Today, we will be exploring the core concept of the technology powering the DTube platform: the social blockchain.
Over the past 2 years, the DTube team has been iterating its video platform and building Avalon, a new type of blockchain that allows users to earn token rewards for their social contributions.
Our vision is to re-create trustworthy social medias by replacing the targeted advertising business model (leveraging mass collection of personal data and increasing ad pressure) by a new tokenized economy based on social rewards and a gamified experience.
The social blockchain: Why?
Since the inception of Facebook 15 years ago, social networks completely remodeled the way people socially interact by sharing opinions, information or emotions with friends or celebrities.
However, following recent scandals, users and creators realized that major actors don’t fight for their interests anymore and have lost trust in their platforms:
- Privacy breaches and massive uncontrolled collection of personal data
- Inability to moderate content and fake news without censorship
- No transparency over revenue sharing or monetization algorithms, no control over suggested videos
A few platforms became so powerful in this field, nations even think about ways to limit their influence or increase their transparency.
Limits of the advertising model
Thanks to their massive audiences, social media platforms designed highly performant ad services by offering advertisers a cheaper, more impactful and more customizable advertising solution than traditional TV and offline medias.
However, the recent trends are showing a limit to this model: less revenue sharing with content creators, increasing ad pressure for viewers and concerns on the collection of personal data are creating user discontent. Meanwhile, automated moderation of user-generated content creates brand association risks for advertisers.
Platforms responded to these issues by tightening moderation which led to inaccurate censorship and unfair demonetization of users’ content but without significantly improving protection of advertiser’s brand image.
This situation creates the need for a new model that respects user privacy, can self-moderate content in an effective way without censorship which creates trust for all stakeholder
Our core values: the DTube Manifest
A new model: Avalon social blockchain
We designed Avalon social blockchain, a new socio-economic model for social medias built on 2 principles:
- Re-create trust with users by leveraging the power of maturing decentralized technologies
- Reward users for their contributions in a fair way with cryptocurrency tokens
Decentralized tech and open-source to recreate trust
Blockchain, decentralized infrastructures and open source software can re-create trust by offering data immutability (this defends against censorship), transparency (against corruption) and privacy (no need to collect personal data).
Reward social contributions
Collaborative models appealing to the community proved very successful over time by leveraging the power of user’s contributions (sharing goods or services, car-sharing, community reviews, open source code contributions, etc.).
In the social media space, platforms thrived by offering a direct relationship between users and curators (Reddit), video creators (Youtube), friends (Facebook), celebrities (Instagram), experts (Wikipedia), developers (Github), etc.
On DTube, users post, vote, comment and tag content. For each contribution, they may earn a reward in cryptocurrency tokens. Tokens can then be used either to promote content on the platform or exchanged against value (currencies, goods, services).
Avalon’s social blockchain introduces a new concept where contributors are rewarded for their social contributions
Blockchain principle
The base of this mechanism is an algorithm that creates and distributes cryptocurrency tokens to reward each participant for their contributions (posts, votes and tags). Each of these tokens bear a utilitarian value by generating voting power (VP) and bandwidth to its holder with time; The more tokens held, the faster the resource generates
With Avalon, social media evolves from 1 vote per person to 1 vote per token
Social blockchain on a video sharing platform: DTube
DTube is a video sharing platform built on top of Avalon (al. On DTube, users can post, vote and tag videos.
- DTube Coin (DTC) is a fully liquid and freely transferable crypto asset (expected Q3, 2019). It represents the value users can trade with each other
- Voting Power (VP) is the resource used to play the curation game. The curation game means users will spend their VP (i.e. influence) to post, vote and tag content in order to earn DTCs and influence content’s ranking on the platform. VP is not a tradable asset and has no value outside the DTube platform
Community self-moderation
In a world of disinformation and algorithmic moderation, community ranking proved the most accurate mechanism to rate and organize any kind of information on the web (restaurants, real estate, movies, etc.)
With Avalon, content is ranked exclusively by user’s upvotes, downvotes and tags. A popular piece of content (i.e. with lots of upvotes) goes up in its category to gain more exposure and a submission with a negative score is automatically hidden. Adult content is tagged “NSFW” and hidden by default;
All platform moderation guidelines come from a community consensus.
NB: As for DTube, our curation team overlooks uploaded content and complies in cases of a written and rightful take-down notice. We only had to take 20 actions in 2 years’ time out of 1 video uploaded every 3 minutes
Conclusion: inevitable shift from the old model
Although still very profitable, social medias need to renew their model to re-create trust with their users, stakeholders and better redistribute value to their giant ecosystems.
We believe the social blockchain model is a game-changer in this industry. DTube already has been followed by hundreds of other DApps. This is just the beginning and social blockchain is at the heart of it!
- Watch videos on D.Tube
- Read our Whitepaper
Join the party and contribute!
