Why do we need decentralized social networks?

Synereo is a new decentralized application platform that has just announced plans to release its first alpha version in September 2016. Although the platform itself is capable of running decentralized applications (Dapps) created by a variety of independent developers, the platform's flagship application is a decentralized social network that is being created by the Synereo team.

Today’s social networks are broken

The rise of social media and social networking sites has been one of the most powerful trends in the past 10 years, shaping society itself and affecting our daily lives.

But as this trend takes shape, it’s clear that power is concentrating in the hands of a few. As much as people complain about traditional media being owned and controlled by a small number of super-powerful global corporations, when you look at social sites and apps, the situation is actually much worse.

This small group of people has complete control over how we communicate today and have access to information about the world around us. They have complete control over what information we see, what is hidden or removed, and who can become a social influencer by using their platforms. Often, we also entrust them with a lot of our personal information and experiences.

Recent instances have shown these individuals using this power to further a political agenda or pursue their own personal interests.

For example, the website FacebookCensorship.com lists hundreds of examples of the social networking giant using its power to remove posts or ban users for political bias, including extensive collaboration with less-than-honorable government regimes around the world. The site has been caught manipulating its trending news section to suppress right-wing opinions and praise Zuckerberg's left-wing politics, and even doctoring the posts you see from friends in a secret mind-control experiment to manipulate your emotions.

Twitter has also acknowledged that they have practiced political censorship and has taken numerous actions that have led to accusations of bias, including a recent episode in which they banned prominent American conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.

At the same time, the entire business model of these sites is based on collecting and exploiting large amounts of user profiles, which raises serious privacy issues and makes user data vulnerable to hackers. It also can get you a bad deal in business, for example if an advertiser knows you have a good income and a personality that may impulsively buy under certain conditions, do you think they will still offer you a good deal? No, they will charge you extra or show you their most expensive items just because they can, because their job is to squeeze every penny out of you.

In the past, the power of media organizations was obvious — careful readers/viewers could clearly see particular political loyalties or biases in the media and freely choose which sources to get their information from. But the covert way in which social media giants exert influence behind the scenes and their users are unaware of what is happening makes it more insidious, powerful and dangerous. What’s more, this influence is exerted on the choices we make in the first place, rather than on the media themselves, limiting our choices and preventing us from effectively seeing alternative viewpoints.

What a social network should look like

The problems described above all stem from the fact that the power to communicate and share information is concentrated in the hands of a few. Therefore, the solution seems obvious to me - decentralization.

New p2p technologies, such as blockchain, offer an exciting new opportunity to take power away from these giants and distribute it to the general public. According to Dor Konforty, CEO of Synereo, which is trying to do just that:

“Five years from now, an entity like Facebook that exercises this kind of enormous power at the center will be meaningless to us.”

Synereo is not only a project that aims to revolutionize social media, but also serves as a great example of how new decentralized technologies can benefit consumers.

All information published through Synereo is encrypted and recorded on a public blockchain that no individual or organization can control. As Konforty assured, this means:

Synereo has no access or control over the information of users on the network. Synereo is powerless to do anything about the identity or data of users on the network. Neither Synereo nor any other external party can remove information or users from the network.

Of course, some filtering is sometimes necessary to reduce the amount of information presented to us into a more digestible digest. But this filtering is never done privately, over which we have no control, and is done according to rules unknown to us and often in the interests of others, in an open way controlled by the users themselves.

Simply put, if you interact a lot with someone else's posts, you'll be more likely to see their posts in the future. Additionally, users will see sections that users can use to increase the prominence of certain types of content. To handle highly objectionable material, a community-driven moderation and arbitration system is being developed.

As part of Synereo's 'attention economy', users can spend the app's internal currency 'AMP' to promote certain posts. This enables advertisers to increase the visibility of their content by increasing the probability of a post appearing in a user's feed. But it's based on attention and interaction, not by exploiting your profile - as a reward, when ordinary users interact with posts promoted in this way, users will be rewarded with a share of the profits.

All personal data is encrypted and can only be seen by the people you choose. Not even Synereo themselves, or their advertisers can access any information about you that you have not chosen to share with them.

In my opinion, this can help protect consumers from predatory adtech, as well as combat more general privacy issues. It is natural and psychological to take a slightly different role in different situations, depending on what is most appropriate and what you are most comfortable with. It is not healthy to share personal information, photos or stories with everyone but a specific group, so it is important to give users full control over what they share with whom. Because blockchain is much harder to hack than a company server, users can rest assured that their data will not be stolen by criminals.

In reality, Synereo is primarily a protocol, and the social network they are creating is just an add-on on top of that protocol, adding a new layer of user controls. Eventually, others will be able to develop applications on top of the same protocol, allowing users to freely choose which apps they want to use, making it easier to switch between apps, rather than being trapped in a single walled garden of a website or app that makes you feel like you have to use it just because everyone else is using it.