Twitter, Musk and DOGE oh my
Reacting to the $43 billion bid from Tesla CEO Elon Musk for Twitter, Sam Bankman-Fried speculates that decentralizing social media may be good news for its bottom line.
Bankman-Fried envisioned ways Twitter could be monetized using Web3 technology, including adding display ads to the user interface and paying network fees with proceeds from sending tweets.
Decentralizing Twitter would be a massive step toward setting an essential precedent for user rights and freedom of speech. It's worth noting that this move could also help alleviate some pressure off the company by allowing them to focus more on what content deserves removal rather than being forced into decisions about everything posted online.
Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has set out to make a decentralized standard for social media. He appointed Parag Agrawal as head in 2019, and though it's not fully formed yet, some signs indicate where they may be going with this new project!
Move over Instagram because there's a new social media on the block! In February 2018, Polygon Blockchain launched its lens protocol, allowing users to post content and charge fees in Lenses. The founder says this could generate enough revenue for them not only to replace profit from posting data but also any other advertisements they may have currently running through Twitter or Facebook ads networks
"The underlying protocol charges something per message," he wrote. At around 500 million tweets per day and a rate of $0.001 for every tweet sent on the app, it would replace half their revenue! Bankman-Fried estimated that this new payment model could bring them back into profitability. If implemented correctly and with no increase in charging users, currently needed due to increased costs from other sources such as advertising or bandwidth usage by content providers like YouTube, which compete directly against us.
He also suggested that NFTs and cryptocurrency payments would be easy to add to the platform if Twitter were on a blockchain. And sure, "why not DOGE?" he said, referring to Dogecoin, ranked 11th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. But it doesn't have any tech experts or people in high places like Musk behind it, so maybe someone should take this idea seriously before they're left being forgotten among all these other coins.
Even though the Twitter thread was more of an experiment than anything else, it is clear that Bankman-Fried wants to see Twitter as decentralized. He says they are just "rambling thoughts" and don't intend to follow through with their ideas.
If tweets lived on a blockchain, users could choose who could decrypt and read them.
"Because the messages would be on-chain, users could control their data." This is an exciting prospect. It means anyone with programming skills can build their own Twitter UI."
The more users who enter the platform, Bankman-Fried said that he expected one interface to be used for all activities on his company's social media network. However, with multiple UIs available and different monetization policies per UI depending upon what type of content it is, this would allow people stern flexibility when browsing or post interacting within Twitter without being confined by just one viewpoint but choosing whichever flavor suits them best at any given time.
The future of Twitter is still up in the air following a reported hostile takeover bid by Elon Musk. However, one thing on his mind is the platform's missing features necessary for democracy; he says they don't sufficiently fulfill this "social imperative."
