Over the past two decades, social media has grown into a global force, allowing users to share ideas, create content, get information, and build communities on these digital platforms. The rise of social media has greatly impacted the society we live in today, giving everyone a chance to have their voice heard and actions experienced as never before. The digital information age is here. And it is here to stay!
Nonetheless, the current model of social media on Web2 has some issues that prevent the users from fully enjoying the global social media experience. The major problem arises from the lack of ownership of content and personal data. Most of these social media platforms do not allow users to monetize their data, attention, or media. Simply, the big tech company, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and others on Web2 take up large amounts of multimedia from you, without you getting anything in return.
Notwithstanding, these Web2 social media platforms have a long list of ‘Terms & Conditions’ while signing up to a platform. While signing “Yes, I accept” to these T&C’s, most users have no idea what they are agreeing to, which gives the big tech firms permission to use the data collected without disclosing who or how they are disclosing your information. This raises a case of lack of transparency from the big data firms.
Lastly, social media thrives on taking up your data and selling it to third parties, or manipulating the data into an algorithm to market products and services to you. The users’ data is sold to third parties without their consent while receiving nothing in return.
Decentralizing social media in the Web 3 realm
Since the turn of the year, we have witnessed the rise of decentralized social media platforms that aim to solve the problems facing Web 2 platforms. Apart from solving the problems discussed above, these decentralized platforms will also minimize cases of censorship, which has become rather apparent across all social media platforms.
Hosted by the layer-2 scalability solution, Polygon, Creaton is one of the leading decentralized social media platform building solutions for the Web 3 industry. The platform aims to preserve users’ data, provide low gas fees, fast transactions and retain ownership on their platform. According to its website, Creaton is a decentralized, subscription-based content sharing platform that enables creators to distribute their content to fans directly on the blockchain.
The platform enhances the decentralization properties of its platform by replacing the underlying building block of a subscription service with a decentralized protocol.
Creators on the platform will be able to mint their media (photos, ideas, music, videos, etc.) on a non-fungible token (NFT) contract and own the NFT. However, most NFTs are limited to 100 MB file size, meaning not all media can be directly minted on an NFT. To enable more content to be posted on its platform, Creaton has partnered with Arweave, a decentralized content storage solution. Creators’ content is encrypted when it is uploaded, and fans who subscribe to the channel can decrypt it, using NuCypher technology, and view it.
The rise of decentralized Web 3-based projects has been nothing short of exciting. Creaton aims to offer better solutions to the industry by combining the benefits of the centralized platforms without the drawbacks. One of the issues that decentralized solutions are yet to crack open is subscription services to build a creator-first platform, well, until Creaton.
The platform introduces subscription payments to the creators via a partnership with Superfluid, an Ethereum-based protocol that allows users to use crypto to handle their cashflows. The platform helps in the continuous and real-time settlement of subscriptions, salaries, rewards, and any composable stream of value. Fans on Creaton sign up and pay through the decentralized system in real-time instead of monthly, which provides the creator continuous income from fans and subscribers’ payments are spread out instead of hitting monthly.
A decentralized governance system
Unlike Web 2 social media platforms, Creaton also gives users a voice to make decisions on the upgrades and updates made on the platform. Applying a decentralized governance model, Creaton leverages DAO functions to govern the platform, with subgroups (crews) forming to govern different elements of the platform. Initially, there will be the Development Crew and the Social Crew. These will be progressively split to have crews that focus on more specific tasks like Front-End and Smart Contract development, a statement from the team reads.
To participate in the governance of the platform, Creaton users will need to stake $CREATE, the platform’s native token to generate governance tokens. The governance token will help with coordinating funds, setting up proposals, and rewarding contributors and creators.
Final words
Despite being around for almost half a decade, decentralized social media platforms are just coming onto the scene. As attention turns towards this industry, more funding is expected to flow into, giving the platforms and projects resources to grow. With the never-ending censorship on Web 2 social media platforms and lack of transparency, decentralized social media platforms will be the solution to giving users ownership and control over individual data.
