Author: Maciej Olpinski(Maciej Olpinski is the founder and CEO of Userfeeds, a blockchain-based content platform, a startup from Poland.)
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The Metaphor of Newspapers and Search Engines
In the early 90s, when web 1.0 was still in its infancy, the most mainstream way to discover and find a new website was through online classified portals like Yahoo.We reused the content discovery experience we used earlier in the newspaper era and reused it on the Internet.When people read newspapers, they read the next article through the organized sections one by one. Although the Internet is a new medium, classified portals still use the old paper media.
The business model under this design is to allow users to stay on your website as much as possible, jumping between different sections. Thats how the newspaper works, and it has for decades. The web pages in the website seem to be just a piece of electronic virtual paper. So, giving these virtual papers a classified catalog seems to be the most natural way to find these virtual papers.
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the Google search engine for $1 million, but it failed. No one wanted to buy it.But these two people actually hid a big idea in the PageRank algorithm of the search engine: the Internet needs a new content discovery model-a search engine based on the mutual links between various websites, rather than a top-down category .But at the time, the idea was absurd. Of course, we now know they were right.
I think we are in a new wave of technology transfer. The new Internet—I call it the Economic Web—is slowly taking shape with the power of blockchain and decentralized technologies.
The blockchain can be regarded as a decentralized database, and the read and write permissions of this database are controlled by public and private keys in cryptography. You can find a ton of articles online discussing what exactly blockchain is, but for me,The significance of the blockchain is the same as that of routers, servers, and communication network protocols for the early Internet—they ensure smooth communication and exchange of data between computers. On the Internet, people have built a higher level of service, and finally allow users to communicate freely.
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token is a hyperlink between people
In my thinking model, token is a very critical and important part of the Economic Web.Tokens are to users what code is to computers - they are both a way of programming behavior.
Bitcoin has successfully proved that it is feasible to change the economic behavior of a large number of people through a simple token concept. You only need to gather people in the same network, and then let them pay each other for the network. It was found thattoken turns out to be a particularly efficient driver, because it takes advantage of many human weaknesses. After thousands of years of evolution, our brains have retained many instincts and intuitions - the fear of gain and loss, the desire for opportunities, the fear of missing out, the anxiety of regret, and so on.
As creatures, we are genetically programmed to seek and strive for more economic returns, and tokens amplify this.We create a set of token codes through programming, but tokens are programming us in turn.To incentivize a large group of users scattered all over the world to do a certain behavior through economic measures, a few years ago, you would need to go through the government or a giant multinational company to do it, but now, a 15-year-old who is slightly smarter Boy, with a computer, you can achieve the same effect with cryptocurrency tokens.The instinct and intuition in our human nature do not judge whether the so-called incentive is an apple hanging on a tree, a warehouse of company stocks listed on NASDAQ, or a cryptocurrency token that can be traded.People will do anything for a reward.
Economic Web (Economic Web), or Web 3.0, the network itself is still composed of people - but these people are now a group of people holding the same type of token,They are linked together by token ownership。
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A new web requires a new content discovery mechanism
History doesnt repeat itself, but it often rhymes. -Mark Twain
Looking at the picture above, you probably found:We dont have a native web 3.0 content discovery model yet。
This is the same problem that the internet had in the early 90s. A new wave of technology has emerged, but were stuck with outdated content discovery models from the old world.
Todays social networks and search engines are to the nascent Economic Web what Yahoos portals and catalogs are to the early Internet sites.
obsolete. And out of season.
Searching for any kind of token content on Facebook/Twitter or Google is like trying to browse other sites content on the Yahoo portal.
You will never get optimal results. Why?
Yahoo completely ignored the weight value of the hyperlinks between websites. Instead, they chose to manually edit the directory. Therefore, Yahoo has missed the opportunity to truly reflect the value of Internet content.original featuresIf you miss these original features, you will naturally not be able to capture the core indicators of the content, and if you manually select and edit the catalog, you will not be able to include the most valuable websites.Google captures and amplifies these original features through the PageRank algorithm.
Similarly, the current Google/FB/Twitter/Reddit completely ignore the weight value of token-based economic networks (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other encrypted currency networks) among each other. Therefore, the result of their ranking of this part of information and content is also inaccurate.
Want to see concrete examples?
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When you search on Google, the automatic completion keywords are actually the result of the search behavior of a group of decentralized interest communities.
Although the community of interests is not a new thing, the community of interests has historically been limited by geographical location and other factors, and the identities of stakeholders are fixed. That is to say, whether a person belongs to a community of interests,His relationship with this community of interests is relatively fixed.You can clearly judge who is currently a member of this interest community and who has withdrawn from this organization.
A decentralized and distributed community of interests is a unique product of an open cryptocurrency network based on blockchain technology.Tens of thousands of people can join this network at any time and become part of a community of interests. Moreover, the establishment of this kind of interest relationship can be completed without anyone noticing, and you dont need to tell others. It is very simple to join, just buy and hold a token; it is also very simple to quit, just sell all the tokens in your hand.
Once people choose to join a certain cryptocurrency network and become a community of interests, they will move towards the same goal based on the same consensus, and the ultimate goal is to make the token in their hands succeed and increase in value. The efforts of this kind of behavior include not only ordinary netizens posting a message optimistic about Bitcoin in the post bar, but also experts explaining to others why xx coins are the future and xx coins will fail in their technical blogs.
Thats right, tokens dont just let people burn a lot of electricity for no reason.
The token will also allow you to open your mouth and automatically say something online.
However, the ranking algorithm of the search engine has no concept of the incentive mechanism and interest relationship represented by these behaviors and voices, and is completely blank.Google will not calculate how many X coins you hold, and then count it into the ranking of a website. Facebook can recommend articles that your friends like, but it cannot tell you which articles have been liked by people who hold at least 1% of the same token as you.
And this problem is what we want to solve.
This is why we believe that in the new world of cryptocurrencies, a Google needs to be reinvented.
(Part 1 End)
