How Blockchain can save social networks from spam

Use case’ and the next generation of altcoins

The word of the moment is FAKE. Never has there been so much faking going on than today and it’s the Internet, and more precisely social media, that is driving this wave.The idea is ‘fake it till you make it’ and the Internet has exploded that concept creating a plague of ‘fake news.’ Fake views, fake likes, fake listens, fake follows, fake traffic and fake followers…

This faking is the new spam. It is piles of trash stinking up the Internet, its web content and its social byways. You don’t want to watch some faking YouTuber with their bloated zombie subscriber numbers and their bought million view videos of crud. You don’t want to be conned into following a fake twitter poster with their fake millions of fake followers pretending they are important and trying to cheat their way to attention.

What you want is the real thing. You DO want to watch a talented vlogger who has earned their millions of real followers with great content. The reason so much rubbish content has so many likes, follows and views is because it is fake to the bone.

Fake traffic is not only a bane for the user, it is also a bane for the advertiser that pays for the huge resources necessary to power sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The fake traffic is pure kilowatts of waste, a vandalism of our most valuable of resources of time and attention.

Blockchain solutions

It is a problem crying out for blockchain solutions. The beauty of blockchain technology and its application cryptocurrency is that - like social media - it is a bottom up driven platform that gains power from the so-called network effect. The more a network effect resource is used the more powerful it becomes (‘a phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional value as more people use it’ is the dictionary definition). In theory the value goes exponential and it is this growth that the parasites of spam and fakery feed upon, and it is this leeching that destroys much of the value that might be had if the parasites could be kept away.

Blockchain technology solutions can also be self-funding. Just like Bitcoin they can contain the mechanism that actually pays participants at all levels.

The Internet can be viewed crudely as computers+chat and a blockchain as computers+political structure. Due to this, social networks and blockchain technology are made for each other. This is because society needs a political structure to operate under otherwise systems break down into anarchy; something the modern consumer Internet sprung from.

Most Internet facilities were born out of political anarchy where features and products were created with an ‘anything goes’ attitude and then were slowly but surely policed into some sort of ordered community. Over the 25 years or so that the Internet has been in the wild, there has been a long steady transition from the anarchy of its beginnings to the more curated environment we see now. Yet the anarchy of the Internet still holds sway over much of the social media sites we use today. The hate speech, fake news, trolling, porn, extremism - much of what we despise - still bubbles near the surface of all the multi-billion dollar Internet stock darlings that rule the Nasdaq.

Blockchains can address these problems and add levels of order on to the case that you can take or leave and apply if you wish. This is technology that can use the community to curate for you, without the heavy-handed filters and censorship of a central body.

Crypto coins need a “use case”

PlusOneCoin, which is a social media token, is part of a trend that will see blockchains being brought to bear on all kinds of hard problems like social media moderation, mediation and validation. Blockchain will spawn solutions wherever there are chronic problems of resource mediation. With a PlusOneCoin users can curate content, filter it and reward good content and content providers. However, it doesn’t have to censor, ban or mute, it can simply be a lens that a community can use to filter out the noise, or as the Internet companies like to call it: ‘low quality’ content.

A PlusOneCoin has a material value, so a vote with even a tiny fraction of a coin is still a barrier for fakers. While a click farm can register a million accounts in a few days and build up a zombie army of “likers”, followers and viewers, funding them with PlusOneCoin would cost huge money if those computer-controlled bots each had to carry a wallet of money.

You can buy a 1000 ‘real’ fake Facebook likes for $3, 3 cents gets you a YouTube subscriber, $15 for 1000 twitter followers… If you want to buy fake you can get it cheap and get a lot.However, a meaningful balance of PlusOneCoin affirmation is never going to be cheap and it’s a meaningful measure of content value. What is more, it pays the creator and rewards them for quality rather than spam. It’s a great “use case”.

Another digital currency based on social spam filtering and content validation - but this time focused on emails - is Earn.com. This network allows people to earn tokens by replying to emails and completing tasks. Once a user has created and had their public profile verified they can start to earn money by replying to email. The user connects their account to their Gmail, sets the price they want for their reply and can then bounce any unwanted/spam email messages.

You might have been on the other side of this when trying to send an email to a new contact… you go to message them and then get hit with a pay screen. If you opt to part with your cash you get a notification to say Joe Bloggs has received your paid message. They have seven days to respond and earn the amount they have set. You as the messager only pay if you get a response. Earning tokens yourself means you can reach out (free) to particular people on the network. Referring users means you garner more tokens when they complete tasks or send paid messages themselves. This has a strong use case in the quest to de-clutter and de-spam our lives via our inboxes.

Sola has a different take on social media audience and consumption. It isn’t so concerned with moderating or validation of content and it isn’t interested in follows or followers. It is a disruptor of mainstream social network platforms such as Facebook. Content created by Sola’s users isn’t confined to being shared with friends, connections, followers et al, it can be sent to people that have a specific interest in the topic covered in the content they’ve generated. In Sola’s own words: “It spreads information like a viral disease to the most interested users.” Of course this is limited to the Sola network… The publishers of quality content are rewarded with a ‘SOL’ token.

Obviously the success of the likes of PlusOneCoin and SOL depends on the audience size. PlusOneCoin already has an audience of four million; Sola claims 700,000+ users. These days crypto coins need a “use case”. This is where the next generation of altcoins will come to the fore and for investors this idea needs to be firmly on their radar. The coins that don’t have a use case and are just another Bitcoin clone will fail.

The use cases for a social media coin are many. They allow the content owner to get paid and they allow the platform holder to get paid too. The coin itself enables advertisers to see who is “real liking” valuable content and not just buying fake statistics to con the audience and the advertiser. Then with an audience of users familiar with using it, the coin can take on a life of its own as the core of an ecosystem.

Will blockchain kill traditional journalism?

Mining, blockchain efficiency and Internet costs

This is where mining also starts to come into play. People don’t like to spend their hard earned money on things they don’t need to, but with a minable coin users can mine them whether they are at their machines or not and put that intangible resource to work. Mining democratises the distribution of the value add of a blockchain. With mining everyone can benefit.

A lot of nonsense is spoken about the energy used by crypto coin mining. Bitcoin for example takes a tiny fraction of the energy used to mine gold every year and doesn’t involve tearing mountains down and dousing the earth with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cyanide. Then consider banking; HSBC alone has 4000 offices and 250,000 staff. Multiply that by perhaps 20 to get a global banking total and you can see that crypto coin mining is less likely to boil the seas away than the current banking system, which remains only one of many industries that will be slimmed down and made more efficient and accountable by blockchain technology.

The blockchain is not compulsory, it is compulsive though; it is the cost savings and the dramatic value add that makes blockchain so compelling. The decentralisation of this record keeping and its funding method proves to be simply cheaper than current methods and it is thereby inevitable that blockchains will increasingly pop up everywhere.

Social media as a genre is only just being understood and its impact across society is still only hazily considered. What is almost totally overlooked is the costs involved in running Internet products like Google. The costs are huge and underestimated. Google makes fat profits but it spends $70 billion in costs in order to obtain these, that’s 40% of the whole cost of the British health service in 2017. To provide its services it is spending $10 per person on earth a year, or very roughly nearly 5c a search. The costs of the Internet are truly titanic and blockchain and cryptocurrency are new tools in streamlining various aspects of this gigantic process.

Obviously blockchain is not a ‘fix all,‘ but its applications in complex areas of computing are dramatic. This is only magnified by processes with gatekeepers in the midst of these automated processes.

Facebook is hiring tens of thousands of people to try to keep tabs on posts. Why not put that on the blockchain and pay the users in PlusOneCoins for bringing bad actors to the attention of its teams? This would make community moderation something that pays volunteers to do it, in an adaptation where moderation becomes the proof of work.

This is the kind of thought Online Blockchain plc is having as it develops its PlusOne platform. The tools can be distributed, trustless and incredibly efficient for all manner of applications in the social media space. This would allow services like Facebook and Twitter to enable a blockchain and its community do the work, rather than hiring and letting loose an army of disengaged, low paid offshored workers on their precious community’s mainly innocuous content.

Another illustration is YouTube. The channel’s Ad-ageddon has seriously hurt its offering and that of their content providers. When the newspapers pointed out to advertisers that extremist material was being shown alongside their ads a boycott of many high-spending advertisers sent YouTube into a spin. It is easy to see how a blockchain system would work to encourage community moderation and leverage up an old-fashioned manual and algo review system. Not only could YouTube pay its community for caring in its own coin, but it could pay content producers in coin in addition to the fiat it already pays.The possibilities are endless.

Of course entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg are probably thinking “how can I make my own $250bn Bitcoin-like token?” Why wouldn’t a “Facecoin” be worth more than the $240 billion that Bitcoin is or for that matter the $750 billion that the whole scene is worth? Why wouldn’t the Googlecoin (now there is a global currency right there) be worth a trillion dollars? But it is also a way of enriching the users.

How will a Facebook-like service that pays you $1 a day to use its services do competing against the life sapping Facebook that pays nothing? Certainly it would captivate the cash starved young, for whom a $30 a month of extra pocket would go down a treat. How about Bing paying searchers in Bingcoins to search? What then Google?

The prospects are intriguing. Could every online product actually pay you to use it? That sounds impossible but then would you be amazed if a website gave you 20% off your next purchase or some points that were equivalent to money on your loyalty card or some cash back on your credit card? Of course you wouldn’t.

This is just the beginning of the blockchain revolution and only one thing is for sure: it is going to be huge.

Clem Chambers is CEO of ADVFN and Online Blockchain plc. His latest book Trading Cryptocurrencies: A Beginner's Guide - Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin is out now.