Hello!

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIT'S TIME! Time to do some deep analysis!

The first 3rd party application built on top of DECENT Network is being developed. The official announcement was made on Monday. PUBLIQ is going to be a free of charge application for sharing digital content (specifically news and articles). By reading this sentence, one might think Steemit is going to have a competitor. Is it right?

PUBLIQ

PUBLIQ is going to have an approach similar to Steemit, but still different in some aspects. Content producers (specifically news and articles writers) will be rewarded. The official announcement states that rewards will be reputation based, which is a significant difference from Steemit.

@dan has already written amazing articles on Steemit regarding reputation based algorithms and its main challenges. The biggest obstacle I believe is managing to create an algorithm about something that is not owned by a person. Although we generally refer to reputation as something "owned" by someone, it is actually a perception on someone. Perception vary from person to person.

Let me give an example: What's the reputation of @dan? If someone gets to know Daniel Larimer well, this person will probably hold him to a high reputation. However, someone else might have a different perception and hold him to an above average reputation only. Maybe one believes @dan did an amazing job at BitShares, STEEM and is now moving on to EOS. On the other hand, another person might think different and might believe @dan should have not moved to other projects. Whose perception is right? Which one is @dan's true reputation? As we can see, reputation is not owned by Dan Larimer, but instead it is a perception that differs from person to person.

It is not impossible to create an algorithm for reputation, but the developers of PUBLIQ need to be aware of that and be careful not to let someone game the reward system. The official announcement declares: "reputation is built exclusively from the views and feedback of its readers". By reading that I suppose it will be something like a weighted average of ratings, where the weight is going to be given by the amount of DCT (just like vests on Steemit).

The official announcement goes a bit deeper at the following section: "PUBLIQ’s instant rewarding process encourages and incentivizes authors to share their talents with the world. Rewards are assigned on a daily basis to authors depending on their PUBLIQ Score, i.e. a reputation-scoring system created entirely from the readers’ views and feedback". PUBLIQ developers believe that: "This unique evaluation system will allow authors to be more fairly rewarded, as well as praised or celebrated for their good work".

The greatest innovation

In my opinion the greatest innovation will be the following: "PUBLIQ also offers an intermediary free experience to advertisers. Assisted by a proprietary algorithm which guarantees highly optimized placements, advertisers are granted direct and frictionless access to place their ads into the PUBLIQ ecosystem".

Conclusion

There are many social media platforms with different characteristics. Steemit is a one-of-a-kind social media, unmatched by any other platform. I am not saying this is the best. I am saying it is different and has some distinguishable merits.
PUBLIQ is clearly not seeking to be a social media platform (at least not for the moment, considering their announcement). Instead, it aims to be focused on a press model or article model, where good reliable writers can distinguish themselves. There will probably be less room for social interactions. Considering that DECENT focus on a platform for decentralizing digital content distribution instead of a social media platform per se, I believe there will be no competition here. There will probably be synergies between such writers and other content distributors and advertizers (DECENT-like) rather than social media interaction (STEEM-like).

You can read the full official announcement on the following URL: https://decent.ch/en/decent-network-introduces-publiq/

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment below any different thoughts on the issue.