Current state of social networks: Broken in many ways
Over the last decade we’ve grown accustomed to all sorts of different social networks. Some of them make emphasis on sharing images, some on videos, some expand on instant messenger idea. Most networks allow users to organize content into some sort of objects and most also experiment with ephemeral content. Despite the variety, all established networks suffer from three main problems: lack of original content, lack of user interaction and proliferation of fake news.
The concepts of following and likes, created more than a decade ago are starting to hurt the user communities of large social networks. Broadcast-type networks became a place for flame-wars, where users do not talk to each other, they talk against each other. Messenger type networks, although very useful for one-to-one one-to-few communication are becoming nothing more but a medium for re-sharing memes. Blog-type networks serve as an amplifier for broadcasting the views and opinions of a few super-users with hundreds of thousands of followers. Their posts routinely collect millions of likes thanks to the herd-mentality of the users who add likes to anything that already has many likes. They are also favored by the news feed algorithms as more ads can be inserted into such content. As a result, they drown out any content posted by less popular users, no matter how unique and interesting that content might be. Healthy conversation becomes simply impossible.
Most of these established networks have very little respect to user’s privacy, they do not let their users control what happens with the content they upload. Often even basic restrictions on who and for how long can see the published content cannot be controlled by the user. Social networks also amass huge amounts of information about each user – the information a user cannot control or even view – and sell it to third parties. Several high-profile scandals involving largest social networks were all over the news in 2018 and the repercussions are still not over.
But most frustrating part is that all established social networks blatantly exploit and monetize the content produced by their users, while keeping all generated profits to themselves.
Decentralized social networks
Recently, several new social networks have appeared (or announced their development) that move away from traditional idea of storing user generated content centrally, in a datastore fully controlled by the creators of the network. Instead some use blockchain technologies, some use IPFS. In all cases, the creators of the network do not control the nodes on which the content is stored and there are multiple copies of each piece of data stored in the network. This leads to several effects:
- Such decentralized networks are not controlled by a single entity, are difficult to shut down and are more resilient to censorship.
- Information cannot be deleted from such networks. Although the former is generally considered to be a good thing, the latter is not.