Knowledge is power. – Francis Bacon
Actually, knowledge is not only power but also wealth and value. It is the fuel that drives society forward. The pioneers of knowledge have always been respected and greatly rewarded since ancient times.
After the Internet wave in the 21st century swept the world, it is not the privilege of elites only to create knowledge. In contemporary society, ordinary people can express their ideas and values through social networks. People edit entries on Wikipedia, answer questions on Quora, offer courses on YouTube, disseminate information quickly on Facebook, and so on. The Internet has become a sea of knowledge, where the wisdom and creativity of ordinary netizens can be perceived in its “waves”.
But here comes the problem: While people are diligently contributing their knowledge, what have they got in return? The ancient law of “knowledge gains wealth” is now facing unprecedented challenges, that is, knowledge producers nowadays can hardly make any profit.
The Exploitative Centralized System of Traditional Social Media
The problem does not lie with knowledge producers, but with social media. Traditional social networks have highly centralized structures which directly affect the interests of knowledge producers:
First, social media monopolizes production materials. On nearly all social media (Facebook, WeChat, etc.), users create a lot of information like publishing photos and updating status. Such information will attract the users’ friends to like, forward or comment the posts. The spontaneity of content production by these users ultimately contributed to the prosperity of the platforms.
However, all production materials belong to these centralized platforms. On the one hand, social media can use such information to accurately place advertisements on users and obtain huge profits from them; on the other hand, there is no material incentives for content producers, who then end up gaining nothing back.
This contradiction can be easily perceived in all types of social media. A typical example is Q&A community which relies on quality questions and answers from its users to bring browsing flow, valuation, and revenue. The respondents found themselves spending a lot of time and energy, but without equal returns or even respect. The slogan “Knowledge Pays” has been put up for many years, but the platforms are rapidly developing whereas most content providers still have no income. This is undoubtedly extremely unfair.
Second, the reward mechanism of social media is extremely unfair. In the current social media ecology, the reward mechanism only works for the ones being paid attention to. This is a pyramidal structure where a handful of top users (Big V, KOL, etc.) produce premium content, capture a large number of fans, and realize such flow value in various forms. However, the time and attention spent by the ones paying attention (99% ordinary users) did not receive any feedback. After this structure becomes stable and relatively solid with top-level KOL, ordinary users’ enthusiasm will continuously decline. There is not yet an effective solution to this problem.
As a result, most knowledge producers and general users promoting knowledge flow have become the exploitation targets of the centralized social media networks. They create and disseminate knowledge, contribute flow and funds to a small number of KOLs and social platforms, but they either have none or very modest reward. One hundred and fifty years ago, capitalists exploited the labor class at will. After a century and a half, the social platforms have become the contemporary “sweatshops”, taking advantage of the general public.
It is time for people to get back what belongs to them.
Decentralized Blockchain Social Networking: Returning the Power of Knowledge Back to the Public
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for decades to crack the old system and restore fairness and justice. The blockchain technology born in the wave of new technology has brought up the great concept of decentralization, which is fundamentally transforming our society. String Chain emerges as the time requires.
String Chain is a project based on ONT (ontology network) infrastructure development, which provides problem-solving and algorithm optimization for social media platforms through blockchain technology.
— String Chain White Paper
String Chain is created based on decentralization. Contrary to traditional social networks: users of String Chain can completely control their own data and decide how much privacy to be made public. Users will be rewarded to update status, articles, and pictures. The value of their produced knowledge can be easily realized.
String Chain can solve the problems of social media through three functions: identity authentication, privacy confirmation, and quantitative behavioral incentives. String Chain can provide technical support to promote the transformation of traditional social platforms, and can also help the new decentralized platforms with infrastructure development. All internet products with social characteristics can become part of String Chain ecology through DApp.
Regarding the aspect of behavioral incentive, String Chain rewards the users who spend time producing content in the social platform (DApp) with digital tokens. String Chain is designed with sophisticated behavioral quantification functions to measure users’ output as fair as possible and reward them according to the output. Through smart-contract technology, the incentive distribution of String Chain cannot be tampered with, which is highly efficient and reliable.
For example, Lucian spends a lot of time each day browsing a Q&A community developed by String Chain. He often praises and comments on good answers, and often writes high-quality answers. Over time, Lucian has accumulated a lot of tokens in DApp. These tokens can be used for shopping in other DApp stores and can also be converted into mainstream digital currencies. Although Lucian is not considered a “big V” in this community, the revenue he receives from the community is already close to his full-time job income.
Why is String Chain capable of this? In essence, decentralized social platforms have no controllers nor monopoly. No one has the ability to exploit the knowledge producers. The vast majority of users create and disseminate knowledge within the platform. The value of these actions will be back-feeding all the contributors, not just a few KOLs or capitalists. This is a highly fair and competitive market mechanism, and also an ideal model for the liberal economy in social media.
Reform and Innovation: String Chain Leads Social Network into a Decentralized New Era
String Chain is the practice of decentralization and blockchain technology in the social media industry, which guides the traditional social network to a new era. Initially, some small and medium-sized social platforms will use Sting Chain to transform themselves; over time, more and more users will realize the benefits of decentralization, and the monopoly of traditional social giants will start to collapse; in the end, existing social giants will have to reform themselves through embrace decentralization and String chain to deal with user loss.
This process may be slow at the beginning, but it will gradually speed up. Decentralization is the best solution to the realization of social network knowledge, and it is also the internal demand of the entire market. One day, social networks will be fully decentralized, and String Chain then will become one of the most valuable blockchain technologies of our time.
String Chain official website: www.string.global
Whitepaper:
English version: http://www.string.global/String-Chain-White-Paper-EN.pdf
Chinese version: http://www.string.global/zh-cn/String-Chain-White-Paper-CH.pdf
Telegram Group:
English: https://t.me/StringChain_EN
Chinese: https://t.me/StringChain_CN
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, iStockPhoto
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