Decentralized Social: Can Blockchain Realistically Take on FaceBook and Twitter?

FaceBook, Twitter, and Google are some of the biggest tech players that have built successful social media platforms. These platforms have in many ways improved our lives and made it easier for anyone to contribute and comment on just about any topic. They’ve leveled the hurdles of getting your idea in front of a lot of others. So, they have done a lot of good.

But social media platforms have also been widely criticized. Current tech platforms are commercial entities driven by money and profits. The longer users stay on their platforms, the more ads they can be shown and the more data they are able to collect about the user. This incentivizes the platforms to tune their algorithms for choosing information that will engage their users for the longest time. It creates echo chambers of ideas that skew towards the same type of comments and content, displayed over and over. And for whatever purpose, the platforms have made it easy to broadcast fake information, conspiracy theories, extremism, and outright lies in a believable way.

How can social media be redesigned to retain the good aspect of offering a democratic forum for anyone to be able to speak up but at the same time assure that the information that is available is truthful and not misleading?

Many people think the core problem is that current social platforms are centralized and unsupervised. A single commercial entity has access to all information about millions of members with little oversight in how the provider decides to use that data. A solution may be to decentralize the platforms.

Decentralization implies a network of interconnecting communities and web sites. Users have complete control over privacy settings and can decide which other users to connect with. Content is still posted and shared with others, as well as collaboration, comments and hashtags. Some think that the decentralization capability of Blockchain may be the answer.

The Bitcoin Association said that “inherent in the social media offerings built on the blockchain to date has been both the permanency and public availability of the data stored there – with personal data ownership also a core concept for many.”

But, blockchain platforms to handle social networking aren’t quite there yet. Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of ethereum, said that “decentralized systems are just not made to grow and scale for the masses yet. There are always problems with early technology. It takes time. This will be more important than the Internet. It’s going to be massively disruptive for every sector.”