“We're quite confident that when we're sitting here in 20 years, we'll be talking about Bitcoin the way we talk about the Internet today. We just need time for it to play out.”
-- Marc Andreessen
There’s no shortage of blockchain evangelists heralding this “inevitable” future, as described by the eminently quotable Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur. In spite of a lot of very smart people being really excited about the implications of blockchain technology, my friends’ and family’s eyes tend to glaze over when I start explaining what I’m working on.
Having been an early adopter of internet technology, these reactions come as no surprise. The reverse of Mr. Andreessen’s comment also holds true; twenty years ago, we were talking about the internet the way we talk about the blockchain today. It wasn’t until an accessible interface came along, in the form of the World Wide Web, that the mainstream audience began to sit up and take notice.
While its financial technology applications get all the press, I believe blockchain’s killer app will be found within social media. Steemit’s explosive user growth is an indicator of this potential, especially considering that blockchain-based blogging is only a tiny slice of the social media pie.
You might be surprised by just how big that pie actually is.
If you were to ask the average person to define “social media,” they’d likely describe Facebook and Twitter. A more savvy individual might extend their description to include LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, or a handful of others. The truth of the matter is that the full scope of social media casts a much wider net, encompassing thousands of businesses vying for untold billions of dollars in the space.
The Conversation Prism is the best visualization of the social media landscape that I’ve come across. It probably isn’t a perfect stratification of the market, and only includes a fraction of the players, but I believe it illustrates just how many different ways there are to interact with user generated content and social networks.
You might be wondering why you’d want these services, or new ones like them, to exist on the blockchain.
One of the most important concepts in growing social media platforms is the network effect, also known as demand-side economies of scale. Simply put, a network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it.
Today’s social media builds walled gardens around their users, content, and communities. The network effect is constrained by that ecosystem, which artificially caps the value to the user. If a user ever chooses to leave a service, they must leave most of their friends and content behind, and the service becomes less valuable without them.
The greatest value blockchain offers to social media is its openness, breaking down the barriers dividing the walled gardens of today’s social media. Instead of each new social media site requiring its community members to start over from scratch, they'll be able to build on top of what they’ve created before, regardless of the service, medium, or even blockchain they contributed on.
The network effect is allowed to grow, unimpeded by artificial barriers, continuously rising in value to users. This would allow an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration and information sharing on a global scale.
There’s a reason it’s going to take twenty years for blockchain to get there. Social media is just one potential application of the technology and we’re already talking about thousands of websites and apps.
I call on anyone who can contribute, to do their part in getting us there faster. Whether you’re a developer, designer, writer, or curator, find people who are strengthening the blockchain content infrastructure, and support them however you can.
