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If we all agree that free speech is a vital aspect of a healthy civilization 'in real life' or 'offline' and that humanity is exponentially moving towards 'digi
by Deegy 4y ago
If we all agree that free speech is a vital aspect of a healthy civilization 'in real life' or 'offline' and that humanity is exponentially moving towards 'digital lives' – It would seem that it is probably very important for free speech to make the digital leap. It seems very bad to allow private corporations to be the arbiters.
One interesting solution I'm aware of is to utilize blockchain technology for the base social layer (L1). All communications or 'posts' can be minted onto a blockchain. Once minted, they could not be (easily) censored. The token provides proof for who shared the communication (important defense against fakes) and could provide fascinating provenance for the origin of specific ideas.
The token feed would display chronologically and include 100% of minted tokens. At a certain scale this feed would become dizzying and essentially useless. This is where the next layer comes in (L2). Call it the curation layer. This is essentially what twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc are today. The difference is that they are not pulling in their content from a base layer, rather the content needs to be created individually on each of their platforms. On the social blockchain anyone and everyone would be allowed to create a curation platform at L2. These curation hubs could choose to show or not show whatever they want. Some very popular platforms would surely gain favor, but some people may decide to handle curation on their own. Curation on L2 would allow very healthy competition and significantly reduce switching costs. This is because we'd be able to switch curation platforms without having to disturb the network effects as they'll be preserved by L1. It's very hard (though not impossible) to switch from platforms like twitter, facebook, instagram, etc due to the network effects they've built up.
This solution also provides an interesting opportunity for individuals to own their own content online and control aspects of their privacy. As the owner of all social tokens that I mint, I could have the ability to deleted content at L1 and have it disappear across all instances at L2. (though there def still needs to be a lot figured out there).