Content Consumption in the Web3 Era: The New Ecological Cycle and Tools of the Content Kingdom

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Original source:Mirror

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Ecological imbalance behind web2.0

When we pick up our mobile phones or open computer browsers today, most of our online activities are browsing and interacting with content. Most of the time we are consumers of content, and occasionally we are producers of content—with smartphones With the popularity of , creating a piece of content has never been easier. Anyone can record a short video, take a photo, write a text, and send it to WeChat Moments/Douyin/Weibo/Instagram/Youtube... Most of the services are free, just need to watch some advertisements; and For professionally produced content (PGC), we will also pay for platform membership, video site membership/music membership/novel membership...

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Is there a solution to this matter?

Some content producers have begun to abandon the platform and return to the old model of newsletter mail subscription, and control the channel of communication with the audience by themselves: accepting advertisements or charging a subscription fee, it is up to me to decide. The same logic is behind the rise of domestic private domain traffic, but compared to the general protocol of mailboxes that newsletter relies on, domestic private domain traffic still relies on platforms such as WeChat, and it must follow WeChat’s game rules.

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Improvement Phase 1: Value Feedback for Attention

Since the traffic or the user's attention has realizable value, can you give some of it back to the user? Since the browser is the window and bridge for users to contact the web, this job is very suitable for the browser to do. The Brave browser created by the founders of Mozilla has made such an attempt. They released a blockchain-based token: Basic Attention Token ($BAT). The project white paper is here https://basicattentiontoken.org/static- assets/documents/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePaper-4.pdf#/

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Basic Attention Token for Brave Browser

The model of "browsing the Internet can make money" may remind you of Qutoutiao, which is also to get gold coins by reading news, but the difference is that Qutoutiao only uses it as a new way to occupy the sinking market. Since the target is the sinking market, Qutoutiao has no intention of improving the content ecology, the flood of low-quality information, users do not get any value from browsing, and what they attract is cheap attention. In a benign attention economy, attention is first won through high-quality content, big advertisers are willing to put it in, good content creators are rewarded, and users can get more value.

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The second stage of improvement: users grasp content pricing power and unlock long-term value

However, each user's attention span is limited. The time spent on browsing in a day is only a few hours, and only a few advertisements can be viewed in an hour, otherwise it becomes an interruption again. For advertisers, the per capita customer acquisition budget is also limited. More importantly, "attention" is not just a kind of consumption. It is gone after it is spent. It is an investment on a longer time scale. This investment is not only a cognitive improvement in the individual sense, but also a human The wisdom and creative accumulation of this group. For example, you bought a ticket to see a movie, you may be inspired after watching the movie, post your interpretation in the fan forum, create your own work, or you may forget it after watching the movie, no matter what the result is, The ticket price is the same. The income earned by the film producer may be reinvested in a better work for the next film, affecting more people, or it may collect money to make a bad film, but when you buy tickets for the current film, it is unpredictable of. In other words, we are using money to express our support for favorite works, and this support will affect the future, but we cannot price future content, and it is difficult to price it according to the degree of likes (it is true that some people will re-read a piece repeatedly. movie, but the ratio is still too small)

So what if we are not paying to consume a work, but paying to invest in a work? For the same 50 yuan, what you buy is not just a movie ticket, but the right to use + a part of the ownership of this intangible asset. Some classics last for a long time, and its ownership will be more valuable. If you are influenced by it If you create a good work next time, you can enjoy double benefits: the price increase of the rediscovered classic work you "invested in", and the income from your own work. If your work affects other latecomers, the benefits will continue to increase-this is a chain-type layer-by-layer amplification effect, and the value that has passed the test of time will enter a positive cycle, no matter the content form is text, video, audio Or games... With blockchain-based NFT technology and smart contracts, the confirmation of rights and value of works becomes technically possible. A twitter feed, a video, a picture... have all been made into NFT, and the rights are permanently confirmed on the chain and cannot be tampered with.

Classics always inspire new classics: Lucas (director of Odaily Wars) and Spielberg honor their idol Kurosawa.

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The third stage of improvement: a creative free trade bazaar

Some people may say that most people go online to kill time, and content investors and creators are still a minority. Regarding this issue, we can look at the current constraints that may change from the two dimensions of space and time.

The first is room for expansion. In the content chain, there are communicators, commenters, organizers...every follow, like, and retweet promotes the flow of creativity, experience, and ideas, and new ideas are generated through collisions and exchanges during the flow. It’s just that the friction of this kind of flow is still too high now. Our data is separated into isolated islands by web2.0 services. If you post a recipe in Moments, only some friends can see it, and most people will not share the same recipe. The content is posted on Douyin, Weibo, bilibili, Xiaohongshu... Each one may have content with a value of 0.1 to you, but the current friction has caused that unless the value exceeds a threshold such as >100, it can Being seen by more people, a large amount of content that does not reach the threshold disappears from view.

One of the underlying reasons for the friction is that the current network is based on addressing (location based addressing), and this address is often under the domain name of a certain company: write an article in the background of the WeChat official account and upload it to Tencent’s For the server, Tencent assigns it an address under qq.com, and we access the webpage and open the content through the URL. With the help of blockchain-based distributed permanent storage technology, location based addressing can become content based addressing. No matter where a piece of content is sent, it has a permanent and unique address on the chain. With the development of AI technology, semantic Comprehension and machine translation will be more accurate, and maybe the content you posted a long time ago will be useful to someone who speaks another language somewhere on the planet at some point. Mirror uses arweave's on-chain storage technology, and each Mirror article has a permanent address at the bottom.

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Looks good, but is it too far off?

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2. Tools

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Cross-platform information subscription

As a former heavy user of Google Reader, I miss subscribing to various content sources with RSS, bringing them together, and spending some time every day to see the updated time. I can also understand why Google Reader was shut down, and the decline of RSS: how do you use an RSS reader to subscribe to someone's Facebook or Instagram feed? Not to mention that under the background of "mobile first", a lot of data is encapsulated into the App and cannot be accessed through external interfaces.

But in web3, many of the rules of web2 can be rewritten. So with the concept of socialFi, a team began to explore a decentralized social media platform based on the chain, allowing users to choose to store data on a distributed network, forming a social identity that does not depend on any company platform (there can also be multiple) . RSS3 is one of them. Through the service revery.so they provide, you can follow a person’s chosen public activities. Domestic social media also reached a cooperation with RSS3 immediately.

The revery.so service of the RSS3 team aggregates twitter, NFT, on-chain donations, event schedules, etc.

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Recommendation system based on encryption technology

Recommendations will still be the basic service of web3. After all, as long as there is information overload, effective ways to filter and discover information are needed. But the difference is that this is not at the expense of privacy.

Let’s first look at the current solution: someone has verified that Chrome’s “Private Browsing” is not really “Private”, and the fingerprint of the device’s model, IP address, etc. will still be recorded in private mode, and more importantly, what Chrome chooses to record , does not record anything, and the user does not have active control. But when your data and online identity are truly controlled by yourself, you can choose an open-source browser that does not record privacy at all. For example, Brave browser will regenerate a different user fingerprint every time you open it.

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Multi-wallet support and on-chain asset management

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Ad and Tracking Code Blocking: Decoupling "Content" and "Non-Content"

According to a New York Times analysis, the cost of loading "non-content" on a webpage now exceeds the cost of the content itself. Advertising codes and tracking cookies have nothing to do with content, but are necessary to maintain the ecological operation of web2.0, making web pages more and more bloated and occupying a lot of bandwidth.

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Security Related Tools

The encryption economy has been accompanied by various security attacks and defenses since its birth. In the world of web3, hackers and exploits of loopholes have never been lacking. Although the smart contracts on the chain are open source, most people don’t take a closer look at them. Some phishing contracts can quietly insert a “allow unlimited transfer to the other party’s account” in the contract, and then disguise it as a welfare project , to trick you into clicking "Agree".

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web3 is still in its infancy, whether it is application scenarios or solutions, it is still very simple and rough compared to the world of web2. But this is also the most interesting part of it-early web3 applications focused on "this is something that only web3 can do", rather than "we have what web2 applications have", keeping the simplicity of the minimum usable product, and It is fully callable and composable. With the continuous influx of builders, new gameplay and applications will emerge in an endless stream. We are witnessing a wonderful history of innovation.