What happens when you build a platform for free speech but launch it with financial rewards? A five-year journey through vision, loss, and realignment.
They said it couldn't be done. Build a Twitter alternative where your voice can't be silenced, your account can't be deleted, your history can't be erased. Where speech is truly free.
We built it. And then we nearly destroyed it. Not through failure, but through a single, catastrophic design choice.
This is the story of DBuzz.
I met @chrisrice through a Facebook message. Two Americans an ocean away from home, both building in Davao City, Philippines. I was working as a software engineer specializing in blockchain technology. Chris was already deep in the Steem ecosystem.
We started hosting Steem meetups. At one gathering, a few attendees threw out an idea: "Why don't we build a Twitter alternative on Steem?"
The suggestion hit me differently than others. Not because of the technology (that was straightforward), but because of what it could mean: a permanent record for free speech. A place where people could voice themselves without fear of censorship, account deletion, or losing everything they'd built overnight.
We discussed allowing people to back up their tweets onto the blockchain as a permanent, immutable record. I believed this was a human rights issue, fundamental to freedom from oppression.
I pledged my support. Chris and I decided we'd launch it ourselves. I hired @postnzt (Carlo), one of the developers at our meetups who had been vocal about the concept.
Development began.
We had no idea what we were about to learn.
A few months into development, Steem underwent its contentious split, birthing Hive. We pivoted to build on Hive instead. After cycling through various names, we landed on DBuzz.
In May 2020, during one of the most pivotal moments in blockchain history, we launched.
My passion was pure: create a permanent record for free speech. Give people a platform to share their voices. The technical implementation seemed secondary to the mission.
Here's what I didn't understand about Hive's economy: rewards change everything.
I naively thought the rewards were menial and irrelevant. Who cares about earning a few pennies? Only the most popular content would earn more than pocket change, so why would anyone optimize for that?
I was catastrophically wrong.
Immediately upon launch, we faced pushback. Not just technical issues (those are expected), but community backlash against the platform itself. People objected to the very concept of rewards for short-form content.
I assigned two of my developers, Joy and @riyuwe (Dimple), to assist @postnzt (Carlo) with a modified version. Chris worked with community members to reach consensus. We relaunched with a limited rewards system capped at $1 per post.
This decision would become the single biggest mistake of the entire project.
Not because of the $1 cap specifically, but because we had rewards at all. The cap didn't create the problem. It exposed the fundamental misalignment between what we built and what people used it for.
I built DBuzz for freedom of expression. People joined for money, even if it was just pennies.
They spammed the platform with low-effort content. Voting circles formed where people upvoted each other not because they found the content valuable, but to milk rewards in an unsustainable system. The platform underwent cycles of downvote attacks and community outrage.
The people we attracted weren't there for the free speech values. They were there to extract value from the reward system.
In 2021, I founded MyShed, a shed configurator platform. At the time, I had no idea it would eventually become one of my most ambitious technical projects.
I also got married that year.
I had limited involvement in DBuzz initially. My intention was to fund the project and see it built. I was developing multiple projects simultaneously and leading a team of 10-15 people across various initiatives.
But reality had other plans. Chris assembled a larger DBuzz team, and I found myself spending countless hours in discussions with the community about the reward system.
Someone suggested moving posts to the comments section. We contemplated it, but it didn't make any sense and would have caused significant technical issues. More critically, it would have permanently locked the platform into needing backend infrastructure, something I had specifically requested we avoid.
I had asked for DBuzz to be built as a front-end only application. But it didn't get made that way initially. It ended up with backend dependencies anyway. Only now, with the recent updates, did it finally become the 100% front-end application I originally envisioned.
As I've learned repeatedly in life: just because you ask for something to be done a certain way doesn't mean it gets done that way.
By the end of 2021, I had dumped over six figures into the platform. Development costs, promotional campaigns, staff salaries, marketing, team management. I told Chris I couldn't sustain it any longer.
Chris contributed his own money to maintain the team through this period, but he suffered medical issues and couldn't be deeply involved.
When Chris returned, I continued funding DBuzz myself through 2022 and into 2023.
In 2022, I was leading a dedicated team working on MyShed and other technical projects. This was a year of intense learning and exploration. Building drones, studying robotics, and researching AI using the first GPT models before the widely publicized announcement of ChatGPT. I was fascinated by what these early language models could do and spent significant time understanding their capabilities and limitations.
My wife and I welcomed our fourth son that year.
This early exposure to AI would prove invaluable years later when Claude Code and other advanced tools became available.
By 2023, DBuzz had become deeply active in promoting Hive. Attending events, sponsoring initiatives, building partnerships.
That year, I began work on SPK Network, where I architected the protocol and built the Proof of Access (PoA) system. This was a decentralized storage protocol that needed to verify whether files were actively being stored before paying out rewards. The PoA system I developed became a critical component of SPK's infrastructure. Challenging, detailed technical work that felt like genuine progress.
We also secured our first DHF proposal. We achieved significant reach:
But reach doesn't equal mission alignment. And our mission was still broken.
We attempted a partnership with MIST University to provide free WiFi for Web3 education. What should have been straightforward became a masterclass in bureaucratic absurdity.
I'm standing in a university that doesn't have internet, offering to install a free connection. And 25 people need to be involved with paperwork to determine if it's allowed. Mountains of requirements. Approvals. Signatures. Authorizations. Going in circles.
"Y'all don't have internet and it's free. Y'all are a college. Your students need internet access for research!"
But I've learned not to fight battles that aren't on your hill. The partnership never materialized despite the 2023-2024 timeframe we dedicated to it.
Meanwhile, Retzark was nearing completion. @valkangel (Kraster) created this beautiful, creative universe and designed the entire game in 160-character card descriptions. Fundamental work that defined the game logic and brought the world to life. I wrote the whitepaper and handled the technical development: hired an app developer, developed the Retzark engine to connect to Hive, built a website, created an NFT marketplace, minted cards and tokens, and designed airdrop cards for DBuzz users.
But the weight of everything was building.
2024 was the year everything I had been holding together began to collapse.
My grandfather, who I was very close to, died.
Shortly after, my first wife and mother of my first son died from Huntington's disease.
My wife and I also welcomed our fifth son that year.
Chris had to take leave from DBuzz due to overwhelming pressure affecting his health, leaving me to handle everything alone.
The Retzark launch approached, and I hit my breaking point. I began having a moral dilemma about launching what felt like a money grab. Something people would gamble on and speculate about, likely leading many to lose large sums of money.
Retzark is a marvelous universe. But launching something I couldn't sustain, something not completely put together, with complete uncertainty about the outcome... the infrastructure wasn't ready. It needed more dedicated time.
Time and money I no longer had and didn't feel right asking for.
App development stalled. I was forced to cut development on Retzark.
DBuzz remained online, but with minimal involvement. Funding had dried up. The team was gone.
The platform I built for free speech had become a monument to what happens when incentives override mission.
I took a much-needed vacation to Thailand, sponsored by a close colleague who wanted to discuss working on projects. While there, I was involved in a major car accident.
I had mistakenly turned without proper thought due to the reverse driving direction and collided with a car that was traveling well over 100kph, according to AI analysis of the crash videos. The car I was in got hit so hard it spun completely around and flew off the road.
But God had other plans. We all walked away with only scratches and bruises.
I returned to the Philippines with a renewed sense of perspective. A clarity about what truly matters in life.
I threw myself into MyShed. A six-month development sprint building a revolutionary 3D configurator using AI voice to design buildings and make sales. I let go of my entire development team except one maintaining the legacy system.
For six months, I worked almost every day from morning to night. I designed a working prototype, demoed it at ShedExpo, and I'm now in final stages for launch.
This year has been about renewed focus on what's important in life. Living a life of service and building things that will genuinely help improve other people's lives. Not chasing funding. Not building for validation. But creating tools that solve real problems for real people.
Recently, Chris contacted me about DBuzz. He sent a list of issues and feature suggestions. Before, that list would have represented weeks or months of painstaking development and testing.
Taking a break from my normal tasks, I opened the newly released Claude Code web portal on my phone, connected to DBuzz, and using what I've learned about AI-assisted development, I implemented most of the issues and suggestions within a few hours. No additional cost beyond my existing subscriptions.
In a single development cycle, we accomplished:
The technical details are documented in our recent platform update:
Chris was shocked by the rapid development.
This is when I realized: DBuzz doesn't need a team, a budget, or another proposal.
It needs realignment. And with modern AI tools, I can maintain it efficiently. Quick fixes and improvements that would have been impossible years ago.
The platform is solid. It just needs to become what it should have been from the start.
Here's the core problem: financial incentives change behavior.
When you pay people to post, they post for pay. When posting is free, they post for purpose.
I built a free speech platform but launched it on a monetization layer. Those two visions were fundamentally at odds. The $1 reward cap didn't create the problem. It just exposed the misalignment.
People didn't join for the values I cared about: freedom of expression, resistance to censorship, permanence of record. They joined for the rewards, however small. And that changed everything.
DBuzz needs to return to its original mission. Here's how:
All rewards from short-form "buzzes" will be redirected to hive.fund or removed entirely. No more pennies-for-spam incentive. Let people post because they have something to say, not because they might earn a few cents.
This is the most critical change. Without this, nothing else matters.
Long-form blog posts will appear in the DBuzz feed with rewards intact. This creates a natural quality filter: quick thoughts stay quick and free, substantial ideas get rewarded properly.
People who want to earn can write something meaningful. People who want to share can buzz freely.
The recent updates have made the platform significantly more reliable:
DBuzz should be positioned as "Permanent microblogging for people who value free speech", not "earn crypto by tweeting."
The mission must be crystal clear: this is a public utility for expression, not a monetization platform.
No complex features. No community votes on every minor detail. Just a clean, permanent place to post that can't be deleted or censored.
The platform works. It doesn't need complexity. It needs clarity of purpose.
The core lesson from DBuzz is brutally simple: incentives matter more than ideals.
You can build the most technically sound platform in the world. You can secure funding, achieve press coverage, sponsor events, build partnerships. You can have the purest intentions and the clearest mission.
But if your incentive structure rewards the wrong behavior, none of it matters.
We attracted people who wanted pennies, not principles. We created a system where gaming rewards was rational behavior. We punished quality content by drowning it in spam.
The failure wasn't technical. It was philosophical.
DBuzz isn't dead. It's been misaligned.
For those who joined for the values, for the activists, the whistleblowers, the journalists, the philosophers, the poets, the writers, the artists, the musicians, the filmmakers, the photographers, the educators, the researchers, the organizers, the advocates, the truth-seekers, the storytellers, the builders, the innovators, the creatives, the people who believe in freedom of speech and expression:
Welcome back.
This is your platform. Built for you. Maintained by someone who cares about the mission more than the monetization.
To those who joined for the rewards: I understand. The platform was designed to attract you. But there are other platforms better suited for that model. I wish you well.
To @chrisrice, who believed in this vision and carried it through medical challenges, community pressure, and countless hours of development: thank you for never giving up on what we set out to build. Your dedication kept DBuzz alive when it should have died.
To @postnzt (Carlo), Joy, @riyuwe (Dimple), and the entire development team who turned ideas into reality: your work wasn't wasted. It's still here, still permanent, still serving its purpose.
To the Hive community who funded us, challenged us, and pushed us to be better: you were right about more than we wanted to admit. The criticism was valid. We just weren't ready to hear it.
This journey taught me something fundamental about building in Web3, and about life itself.
The money doesn't enhance the mission. It replaces it.
When you build to extract value, you attract extractors. When you build to give value, you attract builders.
We'll remove rewards from short-form content and integrate long-form Hive blogs into our feeds. Let DBuzz be what it was always meant to be: a permanent, uncensorable space for human expression.
Not because it might earn you pennies.
But because you have something worth saying.
This year has been about realigning with what truly matters. Not chasing funding rounds or vanity metrics. Not building things that extract value from people without giving back more in return.
But following the calling to serve others. To build things that bring genuine value to people's lives. To create tools that solve real problems and make the world a little better than we found it.
That's the mission.
Build things that serve. Not things that extract.
Give more than you take. Create more value than you capture. Leave people better off than you found them.
That's the calling. That's what matters.
Everything else is just noise.
Written October 31, 2025
@nathansenn
Founder, DBuzz & Dataloft LLC
Davao City, Philippines
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