Veteran journalist: Blockchain could be the key to saving journalism

"The shitpost is mightier than the thinkpiece."

This is a quote a friend of mine saw in a report that I can no longer find, but he swears he didn't make up. It seems that the original quote is no longer available on the Internet, and if it is true, it has been lost among millions of tweets and Tumblr posts.

Now, facts continue to disappear from the pages of the Internet in this way...

This is worrying, as content moves from newspapers to digital platforms, facts are degrading. What appears (or sounds) to be the truth may not necessarily be true. As mentioned above, people are becoming less able to distinguish between true and false events, and are relying more on their own beliefs.

When 62% of American adults get their news from social media, and the top 20 fake news stories receive far more attention than the top 20 real news stories, we have reason to be concerned.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook and Google are facing increasing criticism for fake news. (Google now says it will ban fake news sites from using its advertising services, and Facebook has updated its policy language to say it will not show ads for fake news sites.)

Perhaps it’s time to face reality: the root of the problem isn’t the information itself, but the nature of the platform.

Now, more and more blockchain companies are trying to shake up the content creation field, and these projects have also attracted the attention of some people (including the author himself).

Today, with the rise of new blockchain content platforms, is the truth being respected?

User experience trumps truth

The short answer is that this issue does not seem to be of the utmost importance.

According to Ryan X Charles, founder of the Yours Network, the mission of the Yours platform is to “enable content creators to get paid on the internet.”

If these content creators can write good articles and the content is authentic, then of course it is a good thing. But if they are not, do we have the same problem? Why should we or others pay for their garbage content?

(Photo: Ryan X Charles)

“I don’t think our first concern is the truth,” Charles said.

His principles of action are based on market economics, and because Charles previously worked as a cryptocurrency engineer at the social media company Reddit, he would choose the same rules as Reddit moderators.

“Not all communities on the platform are good,” he said, “but the ones that choose the right rules and pay the right amount of money to the right people will be successful.”

The idea, of course, is that social media users who create good content should be compensated accordingly, but in practice this already happens, with nearly naked women successfully selling their photos on SnapChat using SnapCash, and high-traffic Twitter accounts working with affiliate networks to share ad revenue.

Steemit, another blockchain social media platform that has been heavily criticized for its construction problems, has seen some blockchain entrepreneurs earn $1,500 worth of Steem digital currency by writing short articles in less than 15 minutes.

In contrast, articles about topics that journalists spent weeks or months researching in depth received only a negligible reward. We can see that the Steemit system seems to encourage quick and easy content rather than investigative reporting.

Steemit also has sustainability issues, which has also been widely discussed.

For example, some cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe that even today, Steemit's management team still holds the majority of the platform's tokens, which they use to attract more people to use the platform. The more people register, the higher the price of each token, which makes the management richer. Especially in the event of a run, these executives are likely to sell their tokens at the first opportunity.

Charles from Yours Network explains:

"If you don't please the big guys, you won't be able to move forward."

This is also why Yours did not create a new currency for its platform, which Charles said was to mitigate the suspicion of a power grab and a Ponzi scheme.

However, Yours and other platforms like it may also encounter various problems because the cryptocurrency industry is full of radical elements.

Identity is key

Two veteran journalists, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera and Jeff Koyen (both of whom are registered with Yours), believe that blockchain can act as an identity layer for social platforms, which may be the key to saving the journalism industry.

The problem, in Koyen's mind, is that journalism is based on advertising rules, and revenue can only be increased by getting more clicks, which leads to the entire system being rife with fraudulent advertising.

This is where blockchain comes in, as an identity layer and transparent ledger that makes ad fraud more difficult to detect. The act of readers, whether they are anonymous or not, sending crypto tokens to publishers verifies their existence.

Duignan Carera believes this could free journalists from the constraints of advertising.

“Anything the internet touches, it devalues,” he said. “That means it makes it obsolete, but you can also say that the internet just upends all the previous revenue models.”

And in publishing, that can be a good thing.

Duignan Carera believes that by using blockchain to establish a review process, this will allow content creators, advertisers and consumers to establish a trust relationship. This can also use the payment function of blockchain to allow customers to pay directly to content creators or advertisers.

It now appears that although these systems are not yet perfect, there is still hope.

“Decentralized publishing is scary, and at the moment we still need trusted forums so there’s not a lot of incentive to eliminate centralized publishers,” he said.

He concluded:

“With blockchain, provenance, trust and audience can be verified.”