TL;DR:
Facebook vs Web3 social, this essay is a reflection by an author who has been heavily invested in both and is now building in Web3.
How Web2 Social Operates (The Ethics of Profit)
The primary difference between Web2 social media and the emerging toolkit of Web3 has to do with curation. In Web2 social, low-cost social interactions on free platforms take place because advertisers have figured out how to slip in; much the same way the commercials in a football game reach people in that deeply social space where they go to enjoy themselves. The seed from which Facebook emerged was a seed of basic human goodness - Facebook was adopted by users because we wanted to connect with one another. We wanted to build things together, from relationships to businesses and families and friendships and lives. But our wants got subverted along the way, and while it would be absurd to argue that Facebook provides no value to its users, it is equally true that the value comes with a great deal of harm that is not properly understood by most of them. This has steadily increased more or less in lockstep with Facebook’s introduction of ad revenue to its platform.
What could otherwise be as enjoyable and carefree as a family picnic, in the case of Facebook, rapidly descends to the lowest common denominator as everyone desperately shills everyone else with low-effort content in an effort to get this network of people, of “friends,” assembled in real life as well as online, to elevate them. I’m speaking primarily of creators - why on earth is there a Facebook group of Medium authors who all shill their own work, without an external audience? The answer is that the general setup of the algorithm is low cost, low reward with respect to “big” asks that involve new ideas.
Why are "big" asks ones involving new things for people? One guess I might venture, on the basis of how dopamine changes the way we feel, would be because learning is a bit painful for us - we have to admit we were wrong, then discover why. Facebook doesn't want to teach us, it wants to give us something easier so we don't resent it. But it isn't that simple, because it needs to keep us coming back for more, one way or another. This is where our family and friends come in. We care about them and are interested in seeing how they're doing, so maybe this is part of why it is difficult for some Facebook users to kick the habit.
Facebook has drawn major criticism for the impact its advertising methods have had upon electoral politics, primarily because its algorithm design has remained proprietary and is geared toward the low brain. The basic technique is to use people from users' lives, who users care about and are already having ongoing, complex interactions with, to put users into a frame of mind that is open in a very particular way. Once a user is active on Facebook, Facebook can then sell the advertisers an opportunity to essentially use this cognitive backdoor to upload malicious content to the user. This attack could result in a purchase from a Facebook ad, sure, but it could also result in a decision to continue scrolling, some sort of action in a relationship, or any number of other outcomes within the app - as long as the user doesn’t put it down, the software’s goal is achieved. The algorithm doesn’t control us, but at scale, it doesn’t need to - it just needs to work at a predictable frequency so that Facebook’s advertisers won’t stop spending money.
The general arbitrariness of the geographies of the social networks created on Facebook between actual people can lend itself to organization around particular problems and can in fact be beneficial toward activities such as research where a quick answer from an educated mind halfway around the world can save someone hours, but issues arise because the network has a profit motive. So the user is ultimately seduced into believing that they have the upper hand in the relationship and control the value - which they do, as the network’s value creators, but this works against them because Facebook captures the value and they don’t. And Facebook has recently shown in great detail that it is capable of turning up the heat to directly influence user behavior, which has led to backlash but not to the collapse or reform of the network.
What Web2 social media companies share in common is a conflict in terms of incentive alignment between users and investors, and as the current Elon Musk takeover of Twitter would seem to indicate, the one with the most money has a massively increased chance of winning. Web2 social has been a revolution, but, now that we have passed the part of the cycle where venture capital was being invested with no hope of return, the operation has become quite toxic as a direct result of the network’s need to profit from interactions between its users.
With respect to Web3, we aren’t there - at least not yet. We don’t see these profit-motivated shenanigans because things are still far more open. Most of the questions around the core technologies themselves remain at least somewhat unresolved, so things haven’t quite ossified around a particular set of customs which can then become corrupted, as in the case of Facebook, by sleazy ad deals brought on by profit-hungry investors. In a sense, Web3 is just like any other technical insurgence, at a larger scale of course. One of the main questions to critically examine for Web3 is whether it’s susceptible to the same sorts of corruption Web2 seems to be in the process of falling to, and fortunately it seems to be resistant, at least in principle: while scams abound in Web3, we do have a number of legitimate projects at which to point as exemplars of the ideal spotted in the wild.
Web2 Social’s Manipulative Mechanism: Bummer
Web2 social media got a lot of things right. Companies are effective vehicles for developing technologies that essentially have an evil bias toward action - i.e., they routinely do things that cause their users harm. These technologies are remarkably effective at accomplishing certain things, but if we continue to use them without rethinking their economies from the ground up, they will continue to burn us. The burn is a very particular sort of burn. Jaron Lanier refers to it as “bummer” (in his book, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) because of the way the system has learned to sell us ads by manipulating our conscious frame of mind - generally, the algorithm’s basic goal is making us feel inadequate so we “need” to buy things. This has side-effects for us, such as making us feel sad or angry, but the algorithm’s primary goal is to keep us scrolling. It doesn’t matter to Facebook if this makes life worse for us or not. They only care that it works to make money. As we scroll, their advertisers pay. The effect–users being glued to their phones and deeply investing emotionally into the platform–is the amplification of the tendency we have, due to our empathy for one another, to feel the way someone else does.
On Facebook, the caustic polemical discussions seem to take their form due to a variety of causes. On the one hand, you have the competition to win others’ attention and the complexity of the IRL relationships that make remaining active on Facebook such an important task for so many of the users. On the other hand, you have an incredibly useful platform for organizing communities around events and common interests that does very well at isolating particular topics and allowing users to pass one another information very rapidly about these subjects. Emotion is built-in to the equation from the ground up by virtue of the primacy of interpersonal relationships, but some users have more talent for this than others and clearly win this game while the majority of people lose out. The result is a race to the bottom for many non-specific interactions with bizarre winners including trolls and other unlikelies who amass large followings and become “influencers” who are able to earn a living from these platforms. The rest of us are placated with specific information and real-time feedback, providing just enough value to keep us engaged.
If it isn’t quite clear yet, the picture I want to paint here is the Facebook I started using in 2004 - with all its user prioritization and all of the value that was built into it back then largely still intact, yet with a new disease: greed. The greed is most evident in the ad business, but specifically out of this lust for profit has come a very particular sort of engagement characterized by fear and anger, both emotions that any neuroscientist could tell you reside in the lower brain, the limbic system, the dopaminergic tract.
The reward a user experiences when they win an antagonistic social interaction resides primarily in the limbic system which, without going into too much anatomical detail, we can safely say tends to be part of the older, lower brain. The theory of reward prediction error explains positive reinforcement feedback loops which can drive behavior by examining the way in which pleasure and pain result from successful or unsuccessful predictions, respectively. Hence, small victories like little trollish jabs against other users provide pleasure, and larger efforts such as creative works or new ideas quickly fall prey to such small jabs. To boot, the creator who took the risk to put self out there experiences pain as a result. In this way, the worst of each Facebook user - whether or not the user gives in - is always being subtly encouraged by the network. It’s essentially the same reason casinos give away free booze; i.e., alcohol tells the dopamine neurons they’re getting what they want, which lowers inhibitions and encourages aberrant behavior - people take risks which are more profitable for the casino than for themselves if they’re drunk. I’d love to set up an experiment - it would shock me if Facebook didn’t discourage activity in the prefrontal cortex and encourage limbic system responses. And why wouldn’t a profit-driven enterprise brainwash its users to keep them coming back and making it more money?
This tendency to want to rig the system so that the investors always win is a serious issue with scaling a business to the global level, and frequently the results of such endeavors have been disastrous. Especially in recent technology, which clearly transcends national and even continental boundaries, the antagonism between consumer and business has become increasingly intense over the years. The most successful investors have used the internet to grow their power to an almost absolute level; but the problem is that they’re still only single human beings and they have extremely limited throughput as a result. So they make bad decisions, and the rest of us suffer for it.
Web3’s Answer
Web3 solves the problem of Web2 social at the root cause: the centralized infrastructure that feeds profits to investors. Profit and Web3 are not strangers, but the fact that the architecture is all open source means that no single entity really has very much control over what anyone does or sees on Web3 - the equity of information makes the environment more fair for all contributors, which keeps single individuals from disproportionately controlling much of anything. The largest curators of NFTs (non-fungible tokens; essentially the basic unit of expression in Web3, think of an NFT as an unforgeable bearer bond for arbitrary data) actually employ open source software to pull in information from the blockchain itself - everything is public; these companies do not control the information and in most cases it’s openly available, though in some cases they do blacklist or block certain things. OpenSea is an interesting case study, as a private company that builds open source software almost everyone in Web3 is familiar with.
Almost no one seems particularly happy with OpenSea’s team, service, offerings, etc. And yet we all continue to use it because it is so much more available than other services. OpenSea’s NFT offerings are the most widely recognized in Web3 because they were some of the first to become as complete as they are. I was able to put books onto OpenSea, in fact I believe I am the first person ever to release a Whitepaper on OpenSea. And the reason I was able to do this had nothing to do with any foresight or permission from OpenSea itself! I discovered I could mint a PDF to Ethereum and it would show up on OpenSea, but then I built the NFTBook Genesis tokens to experiment with a bit of an improvement - and it worked! Better books on OpenSea. After that, Robbie came in and saved me and the project with the NFTBook Reader dAPP he designed and refined. And that’s how things in Web3 get made.
The point of Web3 is that all of the source code for all of our apps should be publicly available. Free, open-source software is back and it is back to stay. The key benefit of Web3 is a universal source of data that is not controllable by one particular network entity to the disadvantage of others. This environment makes it very difficult to deceive anyone and impossible to tell a lie that cannot be disproven, which is essentially the core thesis behind Ethereum's new Optimism L2.
The builders of these networks and communities must be both honest and acting in good faith to successfully deliver useful technologies that can then go on to change the world, and traditional investors and their hire-on developer teams do not do particularly well here. The space of Web3 is accelerating at lightning speed and many of the operators making these big strides are, for the first time, and as a direct result of their involvement in these communities, financially independent. Using the internet to allow people to transfer money to one another is perhaps the single most effective answer to the Web2 Social problem of bummer: getting money stimulates dopamine, just as getting in a few good jabs against someone who said something you didn’t like does, but Web3 makes it possible for someone to ask a favor of you and for you to know for a fact you will receive the reward. And this setup makes it easier to get the dopaminergic response you want, anyway: you can be right every time.
Web3’s decentralized and permissionless ethos allows users to take on deeper projects, with more effort required as well. The reason this is so has to do with the confidence users can have that cause will reliably lead to effect, but it also has to do with the thing that made Web2 go south in the first place: profit. The networks set themselves up to profit by volume, but in recent years we have seen massive transaction fees on Ethereum with shockingly little effort from the dev team to lower them. L2s will play a role, but as Vitalik Buterin outlined in Endgame, Ethereum’s purpose is no longer to be a complete reservoir of information. Instead, Vitalik sees it as the original, primary gold standard of immutable decentralized network technology, but only one piece of the internet of Web3. So people with more money who have things they most certainly wish to never lose will just have to pay more to access it.
Vitalik has recently been showing increasing interest in the Cosmos SDK, which allows users to create their own chains for specific applications. All of the apps created this way will be interoperable, and can be connected to the interblockchain communication protocol so that they can transfer assets back and forth to one another. And the hope for Web3 lies precisely here: the tools of the open internet are being so brilliantly and openly developed that almost anyone will be able to pick them up and use them to create whatever they can think of. In my experience at Cent (https://beta.cent.co ) when I was getting acquainted with Web3, I couldn’t believe how nice everyone was. It was very different from Facebook and I wondered why for years, but now I think I understand: as a creator, I’d rather make $.05 by saying something nice than piss off a bunch of potential tippers by being a dick for no reason. On Facebook, there’s nothing at stake - not even with the identity, not even with the businesses being built there. The users keep coming back to see what’s new to be upset about or afraid of just like they do to see what their friends are up to - the frame of mind I’m in when I am having a hard time getting anyone to pay attention to me and the world is burning down all around me is entirely different from the frame of mind I’m in when someone just liked something I wrote enough to spend money on it. It is as if adding the financial skin in the game makes everyone feel like an influencer, and perhaps this makes us a bit more conscientious.
PageDAO’s Contribution
PageDAO is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) oriented toward allowing creatives to retain greater control over and reward from their work. It has a cryptocurrency ($PAGE) and a long-running Discord server - have a look at the most up-to-date official links here: https://page.cent.co/. PageDAO sees itself as a metaverse writer’s guild cum dev shop - we are writers who got tired of getting shafted by the mass market paperback model and skimpy Web2 content monetization schemes and decided to build a better future. We do not intend to do this by limiting people or telling them not to do what they want to; instead the goal is to build a community with robust development talent and vision as well as deep commitment to the written word.
Our first goal is to empower writers. The Web3 technology stack we recommend currently consists of the following:
- ReadMe Books: our current NFTBook technology platform at https://mint.nftbookbazaar.com
- App in Bio, by Cent: a Web3 link service offering collectible NFTs and email subscription service at https://app.bio/
- Hive: the definitive blockchain blog solution (Scholar and Scribe DAO: https://peakd.com/hive-199275/@hive-199275/scholar-and-scribe-x-pagedao-partnership-proposal )
- Twitter: a way to keep everyone in the loop (https://twitter.com/page_dao )
- Email: an oldie but a goodie. A good email list is every writer’s best friend.
The hope is that, by joining forces as writers, we can present the Web3 community with a powerful new partner to ensure that the space has plenty of well-written content as it seeks to continue to grow and become widely used. By doing this effectively, we’ll be providing massive value to an underserved market: the bottom 95% of writers who haven’t had it as good as their top tier cousins, in some cases due to talent but mostly due to arbitrary preference by individual editors and little else, and despite their skill and value, have been unable to “go pro” at writing. With these tools and the opportunities available through PageDAO, we hope to give a significant proportion of the underserved author market a real chance to do their dream job.
That’s only part of the vision, here, however. The authors are important, but they’re a small subset of the people who are involved with written works. Most of us sit around and read articles or blogs or listen to podcasts on a regular basis - insofar as we use Web2 services for these activities, we’re losing out on the opportunity to take ownership in the content we love while Meta and Twitter and Spotify investors pocket almost all of the value we pump into them. By developing tools to do what these services do for the users, but cutting out the investors who have been taking too much of the pie for too long, the Web3 community can open the options back up for everyone involved.
As an owner of a piece of content, I have the ability to sell that piece of content for money I can then spend on something else. This is the core of ownership. Rightful ownership in Web3 is generally fairly easy too, because things happen on-chain. Even fraudulent misrepresentations of identity such as plagiarism are identifiable - and as long as they are identified, the DAO running the blockchain or dAPP users need to use to find said piece of content can enact policies to remove them or blacklist them to effectively manage digital rights as well as or better than Web2 DRM. Payments are substantially improved in Web3, and tools such as multisignature wallets make it simple, transparent, and manageable. More complex solutions are on the way here (I’m working on one!), but the key takeaway is this: access to the tooling to create NFTs and exchange them and digital currencies on the internet makes it easier to make a living as a creator.
Some people earn their living, today, already, by purchasing NFTs and “flipping” them for a profit. Others make NFTs nobody buys, or buy NFTs nobody wants to pay more for in the future - the market is complex, and not everyone is equal. However, rather than the zero-sum profit game Web2 companies play, which would simply stop here, Web3 has a vested interest in ensuring that creators get a fair shake - anyone who can drive volume is good for Web3 so the network itself has little reason to discriminate against newcomers, but on the other hand there is very little in the way of a centralized newsfeed all of this lives on, which means new creators have a much easier time breaking out because they just have to build an audience and it isn’t so much about tricking some algorithm into featuring your work somewhere a lot of people will see it. Web3 content - the ReadMe Books, in particular - is very open, extremely sharable, and because of the absence of paywalls, it can be far more accessible perhaps without giving up anything in return on the revenue side of the equation.
Over time, Web3 curation will evolve and could indeed develop some of the same cancers Web2 social media developed. When that happens, it will be important to create new technologies to replace Web3 with something that isn’t old and full of well-known exploits. However, with a bit of luck and the right community, Web3 could be used to build a new sort of online social experience that is actually net-positive for all of its users. This is the dream that keeps PageDAO moving forward regardless of market prices or treasury balances. This is the future of the written word.
