SnapChat doesn’t understand the decentralized web.

SnapChat has a blanket rejection policy for any product that mentions the word “blockchain” and it shows that there is a flawed, biased understanding of what the blockchain actually is and what it can be used for. I’m the founder of Dolli.io — an iOS and Android app that will allow you to buy, sell, trade, collect, and print “f*cking lit digital collectibles”. Over 300 people have claimed usernames for the app so far, we are nearing 500 Instagram followers (@dolli.io made the account a few days ago), and we are in the process of creating limited edition shirts. My motto as of late has been “Dolli is dope and we don’t care what you think”. This is a brand for the stand-outs, rebels, and those pushing the limits of the status quo.

The blockchain opened the door for people to own limited, digital assets and Dolli makes it easy to do so. One of the avenues of promotion I took was a SnapChat advertisement. I ran an ad for a week and thousands of people visited the site, which by the way doesn’t have great visual design but it gets the point across — which proves the point that users will forgive poor design (a whole other article). That’s beside the point. The ad was great. By far the most successful online ad I’ve ever created. After the ad run was done I decided I would slightly modify the demographics and give it another go. Besides the demographics the ad was an exact clone of the ad that ran for a week prior. The ad went to review and all was grand — until I looked the next day and saw the ad review team rejected the ad! How could this be? I had just run this same exact ad for a week already. I reached out to whoever is on the other end of the SnapChat help chat for answers. The helpful person, who probably works too much and gets paid too little, told me he was sorry and that there wasn’t any additional information and that he would re-submit the ad for review as he didn’t see anything blatantly obvious that would violate SnapChat’s ad policies. “Wonderful, it was a mistake. Maybe it was some new guy on the team and didn’t know better.” I thought_._ I went about my business waiting for the ad to be approved.

Two days later — rejected again. I reached out one more time. Why was it rejected? The person on the other end of the chat widget this time had more information. The ad was rejected because ICOs are not allowed. I responded that this clearly was not an ICO, but due to the wording and since I used the word “token” I could see how this could be confusing to those who know little or nothing about the blockchain or how it works. I crafted my argument for the escalation. Dolli is a platform that opens a new door for the collecting of digital art. It creates a new platform for artists and those interested in their art. Each Dolli is an NFT (non-fungible token) and I took a quote directly from wikipedia to help prove my point, NFTs represent “something unique; non-fungible tokens are thus not interchangeable. This is in contrast to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and many network or utility tokens that are fungible in nature.”[1] So Dolli is not having an ICO, nor are we dealing with crypto — really we are using the blockchain as a decentralized database to prove ownership of digital assets. Also f*ck ICOs. How many scammy, template landing pages have you seen promoting bull sh*t ICOs that offer the customer zero value and probably never will. Too many to count and it’s because of these that SnapChat and others act like you’re pushing drugs to little kids the second you mention the word blockchain. With wikipedia on my side and a well-crafted argument I was sure the ad would be approved.

Anyone with any sense would side with me, right? Wrong. SnapChat laid the hammer down with the latest response — “I checked on this further for you and can confirm that these will not be allowed to run on the platform. As mentioned previously products related to blockchain, ICO and Bitcoin are restricted.” Let me speak to your manager!

This leads me to believe that SnapChat doesn’t understand, or support a future with a decentralized, open web. I guess that makes sense and I also want to utilize capitalism and the centralized data collection of SnapChat to further benefit my company, so whatever. I’ll use Instagram. I’ll end with this, Dolli is dope and I don’t care what you think.