Somebody "moved fast" and broke democracy: why social media must be decentralized with Sammi Wei

give give people a reason to kind of stop in their commute to work or wherever they're getting to and think I wonder what that's about right so it's about something cool and they think for a minute um my job here now is very similar so we want people to come across an idea or a thought that they've read about and think huh that's interesting and then they can go and connect with somebody else that's thinking and wondering about the same thing uh so that's why I'm here to talk about social media because the way we've been connecting with each other has drastically changed over the last 10 15 years um and the key focus of my talk is actually it's a bit of a pep talk so it's to highlight all the problems you probably are already very familiar with and then just to um figure out how we can move forward together and maybe just shift the direction a little bit so we can you know defend what's out there so I'm going to go back to that analogy a little bit later um and there's a lot of projects out there are very cool social media projects in the web 3 space that are building in a decentralized way and there's specific reasons why we are doing that so I'll also touch on some of that actually before I get into all of it I want to learn a bit more about you guys so what was this last social media app that you used um you can just shout it out and I'll try and catch it Twitter okay sir what's that lens great that's a good one okay so good apps um lots of user value even Twitter um but some of the social media apps out there um they just come with a little bit of dash of anxiety right or Collective grief or whatever it is that they make you feel uh sometimes so um let me get to the next slide by the time I finished reading this slide um six thousand tweets would have been new trees would have been posted on Twitter uh a few dozen videos on YouTube a thousand photos on Instagram which for me is like 50 cats 25 Capybaras but maybe that's just me so uh they know what I like and about 30 000 pieces of new content on Facebook so just in the last few seconds that is a lot of information so a torrent of information is what we call it um so looks a little bit like that but the thing is sometimes it could also feel a little bit like that right there's moments of pure magic sometimes that you experience that you find on these networks because uh social media has enabled us to connect to build communities beyond our immediate network uh very unlikely Community sometimes that we find each other in uh and that is beautiful so how do we you know we're all innovators are we're Builders or we're users how do we get a little bit more of that and then a little bit less of this right because that's not that's not kind to the human brain we're not built for that see all right so uh this is a story oda's time yeah uh dragon and the city so the dragon um or the city rather is the status quo so what we're comfortable with right now so a lot of us are still primarily even though we are probably some of the earliest adopters of web3 social media we are still primarily using web to social media and there's a reason for that is because it's accessible it's convenient um and it's also given us a lot of joy and we haven't quite let that go yet and that's totally okay um but there are a lot of injustices there are a lot of wrongful uses of the technology that we can probably look to where better options to um and the dragon here is you can think of it as decentralization but not just that it's it's any change that challenges the status quo so when you have a dragon at your city Gates you can either run away from the city you can abandon the city uh which we probably don't want to do because then that's where I don't think humanity is going back to you know previous social media days um you can also stay put and try and defend it which is what a lot of maybe some of your friends you know who don't work in the industry who don't work in the space maybe that's what they are telling themselves and that's what they're telling you uh it's fine you know they just people just don't perceive the cost of I don't know invasion of data privacy you know the same as as some others um they're comfortable there's a lot of utility in being comfortable um or you can tackle the opportunity you can tackle the Dragon maybe in a non-abusive way so you can tame the dragon let's say you tame the dragon um and a lot of you are already doing that so um and that's because even though we know the benefits that it could bring there's this you know whole Utopia out there uh in decentralized social media it's still a little bit scary because actually we don't have any evidence that it's going to be good in fact we actually already have a lot of evidence of the contrary there's a lot of already um patterns that we see in in big Tech that are already building in in web3 as well um and even in the social media space um and not all decentralized social media is built the same um which I'm sure some of you are familiar with um so yeah even for us who are very convicted in the space it's still scary um but obviously there's a lot of opportunities um I'm going to highlight two of the biggest opportunities that personally convince me so number one is community curated content based on very very Niche communities because that's where we're going to go right um I'm going to misquote this but it's something like we're moving from a few dozen platforms with millions of users to millions of platforms with dozens of users in the future uh and that's what the web3 tech is is able to deliver if we use it properly the second biggest opportunity here that we want to capture is to use data sovereignty and social graph composibility to help to enable users and Builders to disrupt the cycle of unbundling and bundling of social networks because um they when you when you as a user hold the key to everything that you created that has value to the network and you have the power to remove it at any time then the social network is is incentivized to to keep working with you to help you to empower you to continue uh creating value and retaining a lot of that value so this is this is your daily reminder that Facebook and Instagram retains almost 100 of the revenues that users generate for their Network right creators generate so um if a social network is able to focus on your needs to continue facilitating value for you um that's that's the dream oopsie yeah um so how are we going to do it uh and how do we how do we make these better versions of social networks uh for ourselves so I have a little bit of bad news here because if you're anything like the average social media consumer which is like me um you are fighting a true front War most of the time so the first one is with Society uh with with big Tech right um and the second one is with yourself um because we and I'm gonna start uh actually with another analogy here um anyone a fan of Neil Gaiman yeah okay um so with any conflict with any War there's a dream stage every it's it's it's it's it comes because everyone is stuck between a dream state and a nightmare state so there's a dichotomy of the worst things that could happen and the best things that could happen uh we have a pretty clear picture of what that best case scenario looks like we have um sometimes an overly pessimistic view of what that nightmare is going to look like um so I'll give you an example so when it comes to um the conflict with Society we think that the dream state the Utopia that we were building towards is that everyone should use the internet responsibly be kind to each other um and you don't support um you know any abuse of power um in that sense but if you are also in web3 that's because you're very aware of the nightmare State uh in that realm and what that looks like is Big Tech destroying Humanity uh we all become puppets of this never-ending stream of uh misinformation right so that's the nightmare the reality is always somewhere in between and then the second front of the war you are at conflict with uh the dream and Nightmare versions of yourself because the best version of yourself is extremely disciplined you don't do any Doom scrolling right you're super productive you're not distracted by social media by whatever they're trying to feed you and then the nightmare state is uh you know if you're like me you're stressed about work and you're just trying to find the most common capybara that's out there right um so uh the truth is these conflicts are never going to go away they're always there they're always persistent so you have to be more positioned you're never going to reach the dream state but as long as you are continue to question yourself to interrogate yourself on whether you're making better decisions uh you will also never be in the nightmare stage and uh in the grand scheme of things you're hopefully gonna gravitate towards the dream stage uh further and further um now it's easier to deal with yourself in some senses but when you deal with the conflict with Society in the sense as an innovator in the space it's a responsibility to interrogate yourself around every Tech choice that you make so specifically that could sound like why am I building with this protocol and not something else is it because they're giving me a grant is it because they're supporting me to build a community but what else should I be asking um besides these you know incentives on the surface um do I actually believe that they are going to deliver on what they think they are do they actually adhere to web 3 values so not just using web 3 Tech stack um and uh specifically you know do I agree with how they collect how to use data um how they provide value for for their users how accessible is um are is it for the common user to get in touch with the decor decision making group right um and then for the conflict with yourself um you have full agency here so that makes it simultaneously harder and easier so it's probably super annoying sometimes I don't do it you know you just want to look up a recipe or you look want to look at Capybaras and um you've got to click through all these steps of gdpr consent and sometimes you just skip it right it's not worth it but sometimes uh on good days you think okay I'm gonna I'm gonna assert my rights here I'm gonna understand what I'm getting myself into um and that's okay you know some you have bad days and you have good days um and the key to stay afloat is really to find the people who believe the same so probably the people here in the audience you know you could you could probably be good friends and help each other and tell keep telling each other to do the right thing um I'm going to share a lot of the resources that I reference here also in in a later slide so you can dive deeper there into into some of the readings um and and yeah once you have that support network uh it does it does get a lot of easier but before that um you have to embrace the inevitability of of this journey that's not going to be straightforward at all it's going to look harder uh on some days and the easier on some other days um because we're all innovators doesn't matter what you're doing if you're building a project if you are just a user you love using new tech or if you are working on marketing team that's great you're innovators in the space and that means that you have to make um really difficult decisions right and in reality that could look like giving up some of these grants that are offered uh which are Super valuable to early stage projects um but maybe because you don't believe that they are actually going to deliver on those values um it could also look like turning down Partnerships that offer you a lot of exposure uh you know they hype you up and as we all know that doesn't always go down uh beautifully so um sometimes and I've had to experience myself you might have to let go of team members that just don't see the world the same that don't want to build the same world as as you do and that's very very difficult um so by default I think because you're innovators you're all very optimistic folks right so classes always have full um wag me um you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger Etc um but you have to also Embrace and really accept like know it in your core that you're going to have a lot of hard days there's going to be setbacks where it seems impossible um before our team was funded and I joined at quite a uh a healthier um or happier state of of the team was when we were we're starting to raise our razor around and things were looking great but even then right that first Milestone after you get that major Milestone of getting funded um all the setbacks along the way we just we didn't anticipate any individual situations but it was important that we accept it from the get-go that they were going to happen something devastating was going to be happening um every year every quarter um you know whatever scale you look at it so um you have the full agency here as individual innovators to embrace to accept that the road is going to be difficult and you want to face it with with courage and with a lot of vulnerability that comes with that um so I think I'll wrap up here but just to give you a chance to look at some of the reference materials uh which I think I must reads these two books fantastic Kathy O'Neill's weapons of mass destruction probably some of you have have read that and Jenna winterson's 12 bytes which is a newer book so she talked about how AI has influenced uh the use of language throughout um civilization basically um and and even in pre pre pre predating technology dates because they exist in different forms back then uh the kind of formulas that AI uses today um and then some of these great articles you can read about them uh you can actually read all of them on T2 uh So Soft plot gear um yeah and then maybe just a little bit about T2 um you can find our socials down here if you DM me on Twitter or on lens um I will make sure to get you guys whitelisted uh and start testing the product because we're building our early Community now and it's it's very exciting so yeah thank you very much