Web3 and Much Muckraking: Here's Why Social Money Platforms Are Prototype of Media 3.0

Ours is a government of liberty, no man is above it, no man is below it , we must treat each man on his worth then merits as a man — Theodore Roosevelt

Many people don’t understand the so-called innovation of blockchain, which looks like just a PUMP and Dump scam. And I believe that the decentralized no-access environment provided by blockchain is exactly what creates a possibility for human beings to explore the future utopia.

In this article, we will use our investment in Social Money track as an example to gradually clarify our judgment on the future direction of the world.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial Park, home to a masterpiece of human sculpture that represents the 20th century, is Presidential Hill. The people chose four presidents as symbols of the nation: George Washington, the leader who founded the country, Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, who freed the black slaves, and one, Theodore Roosevelt.

The greatness of President Roosevelt also starts with Rockefeller. Since 1984, when the United States became the world’s largest economy, the economy has continued to grow at a rapid pace. But in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt implemented a series of government-regulated economic measures, the first in a country that advocated free competition, and this time the regulation was directed at the trusts, and Rockefeller was the creator of the Standard Oil Trust.

Protest against Rockefeller

In 10 years Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a Standard Oil trust across the United States. Through the ultra-high market scale, Standard Oil had enough bargaining price with oil producers, oil transportation railroad companies, and successfully reduced the cost of oil, which on the one hand was the economic prosperity, technological leap forward, known as the Gilded Age in the history of the United States, on the other hand, the wealth gap worsened, giant monopolies, and gangsters prevailed. Under the boiling of public discontent, the reflection and criticism of public opinion also intensified.

The trusts were often unscrupulous in their expansion, and Standard Oil’s marketing manager openly intimidated small gas station owners who relied on gas to draw traffic and groceries to make money, If we don’t underwrite Standard’s oil, we’re going to open a grocery store right next to you and sell it at cost (meat, cereal, sugar, coffee, etc.) until we squeeze you out.

“The path Rockefeller traveled was strewn with bankrupt people and abandoned factories, and all that lay before him was unquestionable control over the resources of his vast wealth.”

So wrote one scholar at the time.

The most important reason why the monopoly giants dared to be so blatant was that the government (the regulators) was in their hands.

The truth about politics

It was during the Progressive Movement that Muckraking was “given” to the journalists who were exposing the dark side of politics. But by the beginning of World War I, all the Muckraking magazines had largely disappeared, and those that remained did not continue their shady campaigns. The reason for this is that the deeper the black secrets were exposed, the more they directly challenged the core interests of the regulators.

In the media industry 1.0 era, all the information you see is merely readable and monopolized. Just like the newspapers you see, the news. Just as Murdoch owns enough telecom companies that his daughter is ranked #1 in the “100 Most Powerful Women in Britain” and Queen Elizabeth II is ranked #89.

The birth of self-publishing on the Internet successfully impacted the traditional telecom monopoly industry, but this was only because of the increase in productivity and did not revolutionize the production relationship. In China, a company called ByteDance (ByteDance), whose product used an intelligent recommendation algorithm, managed to become the head player in that world.

But in the US, an app called Digg has disappeared.

Digg's CEO argued in a media interview that because some advanced users have been able to control Digg’s home page (control the recommendation algorithm) without much effort, Digg’s team did not have the technical power to solve this problem. digg team just drove away those advanced users by means, and although it achieved a temporary victory, Digg lost its most loyal users as a result.

This is another level of monopoly, the KOLs monopolize the app. so that new original users have no ability to be discovered again. And there are always loopholes in the algorithm, and the cost of swiping votes always comes lower compared to actually voting with money.

Image from sDAOHaus

Borrowed from DAO Haus’ Medium image The problem with centralized institutions is that the head takes the lion’s share of the revenue and prevents the creation of new heads to compete with them.

WEB3.0 and Radical Markets

With the release and paving of the 1993 “Declaration of Cryptopunk” and the 1996 “Declaration of Cyberspace Independence”, the radical market as is was used as another solution to resist monopoly and maintain fairness by reducing the monopoly of private assets through the Harburg tax, i.e. your bargaining power is determined by having other competitors in the market, not from your monopoly.

The 3.0 era of media industry

Therefore, we believe that platforms like Rally are actually the prototype of media industry 3.0. We will analyze why we think so from four perspectives: readers, platform operators, KOLs, and new content producers.
Readers: two behavioral motives.

1）Readers’ search for existing quality content

By finding the highest value users in a single field and reading their content, if the value of the content is found to be not in line with the coin ranking, it does not bring any additional revenue to the party with the brush volume.

2) Discovery of new content makers

By discovering high quality authors and buying their social money, you can enjoy the revenue brought by the public recognition of the authors.
Platform operation: fat agreement, thin application
Platform tokens: By designing AMM trading pairs of platform coins and SocialToken, it actually makes platform coins have SocialToken as the underlying value pillar, which will become a natural Harburg tax if the project wants to pull up the price.

3) The old KOL

The only problem with blockchain is how the head’s revenue is lower than the centralized monopoly revenue. The decentralized media platform does not prevent the head from receiving business orders, as long as it can ensure quality content output while going to receive excellent business promotion actually forms a virtuous circle and does not reduce the user experience.

4) New KOLs Being discovered is the only thing they have to do -
whether they can effectively discover new content authors is the difference between WEB3.0 and 2.0, and readers, too, want to see new content to impress themselves, to break through their information cocoon, so as to buy the authors’ social money in the early days to reap the double benefits of content and wealth.

In the East, my LPs told me about a very interesting project, Matataki, which is subject to the securities laws of that old continent. They have taken the approach of separating the content from the economic platform, and by directly allowing users to synchronize their creations on the platform in Github (Radicle), and simply using the platform as a protocol layer tool to filter good content producers, they can easily accomplish the whole revolution of the media industry.

The old king is dead, the new king should be established. Just like the new economic policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, let the platform, the shapely hand, and the user market, the invisible hand, regulate the whole content ecology together in order to create a vital content nation.

Multimyst is a Principal Researcher at Cyberight Capital, a first-principles driven investment firm that has invested in numerous public chain, DAO projects.