Decentralized Social Media - Panel

hey my name's rocco one of the co-founders of a company called spruce working primarily on identity and data specifically things with identity around authentication so how do you access a service an identity around credentialing so basically anything with an issuer a holder in a verifier model where you know someone issues a credential to someone as a fact about them and that person's able to verify that fact with someone who's requesting that and be able to phone home and the data side of like data portability where users able to kind of have their own personal data cubby that they bring with them to applications and services and are able to basically authorize access to that when requested so eric all right my name is eric tang i'm the co-founder and cto of live peer life peer is building the world's open video infrastructure and coincidentally that's also built as the video streaming technology layer for web3 so similar to you know filecoin providing data storage for web3 ethereum providing smart contract for web3 live peer provides video streaming for web3 and also let's say on the topic of decentralized social media come hey on the topic of decentralized social media um there's a number of factors to consider when approaching it and a lot of things that come up first is kind of the current model of centralized social media it's broken in a couple of ways namely how data is handled by large corporations how your identity is not portable and kind of where everything is stored at the end of the day and how it's processed and i think one of the things with the space recently has been like we're going to kind of build decentralized social media everyone's going to come in own their own identifiers own their content kind of take it back one of the things i definitely want to talk about specifically when it comes to decentralized social media is the social element that's often not talked about of arbitration and management of these platforms that are kind of emerging in the space one of the things that you'll commonly see is like platforms have problems with like moderation where you have large centralized entities have thousands of people responsible for actual content moderation so if you know very uh vicious things illegal things kind of come up on the platform there's some removal process and namely there's controversy around that too but i think we have the bones which we'll talk about too where we have like the technology to make this happen how do we handle that kind of social part of like moderation and arbitration when it comes to decent like future of decentralized social media and i'd love to you know you guys talk about this getting getting right to the hard question yeah let's do it um maybe before i we dive in say yeah sure hi everyone i'm tayden klein i'm the co-founder of edge and node we work on the graph protocol so one of the core developers within the graphs ecosystem and we're really excited about making all data open and public and verifiable yeah yeah so back to you for the hard question all right content moderation um content moderation is is i think one of those achilles heels for [Music] social networks in general um and it's actually one of the reasons many social networks failed um one yeah all these successful social networks all have spent thousands uh yeah lots of resources to build human powered content moderation tools so i think there's definitely technical solutions that can help with scaling up the human moderation but at the end of the day the moderation has to be done via human efforts because it's it's going to be a you know subjective uh point of view and you know it and that kind of touches on the concept of doubts and and all these other rules that need to exist in these decentralized social networks where you know the rules maybe not so well defined and it's really defined by a group or by a community yeah and i think the protocol needs to be neutral but then what you can have on top of that is moderation and you could even create a moderation protocol if anyone's working on that please let me know i'm very interested but you could envision having different levels of moderation right so you have maybe like i'm a little bit more liberal and so i'm okay seeing certain content and then other people will say like i only want to see rainbows and butterflies like a little bit more conservative on what they want to see and each level can have its own kind of governing principles around it and so i think moderation is very important but i do think it needs to happen in a fair and a decentralized way and i think we do need to learn from web two around the failures of censorship right you censor five people that are really bad but then where does the line go like where is that line drawn and then you eventually end up with very few people left on the platform and so i think that's a really dangerous risk or path to go down and i was going to say too with that and one of the things specifically around that moderation side is i'm wondering if we're going to see the rise again of tcr's or token curated registries uh so back in like 2018 2019 one of the things that was all the rage was token curated registries where if we gave some group of token holders um something to curate so if you could think of like the princeton reviews top 100 colleges but imagine it was like a group of token holders that did that that was kind of the idea where we'd possibly curate objective information but honestly all the original experiments ended up seeing the lines that you know more subjective things were really what was more effectively curated do you think that the incentive models for these networks are less so on kind of the creator tokens or like these kind of like influencer tokens but rather the token models be more centered around these kinds of curations of content of what's allowed on certain platforms these kind of moderation schemes etc so i'd love to chat about that more too yeah absolutely i mean within the graph we're actually working on something within edge of node and i think reputation is really important right and we have curation within the graph ecosystem when it comes to subgraphs which are kind of a proxy for applications and so people have band together in the community to decide like which subgraphs like for example the live pair subgraph like i want to curate on that and so they band together and said okay i've done due diligence i know that this is the real live peer team that one's not right because you have permissionless subgraphs anyone can name it whatever you want so i think curation is very important and i think within curation you have a reputation component right and so if coinbase is saying okay i curate on this subgraph well i trust coinbase and their due diligence and so individuals can kind of follow on to people that they respect in this space and i think it's a huge component of this yeah i definitely agree with that and and and i think that the reason this scheme is still better than the centralized component is because at the end of the day there's still checks and balances in play where you know you don't necessarily always have one group that's in charge of the you know giving of the you know the the creation of the the reputation right that can kind of come from multiple groups and the other thing that i would say is tooling is is really really crucial in this in this moderation topic because oftentimes um you know these social networks fail not because they don't want to get rid of bad actors everybody wants to get rid of bad actors is because they literally just cannot do it technically because there's too much traffic too many things going on on the network and they don't know they don't have a mechanism to um to actually get rid of this thing that's harming their network yeah in the same way you know this in a decentralized world i think applications that are building in this space to really be thinking about the tools that are needed uh so for example um in video streaming it's all it's pretty well known that um you know if you start a live streaming platform um the first thing that you're going to see is people trying to stream illegal soccer right that just happens and there's no way to stop them people just find a way to do it so you have you have to have a way to automatically detect the types of the types of content that you don't want on your platform and flag them or allow people to to self-select or you know allow the community to come to a conclusion that this is actually illegal content and we we will censor this type of content and speaking of like the technology side i love if each of you can dive more into how live peer and the graph become a core part of these emerging social networks specifically on the video side and live streaming side and also on indexing side and how that data is being processed so yeah either we just love to dive more into the technology and how that powers all of us yeah i i think this is like a tech stack right like we are all kind of building a part of that tech stack right like identity is a really important part of it and and you know indexing data is another part of it um for in terms of video which i can speak to um [Music] the the kind of the evolution of social networks on the internet has generally been content format evolving over time to a primarily video centric format you know you can you can see that reddit is a good example at the very beginning it was just discussion forums over time they discovered well people actually engage way more with video posts that are on reddit now reddit is launching their own video networks right very similar to um how how facebook saw um you know the the kind of the content format quickly evolved towards video uh so um and and just for just it's just difficult to enable video streaming at scale on the internet period so what we do a lot of the times is to use decentralization to to really build a more scalable infrastructure and more cost effective infrastructure so that all all these new social networks can start to experiment and bootstrap their their application with a small budget yeah and i think social media could potentially be one of the killer applications in web3 and web3 is a brand new platform for fully decentralized applications to live so you have web3 as the platform that we all trust and then you have the protocols on top and so the graph is one of those protocols live peer is one of those protocols live period builds with the graph so that they're the organization of the data is done in a decentralized way using the graph and so there are other core components of that web3 stack the other protocols like storage so you have r weave you have ipfs there are so many components of that tech stack that all need to i think the pieces are there they just need to all start talking to each other and so that's why we just need time in the web3 space and then you'll have social media but social media and web 3 will probably look very different than what social media looks like today and we'll see brand new use cases that we can't even fathom today once with that tech stack is ready yeah and from our side then on spruce with the identity side it's basically how can a user like you know the platforms you know need to run these decentralized infrastructure and so too must the data be decentralized and for users a lot of that comes down to not only controlling their own identifiers as they go to all these platforms and not rely on any large third parties for their identifiers but also have that consistency across experiences across these platforms so retaining whatever identity information you have about yourself whether that's a profile whether that's like public information about you that you want to keep with you and bring with you to these sessions and the data that follows whether that's social graphs whether that's your actual posts whether that's your messaging on these platforms and bringing that with you is a huge core you know component and part of all this and going back to what you said earlier that's one of the things i definitely also want to talk about is like what will this look like because a lot of social media right now we have a lot of these generalized platforms we have facebook we have twitter we have reddit which do have some forms of community of curation when it comes to groups and smaller subgroups but do you think the emergence of decentralized social media will start almost from like the ground up where you have these small dedicated communities at first rather than large generalized platforms absolutely yeah it's all about community and i think like how many of you are frustrated with all the notifications you get on telegram on twitter on slack and that's because each of those tech stacks have so much redundancy in web 2 but they are centralized so you have to build that out it wastes developer time it weighs developer talent and it's also a waste right and so if you have web 3 where it's all a protocol that everyone uses it's a public good and you just have the ux and the ui on top you get rid of all of that redundancy and it's a much better world right where you don't have 20 applications that do basically the same thing but not everything yeah i really good kind of comparison between like the web 2 and web 3 um like dynamics the other thing that i'm starting to see in in this space which is so new right i don't think we have seen a breakout application yet but um you know in in this world um the like the incentives for these applications are very different um in the web 2 world it's all about the network effect right that's that's what that's what you do to build a social network and like the downside of the of trying to optimize for the network effect is to also trying to stop your competitors network effects and that is a core uh strategy for all of these social networks right so what ends up happening is all of these social networks create uh just just roadblocks or other things that anything that they can do to make sure the users of their platform don't go to other platform really good example for um really good example for like twitch in order to become a partner streaming partner on twitch which is to qualify to be able to make money on twitch you have to sign you have to be exclusively only streaming on twitch if they catch you streaming the same stream on twitch and on youtube then you're kicked out of that program right that you when you as a streamer who makes a living that is they they got you right you can you cannot switch but in web 3 data is by default open and what that means is the same data the same video the same posts can actually look exist in multiple applications and it is almost incentivized and encouraged for that to happen because there's the incentive of developers small teams being able to build pretty good applications that are all very specific to the different use cases but being able to un uh utilize the same underlining social networks the same underlining nfts that are being created uh and then we're starting to see that already it's pretty interesting totally yeah we need to get rid of all those walled gardens i'm tired of like sas contracts and sales people people like pushing you it should all just be open and at your discretion right and i think the incentive piece is really important because think about tick tock think about twitter like the first people on those platforms like those platforms are nothing without their users and the users of those platforms they didn't get anything but with uniswap with ens the first users they were rewarded for being there and so i think that's really powerful and one of the things i wanted to touch on that we were we were just covering is these large platforms right one of the things i'm always curious about is some of them are kind of moving forward initiatives to determine decentralize their stack like twitter for example with bluesky is there really a future where the large tech giants will decentralize themselves will it end up kind of in some kind of government breakup with like you know facebook now meta having like you know five to six little smaller organizations that come from it in some kind of like crackdown and then one of them becoming just the next facebook is there really a path to decentralization for these larger tech giants or is it really going to be this wave of new technologies and everything coming in kind of changing the way we interact online yeah i mean i think it's going to be new right like facebook twitter everyone getting into like quote-unquote web 3. it's a nice validation to the space but it's not what we're here for right we're here for brand new use cases we're here to give the power back to the users we're not here to like redo the same thing that they're doing with like jpegs now um and i think the wh it comes down to incentives right and so a lot of these web 2 companies if they sell ads they're incentivized to be very extracting of their users right they're incentivized to extract so that they can lock people in they can sell ads to companies and then they can sell those products to their users and so i think it's going to be a fight right they're not going to want to give up that super like yeah that business model so i see a world where it's more of a fight and then they'll eventually kind of come in and then live within protocols in a centralized way yeah i i wonder which one of the social networks that we see today is more it's most likely to go that route right um i don't know if you if you have seen any examples of that i i think of like reddit is probably the example in my head where each subreddit is actually its own community and and reddit has gone through a period a couple years ago where there was a lot of talk about it actually decentralizing and each subreddit becoming um its own organization like we didn't have the term dao back in the day that was a dirty term because of the dao now it's not but um but um but still like i think reddit kind of kind of went um like went up against that and because of the corporate structure because of the kind of the underlining incentives of the investors and the and the board and the people who are involved ended up going the other way um i wonder if they if if if it was today when web 3 is so is actually in vogue they would have made the made the other choice totally and i think that's a great point because when you're starting a business or a protocol you them reddit selling equity right their incentives are then to make those equity holders wealthy and so reddit is about to ipo right in the next few years and so even though the founders wanted to do something different it's all about incentives so if you're thinking about building in a decentralized space don't build sas don't take like don't do equity and go like the token route if that is the route that you want to go towards yeah and even relate to this with users i think one of the last questions for this is specifically when thinking about these platforms which user bases not necessarily which ones are willing to decentralize but which user bases do you think will be the most attracted out of like the large social giants just to kind of close this all out uh to these new forms of platforms so it'll be twitter's users because there's this critical mass of crypto people there will be reddit because subreddits can kind of find a new home on this kind of infrastructure what do you guys think yeah i mean i i actually think we already have a social network within web3 which is like everybody here right like we're all participating in web 3. like each web 3 ecosystem is its own social network um like we you know at live here we work with a lot of kind of emerging applications and and i'm starting to notice a trend where each blockchain ecosystem is creating its own social networks for its members to doc food we're starting to see there's a there's an interesting application called discover that's in the icp um uh ecosystem uh it's kind of like a decentralized version of reddit uh but if you go and see like the types of posts on this um it's it's basically the you know the icp community forum right it's like people they're posting about icp stuff they're you know they're doing their nft sales and it's like all like they're icp specific and they have like like five six digit um users like on you know on a weekly active basis so that's that's pretty good for for a community and i think from there like the the organic community within web 3 can start dog fooding um you know web 3 social networks and i think that's kind of where it can start yeah i almost wonder if it will start with people that aren't necessarily web 3 native because i think they have the most to kind of gain from these use cases so i think actually it might be that that takes hold first but it comes down to network effects and solving problems so yet to be determined why not both yeah and thank you everyone for coming around and yeah thank you