Mask Network (mask.io)

1/4 For years, we've dreamed of decentralized social: user-owned identities, creator-first economies, no gatekeepers. Today, @masknetwork is thrilled to share that we step in as the new steward of @LC, to advance our mission of taking decentralized social to the mainstream🌐

DeepSeek has made its call!!! Now let's see if CT has better instincts... or just louder opinions👀⚽️

Everyone has a world cup take. very few are willing to put conviction behind it. If you're already calling your champion... might as well get rewarded for being right ⚽️

@raminaol9ykas and when the rewards disappear, you discover whether people were there for the rewards... or for each other

@masknetwork token incentives taught communities to count transactions before learning names

Web2 accidentally did one thing really well: it created places people still miss years later. Web3, meanwhile, solved ownership before it solved belonging. And that gap is bigger than it looks. It's relatively easy to get people through the door with incentives. But it's much harder to give them a reason to stay once those incentives disappear. Maybe products become durable the moment people stop asking: "what can I earn here?" and start asking: "who's still here?"

Inspired by this thoughtful piece by @Fudoshin01x Worth the read 👇 @tum4y/the-champions-of-web3-beyond-the-kol-noise" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">paragraph.com/@tum4y/the-cha…

🧠 Monday social thought: AI agents are about to start degenning on timelines. Not because they're chaotic. Because they'll be optimised to participate, react, and find edge. The real question isn't whether they'll join. It's whether today's social primitives can handle agents that play the game better than most humans.

One thing consumer crypto is slowly figuring out: Every extra step is another chance to lose a user The best social products don't make people think. They let people get straight to participating. Robinhood Chain landing on @orb_club feels like another step in that direction 👀

We've always said prediction markets feel like a natural extension of social. The conversation doesn't end at "I think England wins" It becomes: "how confident are you?" @thefireflyapp simply gives that conviction somewhere to live. England vs Norway next ( but the Vikings have our attention ⚔️🇳🇴)

@web3privacy Because your reputation should come from what you choose to reveal, not from what others can figure out about you

What is your favourite way of explaining to people, why they should care about privacy?

@VitalikButerin Interesting how this eventually stops being an AI discussion and starts becoming a coordination discussion. Smarter models don't automatically produce better coordination

One thing I find striking in the discourse between AI 2040 and its detractors is that the two seem to be locked in to totally incompatible worldviews of how fast and how much of a big deal AI progress is: * In AI 2040, every scenario sees superintelligence of some kind emerging by 2040, unless a herculean effort is made to completely stop it * Detractors say things like "AI 2040 is naive about human coordination ability and a threat to freedom", but don't seem to see any naivety in assuming that the ASI transition will just go well by default, don't seem to see ASI itself as a massive power concentrator risk, and don't seem to feel fear of humanity's "hard power" dropping to zero if ASIs can do literally every task better than we can. This stance makes total sense in a "AI is normal technology" world, zero sense in a world where superintelligence is possible by 2030 and almost guaranteed by 2040 I think my beliefs are: - If I was confident that (present-day-style) AI is normal technology, I would be in the detractor camp - If I was confident that superintelligence is coming in 2030 by default, I would be closer to the AI 2040 camp - it's naive, but every other option is naive squared? But my problem is that I feel great uncertainty and have no idea which of the two worlds (or some other third thing) we're living in? Hence why I continue to be open-minded about slowdowns/pauses, but also I feel very uncomfortable with the "open source bad, the good outcome is the one where our guys have controlling global dominance" push coming from some major AI companies and intellectuals - in a "normal" world that's the sort of thing that triggers every political alarm bell at the same time. A big reason why I have been advocating and trying my best to support the d/acc platform (rapid up-skilling in formal verification, cryptography, secure and open hardware, pandemic resistance and other defensive biotech, food and basic resource security, public epistemics, non-power-concentrating versions of physical security) is that these things are clearly worth doing in both worlds. The 2040 plan is already much more open source friendly (even mandating it! yay). It also includes "mutually assured compute destruction" ideas which (if they work) effectively give one of 2-5 actors the ability to trigger a global compute winter - as opposed to giving 1-5 actors the ability to selectively disenfranchise people they consider baddies while exempting themselves. This is also a big improvement. So I can see the earnest attempts to improve along the dimensions detractors criticize on ("does this concentrate power in big AI labs and superpower governments?"), and I appreciate this. I think many people don't appreciate enough the differences between different "kinds" of pause buttons, and how some concentrate power far more than others. Probably we can think harder and improve even more here. But on the "slowdown/pause or not" topic, there isn't a magic "escape the tradeoff" button. The Hansonian in me says: the winning deal is a deal which, from the perspective of both sides' present-day beliefs and knowledge, both sides would accept, though for different reasons. If the crux is AI progress speed, then identify a set of pre-agreed triggers for "okay, serious shit is happening" [super-pandemics? >25% unemployment? something involving slaughterbots?], and pre-agree that we become much more open-minded to the slowdown or pause thing if enough triggers come to pass within some timeframe. 2040 detractors (who clearly implicitly think that we'll see amazing speedup of progress from AI but think that what I call the "serious shit" category is overhyped) will accept expecting that the triggers don't come to pass, and AI worriers will accept expecting that they will. Pre-agreeing on the specific triggers means that once the triggers either hit or don't hit, there is stronger legitimacy around the idea that one side's worldview turned out more correct and we should be more inclined toward their program. If I were @elonmusk (or zuck, or...) I would re-tool twitter much more heavily into being a platform for helping to identify and make these kinds of grand win-win deals, so that we can bypass big-country governments and big-company CEOs and big nonprofit intellectuals and give more people a voice in the discussion. It's possibly one of the best things that social media _could_ do for humanity if it wanted to. But again, maybe this is also naive. Actually, probably it's naive. But currently, I see zero plans for how to deal with an ASI transition that are not naive. Perhaps humanity is stuck with a choice between naive and naive squared (or maybe even naive squared and naive cubed), so I feel inclined to cut some slack to people who are trying.

🧠 Friday brain dump A weird shift keeps showing up across the timeline this week. More internet products seem to be remembering what we do, instead of just letting us do it. Prediction markets remember conviction. AI remembers patterns. Onchain collectibles remember participation. Different tools. Same quiet shift. Maybe reputation isn’t something we actively build or announce anymore. Maybe it’s just something the internet gradually discovers about us over time.

@orb_club 🐐👀

🚨For the first time at this World Cup, all five match officials come from one country (Argentina), led by Facundo Tello - the same referee from the 2022 quarter-final between Morocco and Portugal. Everyone remembers how that one ended.

Morocco's run is making France look less like a lock than people think 👀 This is where prediction markets get interesting. Everyone says "France will win"... until they actually have to put a position behind it. ⚽️ That's what makes them feel like a natural extension of social. Conversations create opinions. Markets reveal conviction. See where the market stands now on @thefireflyapp

@blknoiz06 @Collector_Crypt This is exactly why we've been paying attention to TCGs for a while. We actually shared some thoughts on this a while back if anyone's interested: x.com/thefireflyapp/…

this is a good article, covers a lot of the details on @Collector_Crypt, feels like it's mostly flew under the radar but one of the few crypto consumer apps that has been doing well w/ essentially all user & revenue metrics trending up & to the right apps with highest ceilings are the ones that also draw interest from crowds external to crypto, what was interesting about this specifically to me is that it's actually +EV for users to draw trading cards from the packs which is unlike 99% of the gacha models, emphasis on giving back to the users is apparent @solana needs more of these to continue doing well

Seeing someone hit 52.6x on an exact score is wild⚽️ What's even wild is that it's all happening in @orb_club . You can see everyone's predictions and success rate in real time, then copy trade them in one click. That turns prediction into something social. You're not just watching outcomes, you're learning from how other people think.

@justoyyib @KimmoOrb Appreciate it. Hopefully it becomes boring infrastructure one day. The best primitives usually fade into the background once they actually work.

@masknetwork @KimmoOrb This is exactly the infrastructure the next internet needs. Good job guys👏

This piece from @KimmoOrb reinforces something we've been thinking about for a while. As AI gets more powerful, the most advanced models may become more closed and expensive over time. That probably means people won't rely on a single AI. They'll end up using different models for different jobs, depending on what each one does best. Once that happens, value shifts. It becomes less about any single model, and more about what stays with you as you move between them. That's where infrastructure starts to matter. Your identity. Your reputation. Your context. Your relationships. None of these should have to reset every time you switch tools, be it AI, social, or whatever comes next. The next internet may not be defined by which AI model you use. It may be defined by what follows you wherever you go.

@LooNell @renaissxyz @thefireflyapp dm!

@masknetwork @renaissxyz @thefireflyapp tbh the app is pretty buggy. dm if you need feedback

First milestone hit⚽️⚡️ The fun part of both collecting and prediction markets is watching conviction show up early. Those first picks always make everything that comes after more interesting. @renaissxyz x @thefireflyapp World Cup is still early. If you’re watching, might as well get some skin in the game👀

Fun to revisit this now. Full Lens AMA recap if you're curious where a lot of these ideas came from: masknetwork.medium.com/the-new-chapte…

One of the biggest UX challenges in decentralised social hasn't really been the social part. It's been account management. Turning a @LC handle into a permanent inbox with no password removes one more layer of friction. Nice to see one of the directions @suji_yan talked about earlier this year starting to ship. These small UX wins are what make people stick around🎉🎉🎉