Crypto social networks are not cool

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On Monday, we reported on a decentralized $ 100 million social network planned to foster a more egalitarian web. Equality is good, but I can’t imagine a world where this thing is even pretty cool.

The news made me rethink my story on social media. I go back a long way. I’ve watched them come and go and here’s what I learned: Social media steals when it’s cool and only then.

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The first social network I joined was called SixDegrees, which was launched in 1997. So long ago, no one had a name for social media.

SixDegrees was too early, but a few years later I joined Friendster, the first one that really broke. Those were weird days and Friendster made a lot of missteps. He was bowled over by MySpace, which had a very brief moment before Facebook rolled it over.

In the early 2000s, a lot of other social networks tried, and I took a look at a lot of them. The only one I remember was called Ringo, but there were others. A lot of people wanted to capture this addictive quality of the pioneers.

It’s hard to think Facebook is cool now, but it was. Mark Zuckerberg was a carefree young founder. Also, it was exclusive, only allowing users who had emails at different colleges at first, in order to focus on young people (I slipped through a backdoor because I was working at a whitelisted institution). ). MySpace, for all its sketchy appearance, was also once cool – maybe it was its very vagueness that made it cool. It’s hard to say.

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That’s because it’s hard to tell where the cool is coming from – period. But I’ll tell you this: it’s not blockchain.

The story continues

Blockchain technology is transformative, subversive, surprising – but it’s not cool.

Blockchain technology is transformative, subversive, surprising – but it’s not cool. Cool don’t try anything. Cool doesn’t wave to get your attention. Cool shrug if you make eye contact.

Blockchain people make a lot of gestures, but they never shrug their shoulders.

And so, the industry is littered with aborted social media and / or botnets pleading with the public to care.

Either way, BitClout stays in the conversation. This site is so difficult that it has created over 10,000 accounts for people who have not requested them. Such a rush isn’t cool, which is probably part of why its traffic in May was half of its traffic in April, according to SimilarWeb.

The first crypto social network that I really looked closely at was Steemit (now Hive) and while it was always nice people were too eager to talk about how they were all going to get rich blogging. This could be the original sin of blockchain social media, because they all do it. They want, and wanting is never cool.

And then, before Voice.com switched to non-fungible tokens, it was so uncool that I’m pretty sure some of the more selective captions banned you if you’ve even visited the website once. They could have done it telepathically. This is how uncool this site was!

In this blockchain universe there is a lot of money, so entrepreneurs continue to delude themselves into believing that they can buy cool, usually in the form of famous paying users.

Cool cannot be bought. Cool cannot even be transferred. Example: Jay-Z is cool. The tide is not cool.

Crypto-influencers aren’t cool either. They can have attention. They can get 10,000 retweets on their pithy observations, but that’s not cool. If they point to a new social network, cool kids may look but cool kids won’t stay.

In fact, this story comes full circle. The once cool Facebook announced the least cool blockchain in the history of the industry, Libra. Libra has gone about as well as I would expect every crypto social network to do for a while.

I keep watching crypto entrepreneurs trying to crack this social media nut and shake my head. It’s too early. Blockchains can’t run a cool social network until blockchains are so prevalent that people don’t really try them, they just fall on them.

Cool kids don’t try things. They walk around there, look around, take off their sunglasses, then do something because… “What is this?” Who cares? “And it takes off. Cool is emerging. It doesn’t have to be. You can’t buy it with a billion dollars.

And that’s why the social isn’t going to happen in this industry now. It will only happen then.

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