... as Preston Byrne writes in his latest blog post ?
After reading his post (hosted on an old-looking Wordpress blog) I typed in this comment:
There must be something missing from your picture ... You write : "The essential function of social is to provide people the means to communicate with other people on their own terms largely free from censorship [...] The absence of this kind of platform-agnostic facility in a crypto-native format, which also allows people to trade transactional information (bids, offers, complex transactions, wallet addresses) in tandem with crypto is glaring."
I can't understand how someone like you, who has been in crypto since at least 2013 (or earlier ?) can write such a thing while clearly aware of (and obviously ignoring) crypto-native social platforms built on top of the steem and, more recently, hive blockchains. They exist, they work perfectly fine and they do exactly what you lamment as ... non-existent !
Take for instance fronts such as peakd.com and ecency.com (there are more) which are two completely autonomous, decentralized front-ends offering access to more than 100 hive nodes through more than five decentralized API gateways. Sure, not the same level of decentralization as Bitcoin, but still not quite as vulnerable to marmots from outer space as a centralized service.
You then write "I think the reason why, so far, is that crypto-social has been “social incentivized by tokens” rather than “social which empowers crypto users to communicate about tokens.”". That is quite an unsatisfying explanation as if you browse hive.blog (yet another front-end on the hive blockchain) you see plenty of crypto users communicating about tokens.
It would probably be cowardly of me not to risk an explanation myself. I believe the reason "crypto social" has failed so far is the very nature of the crypto ethos: "decentralized" - in the cryptoverse you can hardly see ubercentralizers such as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg being followed toward a vision that they define and steer. The closest we got were Satoshi (who vanished early) and Vitalik, who took a step back and tries to live up to the "decentralization" spirit himself ...
Absent such a towering "Atacryptosocial" figure, the necessary steps in terms of marketing and "herding users" are not done and no network manages to reach critical mass.
Hence the sad conclusion is that a successful cryptosocial platform, if ever built, will be built on lies and deception, on a betrayal of the "decentralization" spirit.
Until the ultimate conman pulls this trick, we have "failed" crypto social platforms such as Hive who lack users because those who should be actively using and promoting them (such as yourself) distrust them ... we humans have evolved to trust fatherly figures and truly decentralized platform can provide none.
This Pixabay marmot seems surprised by my conclusion but cannot quite disagree
Sort of a tragedy, if you ask me ... but such is the human kind.
Anyway, after writing my comment I realized how ridiculous it was of me to write it on a Wordpress blog instead of writing and publishing it on a "failed" or "non-existent" (according to Preston) crypto-social platform ...
