“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Herbert Simon
And that's why the attention economy has had some pretty harmful effects on us as consumers, with a tendency to spend too much time scrolling and too little focusing. Some have come forward and highlighted that web3 might be a fix for the attention economy. But is it?
In this post, I'll lay out my thoughts. I'm by no means an expert, just someone who likes to read, research and contemplate what new tech means for existing industries.
Take everything with a grain of salt or an entire package of it.
What web3 brings to the table
Not telling you anything new here but let's get at it anyway.
- Decentralization: distribution of power instead of accumulating it in the hands of a few. Even though, realistically, if you are a cynic like me and like to look at how stake in PoS networks and hashrate in PoW networks is actually distributed — you do start to question how decentralized we really are. The answer, more often than not, is that the Nakamoto Coefficient is terribly low for something calling itself "decentralized". Beyond that, an area where decentralization in the digital economy and attention economy really can make a difference is storage by providing creators tools to ensure resilient storage and access to their files vs. having to rely on someone like Google.
- Ownership: is a huge shift away from how current content is mostly owned by the platforms you share it on. With web3, you could own your social graph and, therefore, would be more empowered to do whatever you like. Instead of being at the mercy of Twitter not banning you, on web3 socials, you can take your followers wherever you go (also on Substack, I've heard, which isn't even web3).
- Identity: wouldn't need to be established through a trusted third party anymore but is in the hands of the user. If you wanted to, you could curate a variety of identities as well, similar to how some guys are girls online. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of exploring decentralized identities' challenges and opportunities, check out this one and this post I wrote about using NFTs as identities.
- Native payments: often mentioned as a cool part of web3, which would empower creators and fans to directly transfer value and assets without intermediaries like stripe or PayPal taking their cut. If you use Brave, you can already tip anyone you want on Twitter. The only question is if they are actually signed up.
- The "good" metaverse: at least, so I've been told that the good open metaverse will be better than the one that Meta and the other big tech companies are building. We will see — at the moment, barely one I know is hanging out in either metaverse.
So what happens when web3 meets the attention economy?
Web3 projects, like any other company trying to gain users or build a community, have had to capture attention and have often relied on web2 platforms like Twitter and Discord to do so. That's quite ironic, but unfortunately, no matter how awesome your product is, that won't be enough to sell it; gaining attention is still required.
Also unfortunate that we had a lot of scams capturing a lot of attention, but that's beside the point 😆
Web3 aims to empower users by giving them control over their data, identity, and ways to get paid for it.
Traditional advertising, but at least you get tokens
A fairly common business model is the one Brave is running:
- Have some platforms where users pay attention
- Get advertisers to pay for campaigns
- Users views ads
- User receives some tokens for their attention.
- User manages to sell tokens for real money.
- The advertiser gets traffic, the platform gets a cut, and everyone happy.
Well, or something along the lines. I do use Brave, but I've turned off the ads because I find them annoying and also because Uphold wants me to KYC again, and I'm not having any of that. Also don't really think you need blockchain for the entire thing to work, but anyway.
In the NEAR ecosystem, the biggest dApp currently is Sweatcoin. Besides the issues I have with the Move-to-Earn idea and then having to carry your phone everywhere just to make your steps count (hello, it's good for your well-being and health. That's enough — I don't need a token for this, thanks), I also am mildly infuriated by the ads they put in for people to earn more tokens. I know, I know, that's just nice because at least you get paid for watching the ads but really? $0.04 or even less for spending 30 seconds looking at an ad for a game I'll never download? It just doesn't sit right with me.
These models seem nice, but even if I get paid for watching an ad, I'd like to see more technologies that actually help people channel their attention in more fulfilling ways.
At least they won't track your real identity.
In Web3, since we are all interacting as wallets, we’re free to create a variety of identities that are “divorced” from our real-life selves. One of the biggest issues with the web2 attention economy is the lack of control and invasiveness in terms of how deep profiling goes. At least on Web3, you could decide which wallet you use to connect to which platform and how you want to present yourselves in different contexts. You might have a fun wallet that you use on Social Media networks and one more serious for all your job applications. And then a third to pass KYC on exchanges.
The third might be tied to your real identity, but you could use Zero-Knowledge-Proofs so that it’s just one entity that has confirmed you’re an actual person and everyone else just relies on that.
At least when our profiles are wallets, we’d have more control over whatever advertisers and companies can find about us. But just having control over your wallet doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be safe.
Web3 native advertising
Best case scenario
Let me be optimistic for a change. Web3 native advertising could use your wallet and the NFTs you’ve got in it as well as the sites you frequently use to send cool stuff your way. No one should be yelling about the invasion of privacy because all that data is publicly available anyway on block explorers; it’s not rocket science to find all the NFTs and transfers of any wallet. In a way, it’s marketers' paradise.
If NFT ticketing becomes a thing, event organizers could use that as a way to share limited, visitor-exclusive NFTs afterward. Last year, I went to a concert by one of my favorite French Pianists, Sofiane Pamart — that guy’s a genius btw. 🎹
Anyway, had the ticket been an NFT, the organizer could have easily distributed POAPs to all attendees. They could have also shared a recap video as an NFT with all the participants without ever asking for our email. That could be pretty cool. And other concert organizers might use it to share discount codes — I mean, once there is a web3 native messaging platform that allows you to share things like messages to a wallet.
There certainly was a messaging function through Etherscan, and WalletConnect raised 11 million to build a messaging layer, so this might be a piece of infrastructure required if we really want to use wallets as profiles.
I know it’d be a bummer for all those projects building the next web3 messenger, but I hate to break it to you.. asking people to download yet another app is quite a lot. Asking them just to click a tab in the wallet they already use on the other hand…Anyway, if you’re building a web3 messenger, maybe some food for thought.
Web3 could provide rails to empower creators to monetize fandom rather than relying on ad revenue while giving users a way to vote with their feet by just taking their social graph to the platform they enjoy most.
Moving on to the worst-case scenario
Worst case scenario
We all drown in spam, and sh*t that’s irrelevant to us. Our realities are fragmented, eating at the fundament of our democracies. People’s attentions remain scattered.
Just because someone optimizes for you scrolling endlessly on a decentralized platform, doesn’t change much of the original sin.
If you have a MetaMask you ever connected to OpenSea, you probably can understand how I foresee some drowning. Go ahead and check the hidden tab on Opensea. But please do not click or interact with any things shown there. I repeat, DON’T if you like your funds. Some companies go for mass rather than relevance. That’s what is happening there. And since everyone’s wallet address is publicly available, it’s very easy to airdrop NFTs or other tokens (I have a Che Guevarra token in my wallet, for example). I don’t think the future of advertising is spamming. But these projects clearly think otherwise. And now imagine we give those companies soulbound tokens; that’d be the worst.
There’s really not much you can do about it. We can make it socially unacceptable, or maybe someone can come up with a gating mechanism, so you have to accept transfers from addresses you’re not familiar with.
DeSo
Since among the biggest perpetrators of the attention economy are social networks, many have pitched decentralized social media as an alternative. Apart from the challenge of gaining critical mass and explaining to people why suddenly they have to pay for things that used to be free (queue the: What, I have to pay for making a change to my profile outrage), there is the question of how do you maintain this, and how do you handle customization vs. what might be in the collective interest.
I know that, especially in the crypto crowd, we have many that are skeptical of institutions (fair enough), some that want to throw over the entire system (ah yes, because why not), some that will fuel pure conspiracy theories (reptile people drinking children's blood run the world) and some in-between. I consider myself moderate, I like to read from both sides and reserve the right not to have an opinion on matters. I know the latter is particularly outrageous because then people can’t argue with me.
But what if decentralized social becomes the norm, and everyone just curates their own feeds as they wish? Or maybe even worse, people start doing “Feed as a service,” and then we get feeds from people like Paul Logan that you can buy.
How do we foster a healthy public discourse when everyone’s reality is different? I mean, this is one of the problems with existing social media platforms, and I don’t see many discussions around that problem in the web3 space.
Ultimately, if the goal of DeSo is to maintain users as long as possible on their platform, I feel we’re just repeating patterns.
However, it’d suck to end on such a negative note so.
Maybe
There is a chance for some web3 attention economy companies to make a meaningful contribution to help people focus their attention and for creators to monetize without ads. Instead of using technology to exploit human attention, why don’t we use it to help us be more focused, productive, and fulfilled? Ultimately, isn’t all of this just a tool?
One example I’ve come across is t2 which is attempting to help people in deep reading and connect readers and writers.
I believe there is a genuine chance to use web3 technologies to enhance people’s use of the internet, and maybe even nudge them for the better. There’s definitely an opportunity to innovate the advertising model, and not monetize people’s attention as much and have a race not to the bottom but to serve people the most relevant things.
Maybe there’s even a way to reward curation through creators, something that the EIP-4589 might address since it enables to show NFTs through hyperlinks.
Thinking about the things I do to become better with my attention is for example a pomodoro timer. There is an app where you can even grow a forest if you don’t use your phone for a certain period of time. 🌳
Maybe there’s a way to web-3 that — not that it’d be such a profitable endeavor, but hey it could be fun to have a dynamic NFT version of that and grow your forest that way.
What I believe isn’t the way is “pay attention to earn” because then you might again end up with some sort of arrangement where people are watching dumb things just for the token. Not so humane.
So these are my thoughts so far.
I guess to TLDR it’s just let’s not repeat the mistakes we made in the past and focus on how we can use technology to enhance what we can do rather than exploit our attention.
Also congrats if you read this entire thing. ✨
So long,
Nao
Btw, all the images were created using midjourney and in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, one of my favorite painters.
