Can web3 rescue creators from content prisons built by big tech?
My father worked for the Government for 35 years. The assumption at that time was that the longer you are in an organization, the more important you become. By the time I started working, this assumption became laughable. Loyalty and experience didn’t pay as a good a dividend anymore as skill-building and networking did.
I cannot stop thinking about this analogy whenever I think of the situation of social media content creators today.
For long, the assumption was that if you spend a lot of time creating content on one platform, get enough of your content out there, and build your network and followership, you can reap the rewards for life. This assumption is getting shattered as we speak.
The rise of the autocratic content dictatorship
Q&A social media platform Quora recently started collapsing answers (where the answers are no longer featured under the question) without giving any intimation to the author and no way to appeal the action. This caused a lot of popular writers’ answers to collapse. Many of these answers were more than 5 years old, had thousands of views, hundreds of comments, and upvotes. In fact, you as an author will not even know that your answer has been collapsed!
Why did Quora find this content suddenly unacceptable? The intent is very clear — if there are too many answers for a question, why will new users want to answer them anymore? It didn’t matter to Quora that these were the writers who played a critical role in building the platform.
The whole idea of social media was built on the premise that the longer you stay on the platform, the more benefits you reap as a creator. But now big tech social media platforms have decided otherwise. Your content or even your profile might be deleted or de-prioritized if it is not aligning with the platform’s monetization policy.
Social media platforms — the giant middle man of content
The whole idea of crowdsourced content on social media was built on two pillars — network and followership. You bring in your network on the platform and then you engage them with your content. If you do a good job, you get rewarded. At least, that was the promise.
But then in the last few years, things changed — many of the social media companies have been forced by stakeholders and investors to show real profits. At the same time, content multiplied. Millions of people have become Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok creators now. So the platforms started managing all this content in ways that’s most efficient for them to make money.
Today, even if you have a million followers, it's not a guarantee that you can reach them whenever you need. The Social Media platform playing the middle man will decide when and how you can reach your own audience.
The concept of followership has become one giant myth
For example, a quick look at your LinkedIn feed you’ll realize that 30% of your feed is sponsored ads, another 30% is popular content on the platform from LinkedIn Influencers (which you can pay to be a part of). Another example is Youtube where creators today are forced to create more and more content if they were to be featured by the platform’s algorithm. Technology platforms are effectively forcing creators to adopt behaviors that make the most sense — brand-wise and monetarily, for these platforms.
Can Web3 release creators from this content prison?
Today our content and data are at the mercy of big tech- they can sell them to whomever they want, they can expose them to anyone whose interests is not aligned with ours, and they can delete our content and block our profile whenever they want — with very less explanation or consistency about their rules.
Big tech has put us all in their content prison. Is there a way out?
If there is one, Web3 is going to play a huge part in this. It’s time for a future where individuals don’t rent real estate from big tech and are thereby forced to be evicted anytime they want. For a more democratic media, creators and users need to own the real estate where their content resides at!
For example, what if users can store content and data that they generate on any app on their own blockchain modules? Similar to how Google provides authentication services, blockchain-based data storage companies can provide services where any app can access the user’s self-owned blockchain to read and write data. This way all the user-generated data will be saved only on the user’s blockchain, not the platform’s. This way, the user not only has control of the data but can also revert access to her blockchain for any app at any time she wants. The user — as a creator and data producer, will own her data. Even if she provides access to a particular app, she can revoke the access at any time, take all the data she generated and go to another app that provides better services. Sounds familiar?
The way forward
Traditional media held the power of deciding what people get to hear. Social media brought that power back to millions. Now, the balance of power has tilted heavily towards Big Tech. Big tech platforms have become the new power arbitrators in our fight to democratize media. It's not going to be long before creators shift to platforms that provide more control to their content and network.
When social media evolved, the concept of digital content creators was still evolving. The only focus for innovation at that time was how to get people to interact and share. Now, the next evolution of the internet has to consider the needs of these modern-day content creators.
People are going to go where content creators go. And good content creators are desperate for a way out, right now!
Harry builds tech-based extended cognition to aid in emotional processing at Konvos
