For the last 20 years we had an unwritten contract between users and platforms, is it time to change it?

The contract went like this:

Users will drive attention to the platform, and in exchange the platform will provide them with distribution

Sounds like a win-win, right?

Well, not exactly.

Because platforms didn’t care how users drove attention — they only cared that they did

And what’s the most effective way to drive it?

Conflict and drama

The users who pushed outrage porn and sensationalism, exaggerated facts or fabricated claims for clicks, were therefore also those that got the most attention — and most distribution — on the platform

But that came at a price — both to other users and to society as a whole

Users could no longer tell what’s true and what’s made up, the media and institutions suffered from a crisis of trust, society became polarized, and the platforms turned into cesspools of toxicity

But what almost everyone forgot was that there was nothing sacred about the Attention-for-Distribution contract

It was not some fundamental principle of nature.

In reality, platforms could determine distribution in any way they chose

Attention-for-Distribution made sense in one context: when the platform makes money from advertising it wants to maximize user attention on the platform

But in the age of open graphs and cryptocurrencies, attention is not the only game in town

And once Network Economies enter the picture, things can change dramatically

Then we’d see the emergence of a new mode of production; where contributors collaborate, build in public, and get paid not for the attention they drive but for the value they create