Building a better decentralised social-network economy

Watching the drama regarding the distribution of the reward pool on steemit unfold, and in expectation of newer decentralized platforms such as ONO, I wanted to throw some ideas out there on how things could or even should be done differently when incentivising social media networks that supervene upon blockchains in a decentralised manner.

How wealth is distributed across any economy is always contentious, as are questions around power and who should have the right to wield it. I sometimes feel (perhaps unfairly) that people setting up and maintaining networks such as steemit don’t realise that others have considered these problems before them. Solutions, other than theatrical handwaving about free markets or repeatedly trying to settle arguments by saying “code is law”, have been discussed at length for the past several thousand years.

I don’t want to be unduly critical though - which is unusual for me. What I do want to do is sketch some ideas for how a social media ecosystem could be both more equitable and more successful.

Principles:

These are very roughly based on my understanding of John Rawls’ theory of justice, and his ideas on how a fair and just society can be run under non-ideal conditions, with some of my own thougts mixed in. If this were a scholarly publication there’s be citations all over the place - but since it isn’t, I think it’s enough to say that if you want the philosophical background on this, go and read A Theory of Justice.

1. All people have inherent value in virtue of them being people.
   1.1 This inherent value is equal. No one is inherently more valuable than anyone else.

2. People may be instrumentally valuable, in that they create value for themselves and others through their actions via the applications of their skills, knowledges, and inherent attributes or predispositions.
   2.1 The ability of a person to create value is mediated by internal and external factors that are outside of the control of that individual or, sometimes, any person. Possession, or lack thereof, of such factors by individuals is essentially a matter of chance. It follows from this that such factors are neither earned or deserved.
   2.2 No amount of instrumental value makes a person more inherently valuable. Similarly, no lack of instrumental value makes a person any less inherently valuable.

3. All people inherently have certain rights in virtue of them being people.
   3.1 These rights are equally distributed between people, and are limited only where they infringe upon the similar rights of others.
   3.2 No amount of instrumental value confers the right to override the inherent rights of others.

How this applies to a blockchain-enabled social network:

1. No multis. You get one personal account, and business accounts etc. are linked to it. The reasons for this will become very obvious in the next few sentences.

2. Everyone on the network must get a reasonable reward simply for being on the network. This might be a modest financial reward, or it might be attention. Either way, all users should get something out of their interaction with the network.

3. The existence of inequality on the network is only proportionally justifiable insomuch as it is beneficial to every person on the network, no matter how low on the economic ladder they are.

What does all this mean?

The reasons for not having multiple accounts, or limiting the utility of one person running multiple accounts, are pretty straightforward: Any system that rewards account-holders simply for being human and part of the network can’t support people running tens of thousands of accounts for personal gain. Whether this is achieved through stringent verification, two-factor authentication, algorithmic detection, a combination of these techniques, or some other technique is unimportant so long as this can be functionally equivalent.

All desirable activity on the network, down to simply logging in, will carry some incentive - usually via reward of the blockchain’s token, which should be freely exchangeable for attention. This potentially means that a lot of people can earn something from the network by doing very little. This is not only acceptable, it is desirable, as will be detailed in due course.

Content creation is rewarded as it attracts new users, and enriches the lived experience of existing users. Both of these things are beneficial to all people on the network - more users enhances the value of the network and the associated tokens, and the ways that content can enhance the lives of those who consume it are too manifold to list. Thus, it follows that it is acceptable that those who create content earn more than those who do not.

Likewise, any actions by users on the network that are beneficial to all users will be rewarded. The more equal the benefit, in an absolute rather than proportional sense, the greater the incentive (relative to the size of the benefit).

For example, imagine that the average user, making an average number of posts ect. earns $3 per day. Some people earn thousands of dollars a day, others, only a few cents. An action that increases the earnings of all users by 10% per day would be generously rewarded, but an action that increased the earnings of every user by a $1 per day might be rewarded more, even if the total amount of increased earnings across all users is less than a 10% increase.

A parallel example in a societal system that helps illustrate the ethics behind such reasoning is something like the high pay that surgeons enjoy. Surgeons, in most countries that I’m aware of, get paid a lot more than average. This was thought by Rawls to be justifiable if three conditions are met. One is that the salary incentivises people to become surgeons. Two is that all people in society, no matter how poor, can potentially enjoy the benefits of the existence of said surgeons (universal heathcare, deal with it!). The third is that all people have equal opportunity to try to become a surgeon - that a place in the profession is decided by merit and skill rather than how rich your parents are. That people are able to enjoy surgery when they need it is a bigger benefit for those on average-low incomes than a slight increase in purchasing power that comes from the economic flow-on effects of surgeons spending their generous pay-packets in the local economy, though both consequences are important. We are talking about social media though, and whales are not surgeons!

So how can such an egalitarian approach to wealth/benefit distribution in a cryptocurrency-powered social network be supported? I’ve spent months pondering this. Clearly, even without the existence of multiple accounts, such a network, (assuming it has a less kafkaesque signup process than steemit) would be flooded with with millions or even billions of individuals drawn by the lure of relatively easy earnings and/or visibility in the attention economy.

My somewhat speculative answer is, of course, advertising and influence. No serious corporate or institutional advertiser, political party/candidate, or budding social media influencer is going to spend millions of dollars buying into a token so they can get the attention of a few hundred thousand people. But will they spend serious money to get the attention of a billion people? That strikes me as more plausible.

All this hinges on the buy-in and mass adoption of the token being sufficient to raise demand to levels where even though rewards that the network’s basic users are fractions of a token, the token is worth so much that even small fractions of it translate to an attractive amount of utility - either as social/attention, purchasing power for goods and services, or exchange into a fiat currency where necessary.

All of this might seem counter to certain free-market ideologies and ideas about how wealth should be owned and transferred. Not everyone agrees with either the ethics or economics of the surgeon example. It’s also true that full societies and social networks may be disanalogous in important ways that I’ve glossed over here.

But as I say, I would bet that a social network with a relatively egalitarian approach to how the reward/incentive pool is distributed, provided that multiple accounts can be efficiently excluded, assuming that it’s signup process isn’t unduly onerous, and assuming that the tokens are not too difficult to cash out, would attract an enormous number of signups.

Am I right? We’ll have to wait and see. Will ONO be this network? It is too soon to say. But, on my reading of the whitepaper and observing @onosocial, I suspect that the designers and founders have at least had some contact with these sort of ideas. And if it’s not ONO, it will be another network. I can’t be the first person to have made this connection - the only question is who will be the first team to make it work in practice.

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