Legacy social media platforms have full control of your online experience.

They dictate what you see, who you can interact with, what you can say, and how much money you can make from your own content.

If they don't like what you say they can censor or ban you.

They can do this because their economic engine is based on monetizing your attention. They don't work for you. They don't care about you, and they have no interest in your well-being or success.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

We now have a unique opportunity to reshape our entire social media landscape.

We can give users full control over their online experience, and empower them to do things that were not possible before.

In this new media landscape a platform will not be able to succeed unless it puts the well-being and success of users first.

What's even better? Legacy social media platforms will not be able to compete in this new landscape unless they abandon their abusive business practices, open up their algos and data silos, and start putting the user in the center.

So what does it take to create this new social media landscape?

If legacy social media is based on platforms monetizing user attention by having full control over user data and user experience, the new landscape will need to transform all three layers of this stack.

In other words, we'll need a new economic engine, a new data architecture, and a new user interface layer.

The good news is that much of this stack is already in place. The rest – the economic engine – can be built with existing technology.

If we look at a protocol like Farcaster, we already have a social media platform that's based on an open social graph and distributed data hubs.

On Farcaster anyone can read user-generated content from the hubs and build a custom user interface and algos to serve the data. Users in the protocol have control over what they post to the hubs and no one can take away their user identity.

All this already exists.

What's still missing here is the economic engine.

If the dominant economic engine on Farcaster is monetizing user attention, then we're just recreating the same dynamics we have in legacy social media.

Even if you technically have control over what you post, the platform still dictates who sees your posts. It therefore also dictates who interacts with you and how much money you can make from your content. And if the interest of the platform is monetizing your attention, it will treat you as their product. It won’t put your interests first.

If we want a social media landscape that puts users in the center, the economic engine for such a landscape can't be based on attention monetization.

It can't be based on subscriptions either; platforms using such a model will tend to benefit a majority of users at the expense of others, and not the network as a whole.

What we want however is for platforms to respect the interests of all users.

The economic engine will therefore need to align the interest of platform developers with the interest of users. This is already done somewhat well in the blockchain space, where the interests of those securing the network align with the interests of the network as a whole.

But while blockchain mechanisms like Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake work well for network security, we need something that goes much further; we need an economic engine that can incentivize developers and service providers to build the tools and infrastructure that empower users the most.

Ideally, we also want this engine to enable collaboration on an open platform infrastructure, since this would give everyone the greatest ability to improve on the system and to build more tools to benefit users.

If we built such a mechanism we could create not just a social media landscape where the user comes first, but an entire ecosystem of apps and products that far surpass anything we have today.

Imagine using apps like Spotify or Netflix, but with a much greater ability to decide what music or show you’d view. Instead of the platform pushing content on you according to what benefits its bottom line, you’d be able to use your social graph to look for the music or shows that your friends, or other users with similar tastes, love

You can’t do that today because social media platforms can’t make money from user data if they openly share it with other apps.

With a different economic engine, every app would be able to leverage the open social graph to greatly improve user experience. It would also be able to integrate or build on other apps to further empower users.

All this would be possible if we had a mechanism that allowed the network to value the impact of developers’ contributions – a “Proof-of-Impact” mechanism.

But we can have such a mechanism!

What makes such a mechanism possible is the architecture of open social graph platforms; unlike legacy social media, where the platform has full control over user content and what users see, open social graph protocols cannot hide or change user content.

This open architecture also allows developers to build tools to filter out bots or bad actors who are trying to manipulate opinion on the network.

The result is that open graph networks can be more trustworthy than the legacy platforms. And because users can trust the content, they can agree on what they value in the network.

That is the foundation needed for a Proof-of-Impact economic engine.

A network that can agree on what it values can also agree on the value developer contributions provide, and can fund those contributions.

And if the funding comes from currency issuance – the way it does in blockchains – we can make sure that everyone in the network has skin in the game; the network wouldn’t want to overvalue contributions, since that devalues everyone’s holdings. The network also wouldn’t want to undervalue contributions, since few developers would then want to contribute to a network that doesn’t value their work.

So now we know that it’s possible to have a social media landscape that puts your interests first and empowers you. But “possible” doesn’t mean that it would happen.

Legacy social media and other vested interests have every incentive to make sure that they remain in control, and that you remain their product.

What we need then is a movement of people – developers, creators, and supporters – who want to realize the vision of transforming our media landscape, and putting users’ interests first.

Now it’s time to act. It’s time to put the user in the center.

Mike Natanzon is the author of The Abundance Economy and founder of Abundance Protocol, a consensus value mechanism based on Proof-of-Impact.

Farcaster: @abundance / X: @Abundance_DAO

It's Time to Put the User in the Center