Good Bye Psy Op, Hello Co-op: Why Twitter is a Perfect Example of How Web2 Social Will Die
…And what might replace it.
Okay, sorry for the gloomy, hyperbolic title. The web2 social behemoths probably aren’t going to die, but they are at a very interesting and precarious crossroads. And while my team at Brovember Rain, and thousands others like us are busy working on web3 community products and structures, this very situation provides an excellent case study.
With so many people suddenly choosing to leave Twitter, or deprecating data privileges, or being pushed off by harassment and chaos, we have a perfect example of how quickly things can go wrong at scale on a web2 social platform and why a decentralized web is valuable for community building and maintenance.
As we all know, the recent purchase and privatization of Twitter by Elon Musk has proven contentious at best. At first blush, the above-market purchase of a legacy social platform with a spotty earnings record and infectious toxicity issues seems like a dubious business decision. And because the acquisition LOOKS so odd, we’re all left to speculate on an ulterior motive for the purchase, and the long tail plans for a platform that already seems to be spiraling into operational chaos. On the surface, none of it passes the smell test.
All of this does not, of course, mean that the acquisition was necessarily nefarious or ill-advised. For all we know, there is a very real and well developed plan to improve Twitter and make it both palatable and profitable. Elon may quietly have the best intentions and might secretly have a brilliant roadmap for the product. But as always, we don’t know what we don’t know. And in the interim, things are messy and people are bailing.
Now, if you’ve read any pf my previous posts on the subject, you know that I already have a dim view of most major social platforms, and have some very developed (if not popular) ideas for improving them. That being said, it does seem like the bi-directional, extremist, psy op nightmare that is legacy Twitter has been purposefully extrapolated out into a unidirectional, extremist, psy op hellscape within the space of a week. The devil we know has evolved into a focused, angry, devil we don’t know. Impressive.
So it’s bad for everyone. But it’s REALLY bad for people and brands who have invested vast amounts of time and money in building on Twitter. And here’s how web3 could provide a better structure for social networks:
If your community (or business, god forbid) is built on, or heavily leverages a third party, cenralized, non-public utility platform, that platform owns your community. It owns your contacts, your comms, your interactions, your digital identities and the keys to your headquarters. That platform is a single point of failure over which you have no control. And if that platform chooses to end you, it has the ability and privilege to do so.
So for example, if we paint the current situation at Twitter in the most bleak (again probably hyperbolic) terms imaginable, we could present the following scenario:
You are part of large, distributed group that has spent years building a community on Twitter that both enriches the members of the community and the platform as a whole. It could be argued that your group has historically been the only thing keeping the Twitter platform active and vibrant during some very lean years. And despite all that you’ve done for the product, and built for yourself, one single billionaire, with an unfavorable view of your community based on ethnicity, religion, gender, political party, etc. could buy up all of the digital real estate and push your community out. And this is the best case. Just buy the company, can the board and silence you. In the WORST case, that billionaire could use all of your historical data and all of the reach of the platform to impact and endanger your corporeal, physical life with no repercussions whatsoever. Bad times for all.
If your community is a digital Co-op, however, it can self govern and self sustain. It is self-sovereign. In the case of decentralized community, it would be very difficult for a single person with a lot of money and a grudge to erase you, break up your relationships, abuse your data or gentrify your space.
And I should note that I like the term co-op better than DAO here, because a DAO implies that everyone has employment within the org, whereas a traditional co-op is self governed, but will typically have real infrastructure and full or part time employees to keep things running. If you shop at a co-op grocery, you know that you tend to get superior produce, but that doesn’t mean you have to work nights stocking (unless you want to). Let’s be honest, most of us are too busy for a DAO, but we all have the resources for a co-op.
And one more thing I should note in closing. Not once in this post did I use the term NFT, but yeah, the whole thing would be authenticated and managed with NFTs. If you want to know more about that part, subscribe!
