With all the hype surrounding decentralized, blockchain-based social media platforms such as Steemit and Synereo, another next-gen network is on the horizon.
Back in April, the lead developers of the “Yours Network,” Ryan X. Charles, Steven McKie, and Clemens Ley, released their vision to the public: a platform that places social media in the control of content creators through the power of Bitcoin.
‘Yours Network’ to Challenge Blockchain-Social Media Alternatives
A while back, Ryan X Charles left Reddit — where he briefly worked as the site’s Cryptocurrency Engineer — to produce the Yours Network. The goal of the project is to utilize Bitcoin to breathe new life into content creation and social interaction, such as commenting and picture sharing, by providing a financial incentive.
In an April blog post on Medium, Yours Network writer and developer Steven McKie explained:
The internet itself is a network, and the Yours P2P platform exists in conjunction with it as the network that seeks to monetize all other networks. More aptly put — no matter where on the web the content comes from, we want Yours to be the destination for where you come to monetize that content. —Yours will allow you to take content you put online, and create a separate channel for you to get the $ you really deserve for your creativity.
The Yours Network team hopes that their project will fill the Bitcoin gap left by other popular networks Steemit and Synereo, which both use altcoins to monetize their platforms.
The use of altcoins has led many Bitcoin fans to dismiss these social networks altogether. The Yours Network hopes to leverage this skepticism and make their platform into a strong, bitcoin-based competitor to Steemit and Synereo.
Other Blockchains Have Non-Existent Ecosystems
Ryan X Charles explained in July that the team will leverage Bitcoin becuase it is the “largest blockchain technical ecosystem” in existence. This is a big deal when it comes to dealing with open source software, documentations, standards, API’s and a significantly large community. To Charles, a new blockchain “either has no ecosystem whatsoever, or, if we copy bitcoin, has an ecosystem only insofar as it overlaps with bitcoin.”
As such, Charles doesn’t believe a platform like Steem can last, detailing in a blog post:
Although we are delighted to see blockchain social media a reality, we worry that Steem can’t last. The burden of building not just a community and a technical platform, but also a novel cryptosystem and supporting economy, is extremely high. Security and scaling problems with their blockchain have a smaller team of experts incentivized to solve them, so solutions will come slower. Companies and services such as wallets and exchanges will be fewer in number and less featureful. When they encounter regulatory issues, they will have fewer allies.
On August 1 the developing team stated that testing has proven their technology to work, but that programmers “still have a good deal of work left to do.” Therefore, after the team implements micropayment technology into the platform, the Yours Network will launch an official preview to an invite-only audience, chosen from the project’s mailing list.
As other social media networks build their user bases, many are waiting for the Yours Network to launch. By monetizing content creation and online interaction with Bitcoin, many enthusiasts believe it will trump those using altcoins.