The same battle that's happening between Google and ChatGPT is going to happen in social media very soon, and not how you may think. I want to explain to you what the future of social media will probably look like, 🧵 The drawbacks of today's social media platforms hint at how they'll be disrupted, and most issues come from centralization. A few "trusted" media outlets controlled our information for decades with little oversight (eg New York Times). They fell and got replaced by "social platforms" with the rise of Meta, X, TikTok, etc... The problem is centralization increased even more because network effects allowed these platforms to concentrate users across fewer "owners," with even less oversight. If TikTok decides to censor something, the impact is arguably much higher than if the NYT did in the "old days," and harder to detect as well. So what do we do? The first step is not controversial, and many are pursuing it. It's to open up the "firehose" of content so that anybody can build on top of it, rather than keeping content "trapped" in a walled garden that's controlled by a single entity. If the content is open, then it's technically possible for anyone to "audit" what's being shown vs not shown. What's going viral and what's being "suppressed." It's also technically possible for alternative feed algorithms to be developed, and for you to be able to choose which algorithm is ranking the content for you. Open content is the first step, and it's widely-understood as a key component of what the future should look like. Open content is also a key part of nearly all alternative social medias that people are working on. @jack started a solution called "Blue Sky" that's a non-profit instead of a for-profit, and still centralized, but whose content is fully open in the way described above (a big improvement). Mastodon allows anyone to run a "federated server" so you can have your own community running on a machine you control rather than someone else, and also promotes open content. DeSo, which I work on, goes even further and allows you to put all of your information directly on a blockchain that's not controlled by anybody (and can't be censored by anybody, like Bitcoin). Every "next-generation" social media is incorporating "open content" as a key component-- so why hasn't it created a better system if it's so good then? I believe it's because "open content" is only half of the solution. The other half is "monetization." It's not enough to open the content if it costs millions of dollars to create a "feed algorithm" that improves on centralized players, and it's even worse if you don't have a way to monetize that algorithm after you've invested so much in creating it. Centralized social media platforms run a "closed content" model and then show ads on it, which turns out to be extremely monetizable. What we need is a new model to monetize social media that's compatible with the "open content" approach (and that ideally earns just as much, if not more, than the closed-content-with-ads model). What would that look like? I've thought about this a lot. Like for the last several years thinking about it. And... I think I have an answer. The solution is to create a subscription model for *feed algorithms*, the same way we have subscriptions for things like Netflix or Hulu (or ChatGPT and Claude). You pay a monthly subscription to someone who runs extremely sophisticated (and possibly extremely expensive) algorithms to rank the content just for you. This is really interesting not only because it allows for monetization on "open content" but also because you can have "tiers" of complexity. If you want really simple feeds, pay $0.10 per month and get something cheap. If you want something super complex, pay $100 per month (or more!) and get what you pay for. Even better, people can *compete* against each other to give you the best possible algorithm. Think this guy is censoring the rankings? Ok, switch to this other guy's algorithm and try their ranking. They can even let you tweak the "knobs" of their algorithm directly. You can see that the internet is already moving more toward subscriptions. Google is literally getting disrupted by ChatGPT on an "ads-driven" vs "subscription" monetization contest of the century. And the ability to choose your AI model more easily is actively causing the model providers to iterate and provide a better experience. What people are missing is that the SAME CONTEST is going to hit social media soon. The reason it's easy to miss is you need TWO things to come together: 1) open content and 2) a marketplace for ranking that content. But it's going to happen, and when it does, I believe we're going to wonder how we ever let a handful of highly-centralized companies tell us what to think. I also think all the problems of misinformation and bias are going to dramatically improve, almost overnight. Still skeptical? You should be-- this stuff is HARD to pull off. It would take someone YEARS of deep devotion and tens of millions of dollars spent on a super speculative idea, almost out of pure LOVE to make it happen. You have to put SO MANY pieces together JUST RIGHT. Yeah, it's definitely tough. But I've been thinking about these problems, and working on what I believe will be close to the ultimate solution for basically since 2019 at this point (six years? wow that's a long time oof...). I don't know if our solution will even win, but honestly it doesn't even matter that much to me as long as the change that we need eventually ends up happening. If you want to try what I've been working on, it's an app called Focus, it's built end-to-end on crypto, it stores all your content on the blockchain directly (though you probably wouldn't even notice), and it has a built-in Feed Marketplace that allows you to subscribe to anyone's algorithms that they build for a monthly fee. It's going into public access soon, and I'm really excited for you to try it. I can't promise it will solve all of our problems, but I can promise it will be unlike any social app you've ever used. And I can also promise that the IDEAS that it's pioneering are new and interesting, and that many will be a part of a more decentralized future. If you read this far, thank you for caring about this stuff. It's very important to me, and I hope it eventually becomes important to more people as well.
