I have two phones: a main one (family, close friends, daily stuff) and a work one (corporate, let's say), where I keep most of my social media accounts on the work device. One of my triumphs this year—I say this with pride—is my ability to spend less and less time on social media and more time writing things, even if most of those words will never see the light of day.
There is a reason why I spend less time, and that is, having done the corresponding measurement, I see that there are things where, with a glance of less than 10 minutes a day, I can already obtain all the information I need to start my day. I do this through a personalized curation of the topics that interest me. I also know where to nurture the value.
Between Facebook groups, Reddit communities, and other interesting forums, I begin to build a personalized algorithm, highlighted just for me. In fact, between memes and content, the community per se also perceives this value as such, given that you will consecutively see messages or comments like "this is how I want my algorithm," "I have built my algorithm with blood, sweat and tears," among other slangs. The market also recognizes it; in fact, to construct an answer, most AI nourish themselves from Reddit et al. communities in order to provide their results.
Today, the new creator economy is not just about building pieces of content (like this one) but also taking the time to consume everything I don't have time to do, synthesize it, and give me something pre-digested. It is the new market1.
Google, the First Curator
Let's think a step back to the solution Google brought to the internet table: a handful of scattered websites, like a library without a librarian, without indexes, without anything. You had to go one by one looking for the information you needed, and that lasted until 1998 when this was put to an end through a solution known as PageRank. This prioritized sites that were better built, that met certain requirements so that the ranking would be as human as possible, like a sort of available website curation—something similar to what most AIs do today.
For the work of acting as a text curator, Google decided to take a monetization model where it places advertising spaces in certain strategic places in plain sight, which can be exploited by companies to attract potential clients to their websites. Then Android, Google Maps, and Gmail appeared, among other services, and they were not random purchases. It’s just that when you visit whatever sites are related to Google, three things emerge:
- Google serves you ads that they say fit you best.
- The company pays a fee to be on that site.
- The company competes against others for the user's attention.
Google itself has explained on its platforms how the ad auction works because everything explained above comes with a reason: they're building a personalized curation for you.
Data mining as we know it was born from this company, and they take everything into account: what places you visited (Google Maps), what cookies you keep, who you are visiting with, what topics interest you among thousands of other things: meetings in Meet, your shopping list, who you stalked... they are building you your own timeline.
The same happens with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Voluntarily, we upload photos, videos, statuses, locations... we show our children... we ourselves present data so that these companies can build context for us, some for educational purposes, others for entertainment purposes, and so on...
Now we introduce one more factor: the financial interest of each company. And it is not an Illuminati secret of any kind that each company seeks its own interest. From Google to the last company doing data mining, they have different components:
- Sell their products.
- Decide what ads you should see.
- Be the context builder. All algorithms want that.
The problem lies in how this is changing. Do you remember that Google was the one building our entire context with PageRank? That passed into the hands of TikTok today. Imagine being the Lord Almighty, Creator of Ads and Videos of the entire Internet with close to 60% of the market in your hands in 2018, going to close to 27% by 2023.
The new context builder is called TikTok Artificial Intelligence. And are we here by accident? Not exactly.
When the internet was in exclusive hands, that is, of a few (less than 1 billion people), there was no problem in contextualizing the internet, as the amount of available information was consumable and traffic was also light. Once it exploded into massification, two things happened:
- With too much content available, Reddit communities or Facebook groups attempt to sustain new models of attention attraction to grab your attention.
- Things got serious. Harari, in his book on artificial intelligence, maintains something I agree with: today the battle is not to create content, but how the human being can consume all the available content without falling into the detriment of quality.
Does all this verbal fanfare just to sell me the famous "bitcoin fixes this"?
Yes, but no. Let me explain.
Before moving on to the solution I believe is best, we must review the examples where content curation came close but couldn't solve it, which is the majority of token-based projects. Call it what you want, the problem is that people are not looking for their project but their token, in order to pump and dump. I'm not saying it; airdrops are concentrated on economic incentives and not on the projects.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also sought to be curators and community builders. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) was the greatest prospect of this regarding digital attraction, building a solid economy for almost 3 years. Now, did this project seek community building or simply to pump the projects? The answer is clear.
Tokenization to Failure or AI
Today, most products seeking to build context give this at a laughable price, even 49 USD a year—something unthinkable 6 or 8 years ago—because today, correctly trained artificial intelligence can give you the context of a transaction with real-life (IRL) complements. Therefore, Arkham, BubbleMaps, Nansen, Messari, and others are building communication empires.
So far we have: creation of contexts, paying a price, using top-tier tools, token incentives... we are even in the trend of the tokenization of everything: from simple concert tickets to property titles. And here we have another new nascent market: what happens when economic incentives are found in context? What happens when you have the incentive to build a story with your pockets? Easy, you create the curator market.
The curator market is what in Web1 and Web2 became known as open editorials or opinion columns. Creators who receive the attention and space of a platform to express context on a specific issue. Today, Web3 wants to take precisely one more step and have these curators keep part of the financial transactions.
Curated content will always be there; the question is what form it will take. You send reels and TikToks to your friends, create playlists for your friends, share studies with your community. I know you do it when you send a reel so identified with your persona that you caption it "this is us."
As of today, who are the curators? If you are not annexed to a community, it is difficult to categorize. Reddit uses medals, BitcoinTalk uses merit (trust credits, let's say), X (ex-Twitter) used the verified badge, and now this is a symbol that the user shares benefits regarding published content.
A user receives approximately 1 USD per thousand impressions in profit, with imposed restrictions. YouTube, Spotify... all of them possess certain restrictions before you can make money on their platforms. Web2 is just that: creators today can obtain benefits, but others are the ones who have control of your content and what you can say; others are the ones who build the context.
At this point, we have already seen that the ecosystem is a matter of credentials working in a social context. In the crypto realm, Farcaster is the one that has gone the furthest, with a massive integration of products combining economy and social networks, but prioritizing finance above all else.
I'm not saying it's wrong, but there are two bad things in both perspectives: from the perspective of Meta or X, firstly we have the attention economy—these companies don't give a damn about your content as long as they retain users. On the other hand, Farcaster doesn't care what junk you write, as long as they get money out of your wallet. Launching a token is not synonymous with a sustainable community.
So, how do you build a community with context that can be financially sustainable? Today, we can give users the power to not only create content but also own it. That is why there are places you visit once a month and others where you repeat the visit. What do these successful communities have in common?
- They do not run on tokenized communities. These kinds of communities have economic priorities before content, so the word of whoever holds the most tokens is the truth, which ends up being a sort of sketchy feudalism.
- Content curation is the heart. You can enter, create, and distribute content without restrictions or censorship. You can even leave monetary micro-rewards to your favorite curator.
- The incentive to create quality curation is high. With a single token, the distribution of the most outstanding contributors is resolved.
And How Do We Build This Funded Curation?
Elon Musk has his black box of how rewards are remitted, as do the creators of Meta (FB/IG); we can infer, but we don't know how they do it at the end of the day. Google also has its AdSense program, in which it has some distribution mechanisms to incentivize its users.
Funded curation is the answer to the question "can you make a living from art?", meaning that creators live off their content. Medium with its partner program, and Substack with its incentive model, are two of the programs where I recognize an advantage in using them, by taking their curation monetized to sell ads out of the equation.
Although, as I read in a Reddit comment, perhaps isn't it better to build a community? Substack and Medium (I could be wrong) are platforms where the relationship with my followers is direct, as I possess the email list, and we see a sort of primitive Web3.
So, is there a solution or not?
I would say that Stacker News and the NOSTR protocol offer, in combination, a long-term solution for our aspirations, removing the free content of Web 2.0 and the trash tokenization of Web3.
Stacker News (SN) is present in my words always2, not just now but in other articles as well, where I extend the same solution over and over again: value-for-value. If the one with the most tokens has the loudest voice, in SN reputation is built through value, and this value is represented in the strongest currency of all: Bitcoin. There are no likes, no upvotes, only your valuable satoshis that eliminate unnecessary noise and also eliminate bots and junk content from X or Facebook; by operating without promises of airdrops, the economy is functional, since creators share the reward, users incentivize more content, and technical quality as well as deep debate can occur.
If we take it to a protocol level, then NOSTR (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is the structuring of free content through an open protocol where, if someone tries to censor you, you simply move from one relay (server) to another, given that your private keys (and your data) are yours.
With nearly 1000 public relays and an ecosystem that grows ceaselessly, NOSTR presents itself as a curation funded by the users themselves through the economy of zaps, which is basically sending micro-fractions through the Lightning Network flowing directly from consumer to creator, without intermediaries or retention fees.
That is why our debates on SN or NOSTR are no longer about whether one can live from art, but how we ensure the community can subsist, incentivized to receive rewards, without censorship and with absolute control of our data. Micro-payments already exist; the culture of subsisting also exists.
The proposal is simple: instead of selling sketchy art of a rock for millions of USD, why not pay 1, 2, 21 satoshis... whatever you can for content curation? With the fatigue caused by social media, it is time for new economies to emerge. If NOSTR is stage one, what else can we do with NOSTR Wallet Connect, Lightning nodes, Ark loans, BTCPayServer POS? How beautiful it is to be alive in these times.
I'm bullish af on everything that is coming. And it is a personal decision which path to follow: do we build our own algorithm together through the community, or do we delegate once again to corporate centralization.