Why Do We Need an Augmented Web? (part 1)

Intro

It's no secret that we all live in a world dominated by social media.

Every social media platform controls our minds by controlling our attention completely. Social media dictates what we say, what we watch, who we should listen to and who we shouldn’t. Smart algorithms are effectively shaping our smart feeds, and so on.

Social media owns more than just the content. We acknowledge that social media platforms own all the members and all the communities within them.

So why is this the case?

The social media platform itself decides how to use personal data, which services to allow, and which businesses to let in.

Whatever useful content you create, you have no say within the social network site; your wishes and desires don't matter, they are irrelevant.

Is this a good thing? We don't think so.
Is this acceptable? Well, as long as there's no alternative, then you have no choice. Our platform, the Dapplets Project, offers you such an alternative.

The year 2020 was the year of deplatforming

The year 2020 was the year of deplatforming. A special word was even invented for this :-)

Millions of people were denied access to receiving information from those they were interested in. This was a violation of not only the right to free speech, but even the right to freely listen to what one is interested in.

People who are unplugged don't even get the opportunity to tell their followers where to find them.

All they have left is to go to the town square to shout until they are picked up for disorderly conduct. They have no other channels of communication left.

Social Media Owns Your Opinion

Censorship and politics form an information bubble from which it's very difficult to escape. You're deprived of the chance not only to express yourself, but to even form your own opinion.

So why is this happening?

Social media controls your attention completely. Internal algorithms and rules decide what to show you and what not.

It's difficult for you to change this paradigm.

In order to get information from another source, you’ll have to go beyond social media. This requires proactive action. For the ordinary user, it’s much easier to remain attached to a single source of information despite its bias and restrictions.

Media Monopoly =

A monopoly on audience attention leads to abuse of that monopoly.

The social platform becomes a conduit for one point of view or another, usually politically or socially biased.

If you aren’t afraid of losing a community member, you can feed him any bullshit, he will swallow it all.

When you’re tied to one social network site, you would feel there are no other opinions apart from those propagated on that platform.

You find yourself in an Orwellian universe where something exists, but you're forbidden to think about it. This is nothing but doublethink... in a new form.

But remember, if an effort is required to achieve a goal, people usually tend to throw in the towel, remaining where they are. They would rather pretend that everything is OK even when such abnormality is so glaring.

Owner of the platform owns the entire community

Social media monopoly has another side.

Such a social network site or platform has monopoly access to a community of people. Only the platform decides which goods and services will be available to that community and which will not.

This means that this platform can forcibly extract unreasonably high profits from users' pockets.

Businesses would have to play by the rules of the platform. They spend much of their profits not on paying for the services of that platform, but just to have access to users, who are nothing but some kind of property belonging to the platform.

Now let’s imagine a model where a business has direct access to an already established community. Let’s assume that the goods and services being offered by that business are exactly what the members of that community desire.

Don’t you think that business would definitely make a lot of money?

You would most likely say that’s a dreamworld, wouldn’t you? : -)

Web3 as a new paradigm

In 2014, Ethereum came up with the idea of a "world computer. That's when the idea of Web3, the new Internet, was born.

The world computer (and the world internet) were supposed to have new functions:

• decentralization
• disintermediation
• permissionless
• trustless resilience

But what exactly did Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, propose should be made decentralized and unstoppable? He proposed making servers decentralized and the code they execute unstoppable.

This decentralization hardly touched the ordinary user.

The need for decentralization for the end user was not obvious.

Beneficiaries of decentralization

So, who is to benefit from the decentralization proposed by Ethereum?

Users cannot benefit from the technology directly. App developers and owners were the direct beneficiaries.

All the benefits for the user depend on the goodwill of the app owner. If there is goodwill and the app, relatively speaking, is good, then the user wins.

But if the app owner misleads users and promotes a malicious project, then everyone, except the owner, loses.

And his app remains unstoppable, just as Buterin proposed. The situation becomes even worse than before because no police would be able to stop an unstoppable fraud application.

2017 The ICO Craze

The ICO explosion began in 2017. Just within two years, there were more than 3000 ICOs that raised over 20 billion US dollars.

Technically, everything worked perfectly, but there was also the other side of the coin.

Money was raised by projects that had unrealistic goals, projects with dishonest token economics. Put simply, behind such projects were scammers. The projects disappeared, withdrew profits, or just spent it on their own needs.

As a result, almost 90% of the projects ended up with negative returns for their investors.

Who's to blame for these financial losses?

Who is to blame for ICO scams?

In today's crypto world, it’s believed that the user takes all financial decisions independently and assesses all risks himself.

Slogans like:

DYOR - Do your own research!

Don’t trust, verify!

are just only a few examples of this paradigm.

So, what if:

you make a mistake in assessing risks?
or you send money to scammers?
or the project just disappears (with the money of course)?
or the token has an unlimited supply (not in your favor) and so on and so forth?

then it's entirely your fault and mistake.

It's hard to argue with that statement. We're in a financial industry where there’s no regulator, and all actions taken are irreversible.

But isn't that too much to ask of the average crypto wallet user?

Due Diligence: Mission Impossible

It turns out that the crypto community in all seriousness believes that their average member:

• can audit a smart contract and run his own node;
• has and knows how to use hardware wallets;
• is a guru both in economics and in IT security at the same time

And most importantly, he has the time for all this.

These are totally unrealistic expectations…

We want mass adoption of crypto technologies, but then we are expecting to have not a user, but rather a real Superman.

That's quite naive expectations, aren't they?

We scare off some users with the complexity of all the crypto procedures. The brave and self-confident fall into the hands of scammers and lose their money.

The main problem here is, crypto applications are decentralized but the information we get about them is located on legacy centralized sites fully controlled by the owners of the same application in question.

The website of any app or financial service is always owned by the owner of that app. Information contained on such a site would most probably show only the benefits of that project.

Anyone who visits the website of a scam project might get into a sophisticated and well-thought-out sales funnel and there would be no way for him to get out of it without outside help.

Summary of Decentralization

From all that has been said, several conclusions can be drawn:

1. Decentralization makes it possible for any application to run unstoppable, no matter whether it is…. in quotes….. good or bad.
2. Users are not the beneficiaries of Web3, their benefit depends only on the performance of a particular app
3. Outwardly, it's very difficult to recognize a malicious app. Its owner has complete control over the UX and user's attention
4. Verification is the product of continuous and collective effort by the entire community, it is not the private responsibility of a single individual.
5. Continuous and collective effort requires an organizational infrastructure

And yes, we still need to stop the unstoppable app)

We will talk about this in the Part 2: https://teletype.in/@dapplets/why-do-we-need-an-augmented-web-part2