Editors Note: This article comes fromOrange Book (ID: chengpishu)Editors Note: This article comes from
Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)
Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)
, Author: orangefans, published with permission.
If Bitcoin came before Twitter, would the history of social networking be rewritten?
One night in 2007, Jack Dorsey had a dream.
Jack was a child who was used to being alone since he was a child. While the other kids were playing American football, he was busy obsessively studying maps and the sounds of trains. He has a particular fascination with train drivers and dispatchers communicating geographic locations by radio—communications expressed in a simple and efficient way: where are they going, what are they doing, they are where are you now.
Years later, the kid created a product called Twitter. The name Twitter is a birds call, and the call is characterized by short, frequent, and fast—this is in line with the simple and efficient communication connotation of this social networking site. My childhood studies of trains became, unintentionally, the inspiration for Twitters original origins.
The day was June 2007, just over a year after Twitter had been live. Three months ago, at the South by Southwest Conference in Texas, Twitter won the best blog award, and the number of registered users also rose, first breaking through 100,000, and three months later, breaking through 250,000. The whole office was filled with excitement.
Jack stared at his mobile phone in his seat, thinking about how to wind it up. To make it easier for people to use Twitter via text message, the team just added a somewhat odd feature to the product in February: a 140-character limit. 140 characters makes people send shorter and shorter messages, and also makes the speed of information dissemination faster and faster.
He suddenly thought of a post he saw a few days ago, which mentioned a thing called Bitcoin. A netizen named Satoshi Nakamoto is developing an electronic currency protocol. It is said that he originally wanted to publish the paper in 2008, but he couldn’t help but start writing the code a year in advance, and the progress is not bad.
A protocol for electronic money, what does that mean? Jack didnt want to understand, but he vaguely felt that this thing was interesting.
When he got home from get off work that night, Jack had a strange nightmare. He dreamed of Twitter becoming an instant hit. As the growth rate of users is getting faster and faster, the companys technical capabilities gradually cannot keep up with the development, products often go down, but the company is busy developing new functions internally, the management team is struggling with various problems, and the relationship between various partners It has also gradually deteriorated, and the CEO battle in the office is like a palace infighting.
But all this is not the most terrible. The scariest thing Jack dreamed was that Twitter became one of the largest social networks in the world. With the increase in the number of users, political manipulation, online violence, bot accounts, hate speech, Twitter is full of vulgar and eye-catching information flows.
To make matters worse, when he wants to do some governance on the hostile speech on the platform, users complain that Twitter controls too much; when he wants to let go, the government and the law have the responsibility to require them to intervene. On the other hand, due to the pursuit of profits by commercial companies, the recommendation algorithm of the platform continues to push similar content for users in order to attract more clicks. Although Twitter went public, it turned into what it hated the most.
At work the next day, Jack tells his partner Evan about last nights nightmare. This nightmare made him feel a little heavy. In order to prevent Twitter from falling into such an ending, he told Evan that maybe we should make Twitter more open, not as a product, but as an agreement—no Wrong, just like the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet, anyone can develop new products on it, which is also a liberation for the team.
But isnt that what we do now? Evan didnt quite understand Jacks idea. In his view, Twitter is now open enough. All APIs used by the product are public. Any developer can freely call the data on the platform. In the future, there will even be different Twitter clients for users to choose freely. What is the difference between making a protocol and an open API?
The difference is that Jack continued to elaborate on his ideas. If Twitter goes public in the future, in order to make money, we must stop the API and block all other clients, so that we can capture the most users and extract the most profits. If it is a decentralized agreement, we will not be able to prevent others from developing applications on the agreement, because the agreement does not belong to anyone. At the same time, what kind of behavior users have on the application, what kind of content review policy the platform needs to govern the community, none of these have anything to do with us.
If you want an analogy, its like making a social network another e-mail box. All emails on the Internet follow the same set of standards, including SMTP protocol and IAMP protocol and so on. Whether it is Yahoo Mail, Gmail or Hotmail, they all use the same set of protocols. In this way, even if users use different products, they are still interoperable with each other. For example, my use of Yahoo Mail does not affect my sending emails to Gmail .
If someone uses the same protocol to make a new product, from the first day of its birth, this product has the advantage of being compatible with Gmail and sending emails. Moreover, the standard formulation of the protocol enables you to unconditionally download, delete or transfer your own mail data on the Gmail platform-the migration cost for users is almost zero.
In this way, whenever a new product enters the market, facing the existing giant players, it will not face the disadvantage of being absolutely monopolized in the market, because users can migrate to new products with their own data at any time. In other words, the market will always remain open.
So, what would it be like to build a decentralized protocol for a social network? Think of it this way:
This set of social network protocol may be called SSNP (Simple Social Network Protocol) protocol. The SSNP protocol defines what an information square social network like Twitter looks like. It has account registration standards, user data storage and migration standards, and basic functions such as tweeting, forwarding, commenting, following, and likes. .
If a product is built according to the SSNP protocol, it will naturally interoperate with other SSNP protocol products. What is the concept of intercommunication here?
For example,when a Weibo user 王大池@weibo.com posts a Weibo, he can @ a Twitter user Chandler@twitter.com, and the other party will receive a reminder of this message; in turn, Twitter Users on Weibo can also follow the big V on Weibo, like and comment on the content posted by the other party.
Weibo and Twitter can have their own content review policies, their own speech rules, their own community culture, and they can also have different clients in terms of functional design and appearance UI. At the same time, when users want to migrate to Fanfou, the migration cost will be very low. Users can export their own data, take away their fans and attention, and continue to live on a new platform without affecting the use of the new account (new username @fanfou.com) at all.
After Jack finished talking about this set of ideas, the entire office fell silent. Obviously, this approach of agreement, not platform is closer to what Twitter was when it was born, and it is also a model that the team wants more.
But at the same time, one of the most important problems remains unresolved.
We are a commercial company, and the development agreement does not make money. How can we maintain the long-term operation of the team? Even in the early stage of financing, there is little need to consider the business model, but sooner or later, investors’ money will need to be realized and withdrawn. At this time, an open source protocol that cannot monopolize users’ data and their social relationships may be difficult. Capture the value of real money on social networks.
Jack also has no answer to this question. He thought about this problem, but there was no good way to do it. Either forget about the thought, or postpone the question indefinitely. This is the last seemingly unsolvable level.
Suddenly, a word flashed in his mind: Bitcoin.
Yeah, this guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, hes developing a network in the same way, except instead of a social network, its a payment network.
Jack suddenly realized that Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment network. Anyone using this network can transfer money to another person in the world without companies and intermediaries. The overhead cost of this payment system is borne by the P2P nodes in the network. These nodes are also called miners. They earn rewards by protecting the Bitcoin network. This reward is the Bitcoin automatically distributed by the system.
As more people use the bitcoin network, the reward bitcoins are worth more. The founding team that developed the protocol, and the nodes that joined the Bitcoin network the first time, could theoretically obtain a large amount of Bitcoin at a relatively cheap price in the early days. After the network value increases, they will get even greater rewards. In this way, Bitcoin solves the business model problem while developing a decentralized protocol.
If someone can develop a protocol for an electronic currency in this way, why cant we use the same method to develop a protocol for a social network? After all, electronic money and social networks seem to belong to the necessities and public utilities of human society. It is difficult to be commercialized, but at the same time it needs to undertake public social functions.
All in all, the future of Twitter remains murky, but Jack at least has some sort of answer in mind.
(over)
He was still thinking that maybe he should make another product besides Twitter.
After all, Bitcoin is just getting started, and its power is still very weak. The success of decentralized electronic currencies is a question mark. Maybe he should make a centralized payment product first, called Square, to solve the problem of people receiving and paying. If this product becomes successful, he will be happy to help Satoshi Nakamoto and fund the development of this Bitcoin project...Of course, all this is a story.
(over)
This story is purely fictitious, if there is any similarity, it is my time travel.
Finally, two more words:
1. Jack, the CEO of Twitter, recently released an exciting news: Twitter will fund a small team of 5 people, with the participation of Twitter CTO personally, to jointly develop a decentralized social network protocol, and Twitter will serve as a standard for this protocol one of the clients.
This team is called Bluesky, and they have a lot of freedom and autonomy. They can refer to the existing work on Twitter unlimitedly, and if they feel the need to start a new stove, they are completely fine.
2. Jack mentioned that the reason for this decision is that he realized that some things are difficult to achieve on a centralized platform. For Twitter, these things include:
First, give a set of globally accepted censorship policies for content on social networks. In practice, legal requirements and community cultures vary from region to region, making this nearly impossible.
Second, the recommendation algorithms of social applications are not open source, and users have no freedom of choice.
Third, out of their own interests, social apps will promote eye-catching content rather than healthy content.
The emergence of new technologies has made decentralization possible. The blockchain provides an open and sustainable data storage strategy, as well as a governance mechanism and a monetization mechanism.
3. USV investor Fred Willson retweeted Jack’s tweet and agreed. He said that the early Twitter’s path was closer to the decentralized protocol. The API was open to the outside world and there were many third-party clients. , they chose a more centralized path.
In the decision-making environment at that time, this decision was absolutely correct for a commercial company. But Fred sometimes wonders if Twitter had appeared after Bitcoin instead of before Bitcoin, maybe the results would have been very different.
4. Jack holds bitcoins and only bitcoins. Another of his payments companies, Square, created a project called Square Crypto to fund research related to the bitcoin protocol.
5. However, many users are not optimistic about Twitters decentralization and self-revolution. One of the reasons mentioned by many people is that there are already many similar decentralized social networks, and they are open source. The product is also an open protocol, but it has not attracted many users to actually use it.
According to the Orange Book, there may be several reasons for this:
