Social Media

Social Media does not have Our best interest at heart

Web2 social media has misaligned incentives due to it’s “free” nature. Since their users do not pay them they are beholden to those that do, which is mostly advertisers. In order, to get the most money they can from advertiser they are incentivized to keep their users on the site for as long as possible at any cost. That is the price we as a society pay. The best way to keep a user engaged is to play to their emotions. Sure cat pictures and memes can be harmless, but what happens when they try to rile up our political, religious or philosophical emotions. Blasting users with opinions they already agree with and representing others as evil and stupid is a good way to make a user feel comfortable and come back for more.

Whether you agree this is what has actually happened or not, I think the base argument stands, that a social media companies main priority is to keep us there and not necessarily to keep us happy, educated or well informed.

Users are the product and the service

So we don't pay for the service and therefore are sold to advertiser, but users are also the service that is being consumed by other users. The majority of content on social media sites was created by the users themselves and those users are rarely compensation proportionally.

The algorithm

We have no idea how these algorithms work. They feed us content, which we have seen influences our thoughts, actions and behavior, but how and why we are seeing them are completely hidden to us.

Thankfully, one of the beautiful things about the blockchain is that all its data is completely free and viewable by anyone. This gives us the power to take control of the algorithms that influence us. Perhaps PostThread will have an algorithm by default, but there is nothing stopping the community from changing it or developing their own. A user could even selecting which algorithm they want from a choice of many. Maybe advertisers will pay you to use their algorithm. Who knows, but it opens up a wide range of possibilities that were never available before and most importantly gives the power back to the individual.