DESO: WHAT IS DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL? | The Decentralized Social Blockchain

Are you new to Decentralized Social? And do you want to learn more about what DESO is and why you should use it? In this video I’m going to walk you through a complete guide to Decentralized Social for beginners.
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Alright, let's start with the basics and talk about what DeSo is.

Simply put, DeSo is short for Decentralized Social.

DeSo is the first and only custom-built blockchain to power and scale a new category of decentralized social applications.

Now, if you’ve never even heard of Decentralization, it might not make a whole lot of sense. So to help you better understand, I want to tell you about how centralized social media today is.

Today, a post submitted to Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter belongs to these corporations, rather than the creator who posted it. And the monetization goes predominantly to these corporations as a result.

Only a handful of private companies effectively control the entire social space. And the worst part: they earn monopoly profits off of content that they don't even create.

Meanwhile, the creators who actually produce this content are underpaid, under-engaged, and under-monetized thanks to an outdated ads-driven business model.

This ads-driven business model forces social media companies to keep a walled garden around content created on their platforms.

Developers can’t build their own apps. And improvements or changes are decided by one company only, not by the people.

Because only a handful of companies have access to the content, only these companies can curate competitive feeds, build new features and apps, and only these companies can monetize the content. Content that isn't even created by these companies in the first place.

We're stuck in a loop: Users have to use these companies' apps because they have a monopoly on the content - and because of this, creators are forced into continuing to give their content up to them, in order to get any reach.

A solution would arise if we had a way to shift to a public pool of content that no individual entity controls - but can this be done?

Well, all of these problems can be solved by decentralizing social media in the same way Bitcoin is decentralizing the financial system.

DeSo stores all of its data on a public blockchain, rather than giving it to a handful of private companies to monopolize on. With DeSo, anyone in the world can run a node that exposes their own curated feed.

For example, imagine if ESPN ran a node that curated a feed of the best sports content. Or if Politico ran a node that curated a feed of the best political content.

Since DeSo is fully open-source, these players could even customize their UI and build custom algorithms to rank the influencers and posts in a way that serves their specific target customer.

In some sense, we can solve the problem by contributing content to a new globally-shared pool that for the first time isn't controlled by a single company.

Storing all data on a public blockchain makes it so that anyone can build a social media experience that's competitive with the current market. This lowers the barrier to entry for creating new social media products.

Compare this to today where building a competitive social app generally requires building a billion-user data moat first.

The best part is that anyone who runs a node to create their own feed also contributes data back to the public pool of profiles, posts, follows, etc... that's stored on the public blockchain.

A post or a like on ESPN's node can be surfaced on Politico's feed. A post made in China can be surfaced on a feed running on a node in America and vice versa.

Instead of being forced to contribute to a privately-owned data pool controlled by a mega-corporation, publishers can now contribute to a public data pool that nobody controls.

Thus we can move from a world in which data is a heavily guarded, privately-owned resource to one in which it is more like a globally accessible utility that anyone can build on.

But reach is only one side of the coin - the other side is monetization.

Social tokens, social NFTs, and social tipping are three categories of products pioneered by DeSo, and they're already changing the game in terms of how creators monetize on the internet, but they're only the beginning.

For example, imagine a major creator who wants to start offering premium content in exchange for a monthly subscription.

All it takes is for one person on the internet to build this feature, and the entire ecosystem of DeSo applications gets access to it instantly.

The same goes for other features like an inbox where creators can be paid to repost content, or paid to answer messages from their followers. The possibilities are endless.

[derishaaryawan]

Great explanation here!!! DESO is the future🚀

[jasond]

Love this Nigel - great work! Thanks so much for the CloutCast shoutout in there :)

[Goldberry]

Looking forward to seeing the content this channel brings! Thank you!

[TerminallySerious]

Love this Nigel. Have liked/subscribed and turned on notifications. :) :)