Yeah, I'm just here to introduce you. Vitalik, always weird to actually introduce you. You are the co-founder of Ethereum. And today we have Dieter Shirley with you. Dieter is the co-founder of Flow. You are also the co-founder of CryptoKitties. You also wrote the ERC-721 back in time. So very pleased to have you. I'm just here to set a little bit of context and maybe start with one question for you both, and then you are free to chat, or I can also have more questions for you.
Today at the Edge, builders are invited to work on the decentralized social track. This focus makes perfect sense because we have watched digital communities like the CryptoKitties community seven years ago. It was a community sharing common aesthetics, chatting, and having a very social dynamic. And so here we are now, seven years after, in real life in the pop-up city. The pop-up cities are real, and we are all here looking for new social apps that can better suit our specific mode of interactions altogether.
This track makes perfect sense because we are somehow around 24 hours post-US elections, and that reminds us that once again, social media has a very profound impact on our world and the order of our world and how we are interacting with each other. So that being said, for the context, I have a question to both of you: what kind of decentralized social app could we build to promote pro-social collaboration, synergy, and community dynamics? Who would like to start? Maybe you would like to start?
I mean, I feel like there isn't one magic, all-encompassing solution or answer to this, right? I think there's two parts to the question. One is what are decisions that can be made within social apps to make them more pro-social, and then the other question is how do you make something that can actually take off and succeed, right? Because I think one of the challenges that we have is basically everyone is trying to make the next Twitter, right? But then Twitter was not trying to be the next Facebook, TikTok was not trying to be the next Twitter, Facebook was not trying to be the next MySpace, and so on, right? And so I think there's this open question of what even is a different form factor that gives something interesting and exciting enough to people that they actually really want to participate and it catches on, right? And I think like Farcaster and Lens do have some set of features that are interesting over top of Twitter, but there's this open question of what actually would it take to really get over the hump, right? And I mean, one of the answers to this, of course, is to actually build apps that are specifically designed around collaboration for projects, DAOs, or teams, though that's also a category that's not empty, right? Things like Discord do exist there already, right? But I think that's the kind of question that you want to ask, right? It's like what is a new category of activity that you want to enable that doesn't exist yet, and then as soon as you invent it, people just think, wait, why didn't I think about this before?
Then yeah, I mean, on the question of how to make this more pro-social, right? I think the challenge that we have right now is basically that there's a lot of different incentive misalignments, right? One is of course just the fact that the content that both gets seen and gets monetized the most is content that wins popularity contests. And one part of that is that that whole concept can get gamed and attacked and so on, but then the second part is like even if it doesn't, that's not the mechanism that necessarily surfaces the best content, right? So that's one of those questions to think about. The other one is, of course, that the default way to win in an attention economy is often to be polarizing, right? Because basically, yeah, if people like what you say, then they retweet it. If people hate what you say, they either don't retweet it or they point and laugh at it, but then the pointing and laughing itself makes more people see it, and then people might even point and laugh back at them, right? And so this question of can you create explicit incentives to both encourage more high-quality content and more of unifying rather than dividing, right? And like we saw Polis, right? And Polis is like a very earnest effort and it gets used a lot, but then it's like Polis appeals to the superego but it has nothing for the id, right? That's just kind of one of my impressions, you know? Like there's this challenge in creating things that actually really work well for all of the different parts of human nature, right? They're both actually good in terms of what things they promote and actually things that people want to participate in. So to me, it feels like this complicated problem that has a lot of different moving parts to it.
Yeah, obviously there's no quick answer to something like that. I think to hone in on the pro-social aspect that you're talking about, I think the reason why we're seeing these communities fracture so much is in part what Vitalik was saying about, you know, the most divisive content is the one that sort of gets the strongest reaction from people. But it's also just the echo chamber effect where people end up being aligned with people who already think like them, and it lets us forget that some of the people who aren't in that echo chamber with us are also humans and have complex ideas and it's never as simple. I think there was an amazing Twitter account, I don't know if it still exists, but it's called 'I am a voter' or something like that, very simple. And what it is, it literally just randomly samples people that have gone through the exit poll and they ask questions like are you conservative or are you liberal or are you pro-abortion or are you anti-abortion and all of these things. And it just used to post these random samples from this, and it would be wild, right? It would be like, 'Oh, I'm a highly religious conservative person who supports abortion,' right? And it was such a good reminder that there is no one axis upon which we can separate humanity, that's a false dichotomy. And crazily enough, we find ourselves attracted to these platforms that try and impose that on us. And so for me, the biggest thing that we can do is try and recreate what used to be, whether it's school, college for us when we were younger, whether it's the workplace, maybe it's the bar after work, but just these places where we're sort of forced to confront people who have different ideas than us and not just reject them as wrong but to understand how they got to that point and understand the ways in which they're right and the ways in which they're just different from us because they have a different priority set.
And so what does that look like? I mean, to Vitalik's point, if it was obvious then we'd all be doing it or it would have already happened. But I do think that having some sort of mechanism where there's a little bit more mixing and a little bit less segregation is going to be an important part of that. And then another aspect, and I guess this is a little orthogonal to my first point, but one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is that we bundle together the data, the raw data of all of the tweets that people are producing or all the Facebook posts that people are doing, and we combine that with the recommendation algorithms. And if we could somehow disconnect those and we could have a system that looks a lot like Mastodon in the sense that everyone has access to all the data but we had a little bit more control, whether that's by choosing different algorithms, choosing different human curators, but just having a different way of surfacing the content that's interesting to us that isn't predicated on getting us to doom scroll as long as possible in order to show us as many ads as possible. And you know, exactly what that looks like, I'm not sure, but it would be really interesting if there was an app that literally at the end of showing you a bunch of tweets, instead of figuring out which ones you scroll past enough, but like, I don't know, it checked your heartbeat or used the camera to determine whether or not you were angry or happy and tune the algorithm that way as opposed to whether or not I felt the need to send it to my wife to just talk about how dumb so many other people are.
Very interesting. And so do you think there is, like in Edge for instance, is there any social dynamic that we could actually try to enhance or foster through decentralized social apps?
Well, I think every app should be decentralized. I mean, at the end of the day, what we see is that whenever we have centralized social systems, somebody ends up in control, and that person is inevitably going to have to make decisions that are not going to be in the best interests of everybody. And so I don't know what to say other than that, like, of course we need decentralized social applications, but we need all applications to be decentralized because at the very least they end up being rent extractors and end up monetizing the efforts of others in increasingly providing a less valuable service while they're making ever more dollars.
Yeah, and I think we're already starting to see examples of decentralizing providing actual value in terms of breaking down some of those barriers. I mean, even like the different Farcaster clients, right? To me, it's just like a live experiment of that kind of decentralization in action, right? Where if you dislike one client, you can switch to another and you're still part of the same network effect, right? And that really reduces the barriers to entry for people to come in and try to build something better. Another fun one I saw yesterday, right, was like there was a rollup that shut down yesterday, right? And because it was stage two and it was a proper rollup, L2Beat had written software and you could just go and use that software. And so users basically have this method that's completely independent of the original team to actually withdraw and take their money out, right? And that is one of the core value propositions of something being a Layer 2 and being a rollup instead of just being on a server. And we actually got a live demonstration of that playing out, which is also really amazing to see.
And a bit more technical question, probably. What kind of tech primitive should we build or should the developers today at the Edge try to build in order to enable this social adoption, also maybe better user experience?
I mean, one I think about a lot exists, but it's just not... I think it could use a lot more attention, and that's IPFS. I think that when we're talking about social media in particular, there's a lot of data that is read-only, like it's write-once and then read-only, and IPFS is perfect for that. Now, IPFS is a transport protocol, not a storage protocol, and so we still have questions about where we store that data. But I think that there is a lot to be said for using these decentralized systems that don't necessarily require a coordination layer of a blockchain. And I think we forget about those protocols sometimes. And I think if anyone was looking to build something that had a social utility like that, something whether it's IPFS, which has its problems, or something like that, I think we really should be aware that not everything needs to be a blockchain and not everything needs to be on a blockchain, even though lots of things can and should be on blockchains. I think that data distribution, basically the ability to easily create verifiable read replicas, is something that I think is underappreciated and which IPFS has solved to a reasonable degree.
Yeah, and when the original concept of Web3 came out, right, Gavin Wood came up with the term back in 2014, one of the interesting ideas there was that Web3 was supposed to represent this trifecta of three different technologies, right? Where Ethereum was only one of them. The other two were Whisper and Swarm. Where Whisper is a decentralized protocol for basically passing messages that do not need consensus, and Whisper, it's called Waku today, it still exists, right? So that's been quietly progressing and there's even some privacy protocols that are actually starting to use it now. And then Swarm was basically meant to be decentralized storage but also a more sophisticated system for incentives, having decentralized DAOs that can do the storing. So IPFS does a lot of that but not all, right? It's like right now using IPFS requires these pinning services and in theory with Swarm it's supposed to be a fully decentralized thing. So that part's definitely making progress slowly. And I think it's definitely very true that there's a balance of different technologies for different kinds of needs, for different pieces of content, right? Like a single tweet appearing in the wrong order is very different from an account creation being reverted, right? So that's what also... and I think as we've seen, right, there's a lot of hybrid architectures out there, right? Like with Farcaster, you know, user account stuff happens on-chain, but then messages get broadcasted and stored in totally separate but still decentralized data structures.
And do you think that the pop-up city format should have its own decentralized app?
I mean, like Zuzalu and Zuzagora and Z.city and I guess you can continue extending the list and their social layer and a growing list of things, right? It's kind of meant to be that, right? But it's like you can't prescribe that from the beginning. We have to let people experiment and figure out what actually satisfies people's needs.
Yeah, I think the most decentralized thing is that it doesn't have its own apps, but people create apps for it, right? And I think, to me, an area that I don't think we think about enough or leverage enough in the blockchain space generally is composability, the permissionless interoperability. And I think something like this is an area where we might be able to inspire or even incentivize that in this kind of community and say, look, we have an app that keeps track of who's met other people, right? But somebody else can create an app that encourages you to go meet a friend of a friend, right? And if that data is open and if those linkages are open, then it can open up the creativity of other people to come in and say, well, all I have is the idea of one more feature, but that's okay because I can implement that feature as a web page that just expands on the existing functionality or as a smart contract that just leverages the existing data. And so I do think that, you know, I always think that events like this, I think it would be so fun if there was just a super simple trading game, right? Where everybody gets a pack of cards or stickers, or I mean, NFTs obviously, at the beginning of the event, and then but they're all the same, right? Like all I have is little kitties wearing hats, right? And what you have is a dog blowing balloons. But then I get a collection at the end based on how many people I interact with. Like that could be a lot of fun. And I think it would encourage people to go and find, you know, like, oh, I talk to Ali and I see that he has this zebra shooting a rocket out of its butt, and I'm like, where did you get that one? And now I'm going to try and find the person who's got the zebra. And so I think that there's... it sounds silly, but I think the point is that we often aren't silly enough, right? Obviously, I'm the CryptoKitties guy, so maybe I over-index on the silliness, but I feel so many of the attempts for us to create social platforms in the Web3 world are 'here's a social platform and it's Web3 so you should care.' Like, make it more fun, make it more engaging, make it more silly. And I think that's something that vibes with this community. You could talk about simplicity, not stunting, but that's the thing, is I think that sometimes it is too simple, right? That there isn't that whimsy in it where it's very straightforward. And look, so many of us are engineers and very intellectually focused, but we also want to have fun, right? Like, we're sitting next to a guy who has cats on his bag. We're all here because of a guy who likes cats on his bag. So I think we should try and find a lot more whimsy in what we're doing in this space.
