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Web3 Social Protocol

Guo Liu

Matters Lab

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4/14/2022

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Content

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  • Problem & opportunity
  • Case studies
  • Designing social protocol for a community

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https://nonfungible.com/market-tracker

https://www.statista.com/statistics/730876/cryptocurrency-maket-value/

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http://www.electome.org/

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Social Media

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The illusion of public space and agency

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Credit: Alamy

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Problem & opportunity

​

How should a social media work?

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Credit: Joel Monegro

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Content

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  • Problem & opportunity
  • Case studies
  • Designing social protocol for a community

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Return data to the owner

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Decentralize data storage

“Information Wants To Be Free…”

– Stewart Brand

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  • Distribute by gossip protocol, discovery locally
  • Peer to peer, no global singleton
  • Social graph = network topology = web of trust

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Secure

Scuttlebutt

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  • Content addressing
  • Routing & peer discovery
  • Data verification
  • Dynamic data stream
  • Social graph spec
  • Indexers & GraphQL API

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  • Operations on the social & content graph are stored off-chain as files
  • File url is stored on-chain as events
  • Operations are aggregated by indexers to server frontend

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Object-orientation in networks

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Assetize information

“... Information also wants to be expensive.”

– Stewart Brand

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  • Profile NFT: profile writing access
  • Follow NFT: reading access to the content feed of a profile
  • Collect NFT: reading access or additional rights to a piece of content
  • Mirrors: on-chain references and curation of content

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Content

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  • Problem & opportunity
  • Case studies
  • Designing social protocol for a community

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The case of matters.news

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Starting from ground-up

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fair & secure

token

economy

software

architecture

governance

decentralized

minimized

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Revenue

  • Direct content monetization: donation, subscription, paywall
  • Attention economy: advertisement, paid ranking

Split

  • Staking + Voting
  • Graph Analysis

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Attention is resource collectively created,

not commodity privately traded

Designing attention economy is

designing distribution and taxation of public resource

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Building contribution graph

develop

host

author

initiate

read by

participated by

author

author

author

read by

participated by

participated by

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SourceCred

🧮 Cred

  • Retroactively calculated from graph analysis
  • Non-transferable, but determines distribution of Grain
  • Calculated continuously

🌾 Grain

  • Transferable digital currency
  • Issued periodically based on Cred
  • Used for boosting initiatives

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SourceCred

🌾 Boosting Initiatives

  • Prediction market for tasks
  • Optimize incentives for tasks
  • Decentralization of management

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author

?

boost

boost

boost

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What data needs to be publicly on-chain?

token

economy

software

architecture

governance

smart contract

  • Contribution graph: authorship, response, donation, follow, etc.
  • Prediction market for tasks
  • Tokenized public resources