Six months ago, one of my favorite web2 SEO content writing clients, LiveXP, closed its operations, and my lovely content manager was laid off. The 72 articles I wrote for them in the course of three and a half years are now gone. I shared language learning tips, made grammar rules accessible, wrote about the impact of language learning on the brain, and encouraged their readership to learn and grow (and to use the services of their language learning tutors, which was the point at the time). Those articles were an essential part of my portfolio.

It’s okay, I have been paid for this work, but it made me realize that something similar could happen to anyone's personal blogs or publications, and that platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook can restrict or remove access unexpectedly.

I still have these articles in my Google Drive and can republish and even tokenize them, but there are a couple of issues with that.

First, even though the work was bylined, they own the rights. Not sure if they really care about that anymore, and I would add a note about it, but the firm no longer exists, and I have no one to ask.

Second, republishing them now won’t fix the damage, since the metadata is permanently gone. It won’t be clear that a particular article was published on a particular date, has been read XYZ times, has had comments, shares, and everything else. Now it would look new, and since those were SEO optimized articles, someone would assume they were generated by AI. Even worse, since all web2 search engines have indexed each one of them years ago, if I publish them now, they might be flagged as plagiarized content.

This shouldn’t be happening, and the bottom line is that this can stop happening only when we transition to web3 because the content we create and all metadata are permanently recorded on a blockchain.

Now I write on Paragraph, which is also a platform, but all content and metadata are stored onchain and can be accessed via an encrypted address. Each article is visible on the main platform and accessible to people who use “normal” browsers and don’t care about web3, but it also has detailed records secured, which looks like this:

You can check this article's metadata via the Arweave TX link below. The website you’re at right now helps, but it isn’t crucial. If it stopped working at some point, I won’t be too concerned.

In web3, platforms only lend us their UI, nothing else. That’s one of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about blockchain.

I’ve been talking about it to some web2 creators I know, but they are all indifferent. Tried advocating this on LinkedIn without success. It’s their loss, and they will realize it someday—or they won’t. I can only say this:

Every content creator should embrace and use blockchain technology. The only thing you need to make the shift is to decide to do it. You absolutely don’t need to grasp all technical details. Web3 infrastructure, although still imperfect, is already user-friendly. Some ecosystems are more obscure, sure, but there are many that have been optimized for you to use them easily. Why not take that advantage?

As for me, I’ve only known about this aspect for a couple of months, but I love it and will continue writing about it. I will also share this article on LinkedIn. It will likely be ignored, but maybe, just maybe, I'll manage to onboard someone, and that will make me happy.

If that’s you, let me know, and I’ll support you. The internet is changing, and it’s about time to find our place in web3.