Shattering Paradigms: Ad-free Social Media [[treechat lore]]

Are you tired of DOOM scrolling? Social media platforms are hacking your engagement through enRAGEment, for the benefit of platforms’ real customers, the advertisers.

They pay social media companies to hijack your attention through ads, harvest your data, and censor your content because it 'hurts their brand.’
The situation seems hopeless, the incentives are broken with no alternative... until now.

Treechat embraces Bitcoin’s original vision to build a new kind of social media, where users reward good content with Upvalue (upvote + money), own their content, and harness the emergent meme market to reclaim their Feed.

From Knovigator to Treechat

In 2011 I built a chrome extension called Knovigator to teach myself to code, which has now evolved into Treechat, a bitcoin social media app.

The journey from web-clipping to social media is not as strange as you might think. Web-clipping is single-player content curation, social media is multi-player curation. As I slowly added sharing features to the web-clipper, it started morphing into something resembling a social network.

At its best, social media is how we share and signal boost content that informs, entertains, and inspires us. But even at its best, with everyone curating and sharing knowledge, the question remains: Who decides what content should make it to the top of the feed?

Today’s social media is at its worst, thanks to the advertising models’ broken incentives. Platforms make money by practicing surveillance capitalism to capture your user data and attention, and sell it to their actual customers, the corporations paying to mind control you into buying their stuff.

The key insight is that the original vision of Bitcoin, peer to peer digital cash, sub-cent microtransactions, implemented on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, provides a solution to both the problem of how to monetize social media without advertising, and how to democratize the power to construct our digital reality by controlling our Feed.

In 2024, my cofounder @arghzero and I rebranded Knovigator as Treechat and began building Bitcoin social media to shatter the obsolete paradigms of how we monetize our content, how we take ownership our data, and how we curate our feed, and to spearhead a revolution in how we coordinate human civilization.

The Power of Upvalue

In Treechat, every post has an upvalue button. Upvalue is like an upvote but with a tiny amount of money attached, so that, unlike traditional likes and reposts, each upvalue instantly rewards the contents’ author with a small amount of Bitcoin SV.

Unlike ad-driven networks, where new creators must grind endlessly to build a massive audience before receiving any ad-share, thanks to upvalue, Treechat creators can sign up and start earning instantly, just by posting good content, and receiving bitcoin from other Treechat users.

Why would Treechat users want to reward creators? Users upvalue to incentivize the creation of content they want to see more of, by funding the author, and sending a hard to fake signal with actual money as opposed to cheap likes and reposts. Treechat takes a small fee, and reposts the content to the top of the feed. No waiting for payouts, no ads or advertisers, just direct rewards from users to user. Simple.

This new way of prioritizing content aligns the incentives of the audience, the creators, and the platform : users understand they are the customer, and not the product, creators earn money for posting valuable content, and Treechat earns money the more value creators provide.

The fees to send a transaction on Bitcoin SV are so low, that any individual upvalue can be fractions of a cent. Spamming sats with small upvalues, eliminates the psychological and technical friction of sacrificing money, but for the creator the amounts become meaningful as more and more users upvalue their posts over time.

True History

Bitcoin SV is not just money though, it’s also a public ledger capable of storing large amounts of data. This allows Treechat users to archive their posts, as well as the upvalues they received, on the Bitcoin ledger, independently of our proprietary database, creating an unchangeable public record of what people talked and cared about, not subject to manipulation, or the re-writing of history.

Archiving your posts may seem like an abstract benefit, but Treechat has already resurrected much of the content from a shuttered Bitcoin social media app named Twetch. The content resurrection was a, first of its kind, demonstration of the power of this novel, decentralized, web3 paradigm, where users own their data independently of the platforms on which they created it, and can move between apps to get different experiences powered by the content they own.

Distributed Sense Making

In the old, ad-driven, centralized paradigm, our Feed is constructed by proprietary platforms and their true customers – the corporations whose advertising dollars they collect. These entities have immense power to censor inconvenient narratives, ban inconvenient people, and construct our digital realities, to decide what we see, and what we feel, in such a way as to benefit themselves and their patrons. How can someone be trusted with so much power?

Microtransactions at scale provide a decentralized alternative by bootstrapping into existence an information market – emergent from the individual rewards users send creators for their content. Treechat records the upvalue accrued by any particular post, and populates users' feeds according to this signal, taking the decision out of our hands and putting the power back into the hands of our users.

The Seed

From creator rewards, to data ownership, to an emergent information market, Treechat is the seed we’ve planted to manifest this vision in the world and we need your help. All we have to do is chat, create, curate and reward the content we enjoy for a new kind of social media to emerge – one that literally values your attention instead of hijacking it, that lets you own your data, instead of harvesting it, and one that puts the power of shared sense-making in your hands instead of manufacturing your reality for selfish ends. Never has a social media app had so much potential to revolutionize what we pay attention to, and how we know and act together in the world. Come change the world with us.

spread the word https://x.com/metamitya/status/1998494945691173310?s=20