







Steemit is a social network with the radical idea of paying users for their contributions. But in the crypto gold rush, it's unclear who stands to profit.
Status Traps: Learning from Web2 Social Networks - a16z crypto
Countering social networks’ tendency toward “social capital” inequality requires thinking like an economist and learning from the web2 days.

Social Networking Utopia — Matt
In discussing the network topology of social networks — whether centralized like Facebook or federated like ActivityPub — I think the ult...

Pocketstars: The creator site where payments don’t always happen
With the influx of creator sites such as Onlyfans, rivals have been popping up everywhere. However, all are not equal and it’s vital that…


Money as Message | Andreessen Horowitz
Network effects — where a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it — are one of the key ways software businesses maintain a better product and more defensible market position. This is especially true of messaging apps like WeChat — which, as I’ve argued before, is not just...

The 3 Levels of Wealth
Slack is a lot like Twitter from my vantage point. It’s a service I use all the time. It’s become an integral part of my life from both a work and social perspective. Every time I talk to someone else who uses the service they share my love for the platform. And it’s almost impossible to explain its usefulness...

(PDF) Canal: Scaling Social Network-Based Sybil Tolerance Schemes
PDF | There has been a flurry of research on leveraging social networks to defend against multiple identity, or Sybil, attacks. A series of recent works... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

AtmoPay — payments for the open social web
Set your prices once. AtmoPay publishes them to your own account and settles the money, so every app that reads your profile can sell for you.
Ceptr & Holochain - Currencies of Social Coherence. Holography and Distributed Hash Tables vs. Consensus Bottlenecks in Monolithic Blockchains.
“Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about science fiction and money is the different kinds of currencies that are imagined for future worlds: the poscreds of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, a currency required for every minute transaction such that the door becomes not an item you own but, rather, a provider of services for which you must continually pay, leaving protagonist Joe Chip trapped in his own apartment until someone pays his door to open; the bars of gold-pressed latinum used by the avaricious Ferengi on Star Trek, the only thing that cannot be replicated in this post-scarcity world, useless other than as an atavistic marker of wealth; the reputation- based currency of whuffie in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, used to replace the social role money plays in creating a hierarchy in another post-scarcity world.
Money, blockchains, and social scalability
Introduction Blockchains are all the rage. The oldest and biggest blockchain of them all is Bitcoin , which over its eight-year hist...

Money, blockchains, and social scalability
Introduction Blockchains are all the rage. The oldest and biggest blockchain of them all is Bitcoin , which over its eight-year hist...

The Follower Factory (Published 2018)
Everyone wants to be popular online. Some even pay for it. Inside social media’s black market.

Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ (@elena@aseachange.com)
[1 media attachment] #WSocial state of the network - September 15th, 2026 There is a lot of misinformation regarding W Social and how active/successful it is. So, from time to time, I'd love to share some numbers. The beauty of #opendata! The network endorsed by the #EuropeanCommission may be the darling of Brussels political circles and European media organizations (who simply rehash PR talking points). But the look behind the curtain is really troubling. As @pallenberg often says, this network is #DOA (dead on arrival). A social media graveyard, or rather, a simple moribund database. There is no way that Zeiter, Rentzhog & co. can start monetizing it in 2027. Numbers from this morning at 10:30am: - Accounts on their PDS: 37,531 - Users with verified ID: 7,492 - Users with 1+ post: 3,388 - Users who have never posted: 34,143 - Users with 0 posts and who follow 0 accounts: 26,444 - % of users with 0 posts, who follow 0 accounts: 70,4% - % of users who have never posted: 90,97% So, whenever you hear someone hyping it up, feel free to forward this post or point people to my articles at https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/ The one thing I will give W credit for though is how good they are at lobbying and hyping up their image. While this playbook may have worked in the past, not anymore. On an open network, with open data, it's child's play to expose misrepresentations and show the real, raw data. sources: pdsls.dev, clearsky.app, atproto.at and the csv of their full PDS that I download daily 💁♀️

Omidyar Network
Omidyar Network is a philanthropy whose mission is to bend the arc of the digital revolution toward shared power, prosperity, and possibility.

Stellar | Making Blockchain Technology Real: Why We're Giving Away Lumens
This giveaway design will test Stellar.org’s hypothesis: there are people in the bitcoin community who will realize the potential of distributed ledgers.

Who Makes Money From Social Media?
Investigate platforms' revenue redistribution schemes.