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The advantage of networking on the blockchain for my concerns was to escape the centralised control of the tech giants. A decentralised platform such as Markethive puts only you in control of your data, puts an end to shadow banning and when you wish to no longer see someone's posts, simply unfollow them.
Markethive took the decision to transfer its platform over to the blockchain, build its own cloud system and leave Cloud Flare, to escape the political tyranny of the tech giants. Another great decision was to build the wallet on the Cardano blockchain (soon the be released) in order to escape slow transactions with high fees - Instead, deliver extremely fast & secure transactions with extremely small fees.
Now, completely independent, Markethive's Social Inbound Marketing platform is a freedom and liberty proponent that fiercely supports free speech and entrepreneurialism.
I thought I'd share parts of Ben Goertzel's article, below, as it resonates with my decision to join the entrepreneurial spirit & friendly atmosphere of Markethive and network on the blockchain.
By Ben Goertzel - founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a blockchain-based AI marketplace project.
The fundamental flaws in modern social media infrastructure are nothing new, and nor is the idea of using blockchain and other decentralized technologies to help remedy them. But never before have these issues risen to the fore as they are currently. Never before have so many people been so aware of the ethical and practical weaknesses at the heart of Big Tech’s systems for controlling our communications.
One can sympathize to some degree with the folks who run these Big Tech companies. They’re in a classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, which none of them foresaw before they got so huge.
If they allow offensive content or folks arguing for violence in a not-quite-illegal-but-pretty-nasty way, then they’ll get blowback when it turns out content they hosted played a role in some actual horrible acts.
If they start banning content, inevitably they’re going to ban stuff that isn’t actually extraordinarily dangerous, and suddenly they’re evil opponents of free speech.
And with the volume of situations and people they’re dealing with, how can these companies consistently figure out the right place to draw the line, especially when society as a whole doesn’t have a consistent or coherent idea of where to draw the line.
Twitter, generally the most forward-thinking of the Big Tech titans, has appointed a small team to develop a decentralized social media protocol. The idea, apparently, is to make Twitter one among multiple services using a common standard protocol, and to move controversial issues like content moderation and banning from the Twitter layer down to the decentralized protocol layer. The aspiration is admirable but at the present time, it’s not at all clear how the fundamentally centralized logic of the Twitter business model is going to harmonize with the radical degree of decentralization that would be needed.
My own strong feeling is: Twitter is not going to solve this, as good as its intentions may be. The centralized Big Tech world is not going to solve this. Government is not going to solve this either. It’s far too slow-paced and obtuse to deal with fast-evolving issues that are highly complex in both human and technological dimensions, in a way that’s compatible with the subtleties of Western constitutional and business law.
The basic principles needed to create better social networks are not too hard to see:
The technologies to manifest these principles are here right now, albeit at varying levels of maturity.
In SingularityNET, we have been working on blockchain-based AI tools suitable for serving as the cognitive core of decentralized social media networks. Your social media and Internet usage data should be owned and controlled by you, and the AI algorithms used to model this data should be under your control. You should be able to inspect and interrogate these models and understand what they are thinking about you and why they are recommending certain things to you and not others.
Transparent, explainable AI applied to a person’s social media and Internet usage data has the potential to be a powerful tool for self-understanding and self-growth. An AI watching what I do will very likely understand some aspects of myself better than I do, and this is of interest to me because I would like to better understand myself.
It’s easy to imagine a smarter, more transparent version of Alexa or Google Assistant designed to serve as an “AI media navigator” finding me what I ask for in a savvy but unbiased way, and recommending me people and content that it genuinely thinks will be of interest to me. But this sort of vision is hilariously distant from the current reality in which the various Big Tech-controlled AIs are monitoring, modelling and guiding me with the objective of milking money and keeping me staring at certain particular apps or websites as long as possible.
One could argue that corporate control of our minds, hearts and bank accounts is the price we pay for all the valuable processing power Big Tech companies are utilizing to deliver us our daily diet of social media posts. But this is one more failure of moral and technological imagination. It is well within our current capability to deliver modern social media functions based on decentralized compute power as well as decentralized algorithms. This has been a theme in the blockchain world for years now, with projects like Golem, SONM and CPUCoin. SingularityNET has been incubating the NuNet.io project toward this end.
All of these decentralized-processing-power startups need some maturing to serve the needs of decentralized analogues of Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok. But the basic algorithms and architectures are there. What if decentralized, democratically controlled processing infrastructures had received even one-tenth of the financial and software-development firepower that centralized server farm infrastructure has?
With a decentralized infrastructure for social media, the whole issue of banning this or that person or topic from this or that social network would basically disappear.
Decentralized, transparently operated, secure, AI-driven reputation systems would rank and rate posts and posters, resulting in a system where nobody needs to happen upon posts they find offensive or disturbing.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to remain ensconced in your familiar community and idea-sphere and want to take the risk of contact with something new and potentially troublesome, you can tell this to your AI navigator as well.
Decentralization doesn’t cure all the perversities of human nature.
For sure, some people will use decentralized social media to plan crimes together. But people also gather in parks or bars for such purposes, and we don’t solve this by banning group face-to-face conversations out of earshot of government microphones. I have no doubt law enforcement will rise to the occasion of decentralized social networks as it’s done with prior tech innovations.
There is also no doubt that fraud attempts will be rampant on any decentralized social network and AI-driven navigators will need to rely on sophisticated “AI reputation system police” to militate against fraud and attempts to game the system. But the key point is this: The AI policing should be on the level of squashing reputation-system fraud, i.e., seeing through cases where people are pretending their content is something it’s not rather than squashing content itself.
Let us not forget that, alongside all the hate and stupidity, there is a massive influx of brilliant ideas and wonderful creations being put out there on the internet every minute of every day. Most of these have a hard time finding the audience they deserve because of today’s centralized online information architectures.
We have the core tech to enable radically more ethical and beneficial social media networks. All that remains is to get this tech out of the blockchain ghetto and into the internet mainstream. It’s not a small task but the potential benefit is huge. What we’re talking about here is not just a revolution in a certain sector of the software industry. It’s a massive upgrade in how the collective mind and heart of humanity guides its own growth. Personally, I’m thrilled and a bit sobered to be in the midst of a tech ecosystem with so much potential to affect such deep and wide positive transformation.
Article produced by Ben Goertzel - Read the full article:
