Do we really want true decentralization?
Everyone keeps yelling and screaming that decentralization is the way. But with everything there are always two sides and in this article I'd like to go over each and get your thoughts in the comments section.
Before I jump into the guts of this article I want to share with you there is a decentralized Twitter alternative already. Check it out at LeoThreads.io this decentralized system also runs on blockchain and crypto allowing you to earn crypto for simply chatting with others.
We all saw a need for decentralization when it came to the USA president being suspended from Twitter back in the day. Since then things we already suspected were happening started to come to light as being fact and true to all. Terms like shadow banning, muted and other algo changes that made accounts simply impossible to trend just because of the person or the information that was being spread. I mean think about it even the cancel culture to start up their own trend to get people on board to mute a single user as their call to action and most likely achieve some rather decent success in doing so. Once muted it's hard to get off that muted list.
With a truly decentralized program it would pretty much be a free for all and be up to each select user to vote, rate, mute etc. That all sounds great but with it comes some bad things which I'll go over in the cons.
The other aspect of a centralized system is not only the freedom of speech and to connect with anyone and everyone but also
With deactualization means anyone can do anything in reality. That means things like porn, gambling, illegal trading, beheadings, fake news(yes there's going to still be that) and a load of other things you most likely don't want to see but are in fact a part of life that many of us are "protected from" which to be honestly I feel is a good thing. You need to be careful what you feed your brain in terms of content.
The other cons of this would be constant hacking attempts mainly from phishing tactics where you try to mimic another company, person or band. While some decentralized solutions could be applied to this such as a anonymous signature that proved it was the legitimate account much like the verified checkmark once was for.
So here are my thoughts on all of this. While the traditional social media doesn't work because of shadowbans or the owner/ceo or even developers injecting code or statements to restrict certain people, remove them etc it's pretty clear to me that a fully decentralized system wouldn't work either.
It would become rif with spam, scams, hacks and more. So somewhere either new tech has to be developed that's decentralized to combat this in an affective way or you're still going to need a central figure or type of vote structure by the community to help mitigate it.
Web2 and centralized solutions still have these issues with spam, scams and hacks so it's pretty easy to say they would still be an issue in a decentralized web 3 solution.
Another aspect of all of this is that these decentralized web3 social media solutions should be offering up some type of revenue share to the content creators. However it's always a slippery slope as there have been countless platforms that have tried to take on major web2 solutions by offering up content creators a revenue share.
These platforms are always filled with spam to try and game the system for fractions of a penny. It's wild what some of these 3rd world countries will do to squeeze out a few pennies and totally trash a platform.
This destroys the algo and the sense of ever wanting to come back on to these platforms and use them again. This begs the question if some type of revenue share would be better done in another method?
With all of that being said I'd like to hear your take on if a truly decentralized social media platform is possible and if so do you feel all things go or how would you deal with potentially unwanted things?
