competition of building applications and building uh user experiences and it it means that uh as previous you might need uh like a bigger team to deliver a social media application and build something now you might need just maybe one two developers maybe we'll see from this hackathon something very very interesting building a couple of weeks that's uh very exciting for the whole um you know uh uh social media space so it doesn't like lowering the threshold is where kind of like we bring more people to compete and build applications and and more people to use them um as well so i think like uh i would not say that uh like because it's hard to compete against the the uh the the the bigger participants and stakeholders especially when we're in a situation where uh it's so easy to build now a social media application which means that there's more and more uh innovation when the when the kind of like a bar to enter is slower and it's the same in in decent just finance you know it doesn't take much of actually uh building a protocol it takes a bit time but essentially even improving a protocol might take less and there's like less financial kind of like a security risk and smart contract so i could imagine seeing a lot of interesting stuff coming up and and when you have this innovation coming from everywhere it's just like a constant remix culture so when you look at open source development it's always been remixed culture like linux distributions and everything it's all it's it's all remix absolutely yeah let me say one thing which is i half agree with lee and i have disagree and i'll say why right so part i agree with i absolutely do think that new kinds of social networks will be built um and i think that they uh i think many of them will involve finance as a first-class feature because every user you can assume every user in a crypto social network has a balance and can send encrypted messages where you couldn't do that in normal social networks just like instagram and and snapchat assumed you had a mobile device and open to the camera whereas facebook and twitter started out as non-mobile so they were built around a different set of assumptions right so i definitely do think new kinds of social works will emerge with that said somewhat related to what stanley was saying like the back end change to a web3 social network is so challenging that and gives actually so many benefits because it makes it fully programmable like the early twitter and to some extent that early facebook were that that uh what people might just do is essentially have almost exactly the same client like a familiar client that everybody knows and just put all of their energy into innovating on the back end and making that actually work first and then kind of the new things would sort of come out of that so without gain saying what you're saying i think that would be the like sort of the like an engineery you know mindset approach which is the front end has been debugged people have figured out what rts and likes and so on are freeze that have that be exactly the same and just open the back end and put all your energy into that and developers will then take it from there and innovate on other kinds of things that's like one approach um and you know different folks are trying different things farcaster diesel all these folks are trying different things so awesome well i think this is a perfect note to uh to end this panel on i want to thank all three of you biologist donnie lee for taking the time and also going a little bit over oh i've got a little announcement uh uh well i just all right i'm just tweeting it now boom okay new book coming out uh and uh if you probably everybody here will like it um new book how to start a new country it's finally coming out you can pre-order it now arrives on july 4th perfect day so it's uh my top tweet right now so if anybody in the chat wants to see it i thought i'd save the best for last um and i got a nice little blurb by mark and vitalik and brian and so on so check it out i'll be out in about three months oh i will pre-order this right now thank you so much and uh i really appreciate this all right thanks everybody thank you so much [Music] [Applause]