Fame ≠ value and we need to kill that system.
I am often triggered when I see popular content on any social media with opinions I disagree with.
But guess what? If you were to be right before me and made an argument with the same or similar opinions, I would not be triggered.
As weird as it sounds, it is not the opinion in itself that makes me feel uncomfortable, it's the fact that said opinion is appreciated by many through reactions (likes specifically), essentially making these figures appear like they are making any meaningful contributions to society.
Oftentimes, you'll find that content with the most likes simply gets regarded as the most accurate or trustworthy.
This is a huge problem. Sure, there's clearly over 10k (judging by the likes) people who believe everything other than bitcoin is shit, but there's potentially a lot more who believe otherwise.
Based on a lot of external factors like content publishing time and first hours reactors, when the opposing side finds that the opinion is already largely agreed on by early viewers through likes, it discourages further engagement with said content to avoid being the few with a different opinion and that's likely to get bullied for that.
Evidently, this design helps individuals build influence on a large network of people, it's monetarily and emotionally good for the influencers, but it's rather harmful for those influenced.
It leaves no room for proper individual evaluation of opinions or arguments, it also creates an atmosphere of pressure on non-interactive readers or viewers to begin to believe certain ideas and adopt lifestyles shining through this “social validation” system called “reactions.”
It's a pretty fucked up mechanism. If social platforms were to be kind enough to reveal what their data shows on the influence of these little things, we'd be shocked at just what great damage social media has on the world.
Kill the likes, Kill the figures, Anonymize Distribution and Rewards
I hope to one day witness the launch of a web3 social platform with no reactions buttons like love, like or even dislikes.
Sure, views don't need to be removed, that's important for marketers and business owners, it doesn't really have much negative psychological effects on users.
In addition to killing the like buttons, I imagine that profiles will simply not exist.
Or at least, it should be optional to have one.
The concept of profiles not existing is not that users publish content without an account, it's rather that said web3 social platform uses anonymity tech to distribute content to the public.
Get this. Suppose I create a post and publish it to the network. My content pops up on the main feed without a defined account name, just a random hash.
That way, you can't tell who made the post, you simply have to either read it or leave it, depending on if it appears worth your time.
In the same way, considering that this is web3, we are obviously working with an incentivized social platform, through tokenization.
Using hive's terms, perhaps a curator finds the content to be valuable, he could leave a vote on the content and get this, no one would know who voted too just that it's received monetarily rewards.
Given that anonymity is the heart of everything, upon the release of the rewards at payout day, no one too would know where the value pays out to.
Something like this is possible using Monero’s tech, with improvement of course.
Now I know someone is probably thinking about how this can be abused by whales or friends of whales to self-vote and extract maximum value.
Well, none of this takes away the ability of anyone to disagree with the rewards any post receives and simply downvote it to balance it out.
The idea is to eliminate the knowledge of who makes a post, and the psychological influence of likes and focus more on if a content is valuable or not.
If something like this were to be built, I guarantee you that a lot of people who've not had much luck building sustainable income on content platforms would have the universe smile at them for the first time.
Simply because the social layer has eliminated everything that causes humans to be biased and/or intentionally hurt others or refuse to support.
Can't tell that Trump made the post? Now you're likely to vote on it because there's some truth or value to what was said.
A blindfold tech might just be humanity’s greatest chance to improve at great lengths.
At least on social media.