From "Manure Digger" to Web 3.0: Why is it said that social token platforms are the prototype of Media 3.0?

This article was published on ChainNews, author: Multimyst, Chief Researcher at Cyberight Capital, translation: 0xmiracle.

Ours is a government of liberty, no man is above it, no man is below it, we must treat each man on his worth then merits as a man.

------Theodore Roosevelt (25th President of the United States)

Many people do not understand the so-called innovations of blockchain, which seem to be just pump and dump scams. However, I believe that the decentralized and permissionless environment provided by blockchain creates a possibility for humanity to explore a future utopia.

This article will use the Social Money sector we invested in as an example to gradually clarify our judgment on the future direction of the world.

At Mount Rushmore National Memorial, there is a masterpiece representing 20th-century human sculptural art, which is Mount Rushmore. The people chose four presidents as symbols of the nation: George Washington, the leader who founded the country; Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence; Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves; and Theodore Roosevelt.

The greatness of President Roosevelt also starts with Rockefeller. Since the United States became the world's largest economy in 1984, the economy has been growing rapidly. However, in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt implemented a series of government regulatory measures, marking the first time in a country advocating free competition that such regulation targeted trusts, with Rockefeller being the creator of the Standard Oil Trust.

In just ten years, Rockefeller transformed the Standard Oil Company into the Standard Oil Trust, which spanned the entire United States. With an extremely large market scale, Standard Oil had enough leverage to negotiate with oil producers and oil transport railroads, successfully lowering the cost of oil. This was a time of economic prosperity and technological advancement, known as the Gilded Age in American history, but it also saw a worsening wealth gap, monopolistic giants, and rampant gang activity. Amidst public discontent, social reflection and criticism grew increasingly intense.

Trusts often resorted to unscrupulous means during their expansion. The market managers of Standard Oil openly threatened small gas station owners who relied on gas sales and grocery profits, stating that if they did not sell Standard Oil products, they would open a grocery store next door and sell at cost (meat, cereals, sugar, coffee, etc.) until they drove them out of business.

"As Rockefeller walked his path, he left behind a trail of bankruptcies and abandoned factories; what lay before him was only the undeniable control of enormous wealth resources." A scholar wrote this at the time.

The reason monopolistic giants dared to be so brazen was primarily because the government (regulatory agencies) was manipulated by them.

Muckraking was a term "bestowed" during the Progressive Movement on journalists who vigorously exposed political corruption. However, by the early days of World War I, most muckraking magazines had disappeared, and those that remained did not continue the exposure movement. The reason was that as the corruption was increasingly revealed, it directly challenged the core interests of the regulators.

Returning to Our Today's Topic

In the era of Media 1.0, all the information you see was merely readable and monopolized. Just like the newspapers and news you see. Just as Murdoch owned enough telecommunications companies, his daughter ranked first in the published "100 Most Powerful Women in Britain," while Queen Elizabeth II ranked 89th.

The birth of self-media on the internet successfully impacted the traditional telecommunications monopoly, but this was merely due to the improvement of productivity and did not revolutionize the production relations. In China, there is a company called ByteDance, whose products use intelligent recommendation algorithms to become a leading player in that world. However, in the United States, an app called Digg has already disappeared.

The CEO of Digg stated in a media interview that some advanced users were able to effortlessly control Digg's homepage (manipulating the recommendation algorithm), while the Digg team lacked the technical ability to solve this problem. The Digg team merely drove away those advanced users through various means, achieving a temporary victory, but in doing so, Digg lost its most loyal users.

This is a monopoly on another level, where KOLs monopolize the app, preventing new original users from being discovered. And algorithms always have loopholes; compared to real monetary voting, the cost of vote manipulation is always lower.

Borrowing from DAO Haus's Medium image, the problem with centralized institutions is that the top will take away the vast majority of profits and will prevent the emergence of new competitors.

Web 3.0 and Radical Markets

With the publication and groundwork of the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" in 1993 and the "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996, radical markets emerged as another solution to resist monopolies and maintain fairness, reducing the monopoly of private assets through the Habermas tax, meaning your bargaining power is determined by other competitors in the market rather than stemming from your monopoly.

The Era of Media 3.0

Therefore, we believe that platforms like Rally are actually prototypes of Media 3.0. We will analyze why we think this from four perspectives: readers, platform operators, KOLs, and new content creators.

Readers: Two Motivations.

Readers' Search for Existing Quality Content

By seeking out the highest value users in a specific field and reading their content, if they find that the content value does not match the token price ranking, it will not bring any extra benefits to the manipulators.

Discovery of New Content Creators

By discovering quality authors and purchasing their social money, readers can enjoy the benefits brought by the authors' recognition by the public.

Platform Operation: Fat Protocols and Thin Applications.

Platform Tokens: By designing platform tokens with SocialToken's AMM trading pairs, it effectively gives the platform tokens SocialToken as a foundational value support. If a project wants to raise prices, this will become a natural Habermas tax.

Old KOLs

The only issue with blockchain is how the earnings of the top are lower than those of centralized monopolies. Decentralized media platforms will not prevent top players from taking business deals, as long as they can ensure the output of quality content while also engaging in excellent commercial promotions, it actually forms a virtuous cycle and does not diminish user experience.

Discovering New KOLs is Their Only Task

The ability to effectively discover new content authors is what distinguishes Web 3.0 from 2.0, and readers also hope to see new content that resonates with them, breaking through their information cocoon, thus reaping both content and wealth by purchasing the authors' social money early on.

In the East, my LPs told me about a very interesting project, Matataki. Restricted by the securities laws of that ancient continent, they adopted a method of separating content and economic platforms, allowing users to synchronize their creations on GitHub (Radicle) directly, using the platform merely as a protocol layer tool to filter quality content producers, easily completing the entire revolution in the media industry.

The old king is dead, and the new king must rise. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Economic Policy allowed the tangible hand of the platform and the invisible hand of the user market to jointly regulate the entire content ecosystem, creating a vibrant content nation.

Muckraking: The muckraking movement was initiated and promoted by a group of "muckrakers." They were a group of American writers before World War I who aimed to reform and engage in exposé literature, ruthlessly revealing and criticizing the political corruption, industrial monopolies, commercial fraud, and the resulting social suffering caused by the rapid development of American industry.

Trust: A trust is a higher form of monopolistic organization, usually referring to companies producing similar goods or closely related in production, which merge comprehensively from production to sales to obtain high profits. Although the participants in a trust are independent companies, they lose independence in both legal and production/sales aspects, with all business and financial activities concentrated under the control of the trust's board. The original companies become shareholders of the trust and distribute profits according to their shareholdings. Trust organizations have the functions of all joint companies or group companies, making them a more advanced form of monopoly than cartels and syndicates, with considerable tightness and stability.

Web 3.0: Web 3.0 makes individuals sovereign, with true sovereignty meaning owning and being able to control who profits from a person's time and information. The decentralized blockchain protocols of Web 3.0 will enable individuals to connect to the internet, allowing them to own and receive appropriate compensation for their time and data, thus transcending exploitative and unjust networks.

Radical Markets: Focused on designing the economic and political rules of the mainstream society, aiming to deconstruct and reduce people's reliance on centralized authority, they refer to this centralized authority as "Radical Markets." Traditional private property tends to create and perpetuate uneven power, with a few wanting to monopolize resources tightly in their hands, rather than deploying and applying resources to the most suitable places. A more authentic and radical free market would create larger competition and equality through the widespread use of auctions and co-ownership of property.

Habermas Tax: Simply put, this rule will make you pay a price for valuing your property. If you estimate low, the matching price proposed by others will also be low, and they can directly buy your property. If you estimate high, the tax you need to pay will also be high, thus achieving balance and encouraging everyone to objectively assess their property.