Blockchain solutions encroach into various parts of mainstream adaptation today. The attention economy is also beginning to experience increased Blockchain application.
"Global covfefe, if we use a term recently coined by Donald Trump, will never be the same."
Increasing use case scenarios explain the significant growth being observed in the Blockchain industry, especially with regards to the value of associated cryptocurrencies.
A number of Blockchain startups are focusing on decentralized social media content and participation reward that is based on protocols built predominantly on top of Bitcoin on Ethereum platforms.
These startups claim to democratize the attention economy environment, offering a trustless system where both content originators and users retain total control and are fully responsible with regards to their intellectual property.
Bane of centralization
Like most centralized institutions, modern day journalism is accused of sentimental alignment. News coverage in most cases is suspected to tilt towards the sentiments of publishers, thereby leaving a lot of room for verification of authenticity.
Propagators of decentralized news coverage argue that Blockchain solution will eliminate the possibility of unverifiable news coverage.
Dondrey Taylor, CTO at Decentralized News Network (DNN) says:
“The best way to think about it is to think of smart contracts as a set of instructions carried out by a network of trustless computers that all agree on the completion and state of instructions.”
Taylor claims that decentralized journalism pushes back against mass media inaccuracies and political agendas in story reporting by using smart contracts and the online community’s combined news judgment.
The Blockchain solution claims to provide a ready-made digital remuneration system to vaccinate against unwanted influence from advertisers or other corporate interests, including other benefits such as time-stamped blocks of data, an open publishing process, no single authority with global reach, and peer-to-peer validation in a community-financed system.
Big shakeup ahead
Blockchain entrepreneur, Karthikeyan K tells Cointelegraph that content distribution needs a big shakeup and there is already a lineup of companies who are trying to disrupt the industry.
“I have seen many variations of the same idea being worked on even by some of my own friends. My initial thoughts, on their idea, is that it is brilliant but will depend on how fast they can build a network of content providers and distributors by successfully incentivizing them,” says Karthikeyan.
Among questions raised by Karthikeyan on the subject, are the following:
- How will the system make sure the content creator is the legal owner of the content?
- Will there be any plagiarism/hate filters etc?
- How would specialized content like Research Articles/Papers etc be incentivized?
- How to evade fake/paid news promotions?