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Twitter investor Fred Wilson and V God jointly voiced: It is time for centralized social platforms to be "protocolized"

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Will protocolization be an inevitable path for social platforms?

Recently, the news that the president of "Pretty Country" has been blocked by media including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram has caused a lot of noise.

The protagonist's false statements about the new crown epidemic, election fraud and many other events are indeed worthy of criticism, but what is surprising is that, except for many social In addition to the media, even platforms such as game live broadcast platform Twitch, e-commerce Shopify and payment platform PayPal have joined the "de-DT" action.

After the title ban incident was further fermented, discussions about "We are Trump" and "Big Tech" began to increase, and even Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (V God) couldn't help it.

What does V God think about social media?

On January 12, 2021, V God broke his consistent "Twitter-minimization" principle and expressed his views on this matter on Twitter. He said Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (Jack Dorsey)'s ban on the president of the United States violated the principles of freedom and democracy (Dorsey was not elected), but at the same time, it was a victory for the separation of powers.

He argues that, in a way, there are benefits to having a space between social media and government control, where the presence of centers of power in both ensures that when one breaks down, the other can make up. But one point is very important: Twitter’s user base is not limited to Americans. In Eric Glen Weyl’s original words: Twitter’s “natural regime” does not apply to any country. Therefore, any “US”-centric Twitter There may be many problems with the governance model. (Rhythm note: E. Glenn Weil, political economist, chief researcher at Microsoft, known as "the prodigy of economics", Author of Radical Markets: An Economic Model to Overcome Inequality and Stagnation)

V God said that there is still a lot of randomness and inconsistency in the moderation declared by Twitter sex. For this problem, God V thinks he sees two interesting solutions.

One is to make Twitter itself democratic and legal: create a structured process with an appeals process, and a top review panel based in Switzerland (rather than the US), allowing users to vote on panelists .

The second is to make Twitter more like email (protocol), a protocol can have multiple interfaces. This pushes the issue of auditing to the interface layer, and many different interfaces may appear.

Screenshot source: Twitter

He also believes that a global medium for dialogue is valuable, and he worries that "default" political philosophies (both liberal democracy and others) will Push social media governance in a state-centric direction.

Cryptocurrency may have a role to play here, as a non-state-centric ecosystem capable of solving some thorny political-philosophical questions, but it is true that there are currently "certain challenges ".

After asking the question, V God also mentioned some good attempts, such as the decentralized social network peepeth, Kleros, and the reputation system that combines anonymity with durable reputation.

In addition to V God, recently, Fred Wilson, an investor in well-known Internet companies such as Twitter and Tumblr, and the co-founder of Union Square Fund, also expressed his views on this. Judging from the solutions proposed by the two , has the same purpose.

Twitter protocol can solve the problem?

On January 11, 2021, Fred Wilson published an article on the AVC website. He believes that Twitter has such a powerful force to ban accounts. See tweet."

He believes that we should be careful about our wishes, lest we go down the slippery slope.

“It’s been a long time since we moved from centralized applications to protocols.” He said that if Twitter itself were a protocol, Twitter could ban the president from using it, or ban his tweets . But the president can still use another Twitter interface, tweet on another Twitter, and so on.

It's not just how the web works, it's how email works too. Now that we have begun to move to such a platform, Fred Wilson called for it, and it is time to "force" the large centralized application or mobile application store to open to the outside world. "The longer we wait, the worse the situation will be."

Although in a different field, "making social media work more like email" is a similar plan given by V God and Fred Wilson.

In fact, many "protocol-based" applications in the early days of the Internet did not really take off, including Twitter in the early years, which was also very similar to a set of protocols, but later took another path and gradually became centralized , developed into a platform.

Nowadays, everyone has put the protocol back on the agenda, and began to praise the practice of e-mail Gmail. The reason is that the Gmail data is theoretically at the user’s disposal, and both contacts and email information can be exported completely. If Gmail is not satisfied with the user, it is easy for the user to take the data and change the Email client.

Of course, as a free client, users who use Gmail also tend to use Google's storage service to store their email data, and Google can also push some advertisements or make money in other ways.

As discussed in Rhythm's previous article "The World Hates Social Media Now", if an application like TikTok adopts an open source form, ByteDance behind it is just one of the development companies. Most of the functions are implemented by third-party developers, and all data on the platform is open and shared. Can this prevent being banned by a country’s regulatory agency?

Whenever there is a problem with a social platform, someone will always think of the beauty of a decentralized protocol. This return is even more necessary, especially at a time when this focal point has been "blocked" by many centralized social platforms.