Unbundle the Internet
Learning from Reddit, Imagining a new one
Hello and welcome to the same blog, I’ve had for about two years now but have not updated for six months.
I have shied away from having a weekly newsletter till now because I was not sure of how I’m going to keep producing good work while being on a schedule (read: because I’m lazy) but eventually, I’ve realised that this pursuit of perfection is a disguise that has been holding me back (read: I heard Austin Rief from Morning Brew on a podcast and got excited)
Jokes and facts aside, I’m starting this weekly newsletter to share and articulate things that occupy my mind during the week. I would like to warn you, however, that I’ve got some serious range - Web3, Solana, Communities, Culture, India and whatever Balaji says about it, Martial Arts, Brazillian Jiu Jitsu, Podcasts, Books (I buy a lot, read like a couple), Training, Travelling and more.
How do I keep all this in my head? Well, with great difficulty.
This is why I’m starting this newsletter. To be the place where I think out loud, share ideas, talk about things that are important and hopefully foster a community filled with interesting conversations.
So now that you’re here, might as well subscribe!
I’ve spent the last couple of years thinking about the internet and decentralisation so it’s only fair we start there: crypto, the internet and culture.
What happened to Reddit?
In the last couple of weeks, Reddit, the front page of the Internet and the home to every neighbourhood weirdo we love has seen a ton of outrage from its community.
More than 7,000 subreddits went dark
6.6% decrease in traffic
Lowest engagement in the last 3 years
What happened? It’s in the APIs.
Reddit announced in April that their free API, which has been around for free for around 7 years, will transition to a paid model. This is going to come into effect at the end of this month.
In the wake of this news, Apollo for Reddit & other apps announced last week that they would be shutting down due to high API costs that they cannot afford.
This change has seen a massive uproar from Reddit communities & their moderators. Over 7,000 subreddits including some of the biggest ones like r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, etc set themselves private. Some have stayed private since then until things change.
This is an extremely tough spot for the executives at Reddit to be in but one would assume that they will try to work this out with their community and figure out a solution.
But this isn’t about just Reddit. This incident should spark a much bigger conversation.
CEO who?
You would think that any social media company with a centralised team and massive shareholders can make decisions with freedom. But, as it turns out, they cannot.
Reddit's inherent value (like other social networks) lies in the community. With that value comes leverage & influence over decisions regarding the network. As I said earlier, it is a tough spot to be in for an executive sitting in Reddit's HQ but it highlights the power of a strong community.
If a platform runs on user-generated content, the ultimate value resides with the users.
✨Decentralisation✨ has entered the chat
Now, what if Reddit's network of people, i.e. social graph was a decentralised one?
Lots of fancy words - explanation below.
Reddit's social graph currently is like a walled garden. People in the network stay within the network. If you join a new app, you build your network there from scratch. This is how all web2 social networks work.
But when you talk about an open, decentralised social network, that social graph is not restricted to a particular app anymore. Any number of apps can be built using a common social graph. This is called Composability.
So, if this social graph of Reddit users was a composable one, the network would have the option to exit.
The network doesn't like what Reddit is doing? It could just move to a different app. What if Reddit fixes things? The network can come back to it.
This is the power of decentralised social networks. Joel John puts it perfectly in his recent blog.
"That change in infrastructure - from server-side, centralised ownership by monopolies to blockchain-based decentralised ownership by users is what is “new” about Web3."
In a perfect world built on top of a decentralised social graph, the cost to start a new social app goes down to ~0. You don't need to bootstrap network effects because it already exists.
Give the people a sticky enough interaction model and they will come.
(Source because Twitter doesn’t allow embeds in Substack anymore)
Is this perfect world & sticky web3 apps in the room with us right now?
Well, no. We have not seen this future played out yet because of a bunch of reasons:
Terrible UX
Scalability
With the advertising model out of the window, it’s hard to find a business model
Using web2 apps is just way easier
As much as I hate to say this, if things stay the same, we are not going to see this future play out anyway.
The incentive to move to a decentralised, harder-to-use Twitter (Bluesky, Nostr, Mastodon, Lenster, Farcaster) is, to say the least, low.
Web3 needs to shift focus from the app to its real moat.
The Network
DeFi, or Decentralised Finance, took off a couple of years back because it unbundled TradFi into smaller components that everyone in the world could use.
Finance went from being this institutionalised domain to
Staking
Liquidity Pools
Exchange
Lending/Borrowing etc.
It is a reasonable bet that decentralised social networks will do that to web2 social networks - unbundle them into individual plug & play pieces. Or, Social Legos as we call them at the Gum HQ.
With the social graph front and centre, you open a new world of cross-interaction between apps that serve different purposes. We're already seeing this play out in the Solana ecosystem. As an example, you today can buy NFTs from Tensor on your Dialect app & then trade with someone else within the app itself. This cross-application interaction is what web3 brings to the table.
But, building this future of a new internet is not going to be easy.
This will require new incentive structures, new social media habits, new apps and new forms of interactions between creators & consumers.
Talking about the future, Solana is primed for this.
We at Gum are hyper-focused on providing social legos & UX via Sessions
DRiP already has a huge social graph & wallet address base with real users
Dialect is by far the smoothest web3 app I've ever come across
Backpack is building a super app & literally redefining NFTs with xNFTs
Tensor, simply put, is much more than just an NFT marketplace
Cubik has now brought super-smooth crowdfunding to Solana
and many more great things that I'm sure I missed out on.
Imagining a future of these interoperable apps built on top of a truly, user-owned social graph gets me hyped up.
This is not a new social app that takes over the world. This is not speculating NFTs for their price. This is not the SEC vs Crypto battle.
This is a new internet. A better one. It's not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile is.
If you haven’t read Joel John’s incredible piece on this new internet, I highly recommend that you do it here.
Content Consumption Dump
This part of the newsletter marks the point where I've finished discussing what I wanted to talk about. But as over-sharing goes, here are some books, audiobooks, and podcasts that I've been enjoying over this past week.
Monetising Innovation (audiobook)
Bonus: Fascinating game on nuance and communication
The Photo Frame
This is the section where I share a picture that I’ve clicked to bring some life to this long-ass page filled with words.
Here’s a picture I clicked while trekking in Skandagiri with the Superteam India folks during the recent Crosschain Clubhouse.
If you’re in Bangalore and you haven’t made the trip, I highly recommend it.
That’s it for this time. The first of hopefully many more issues to come.
If you liked what you read, do subscribe and share it with others. And if you have more ideas on how I can go about this newsletter thing better, do let me know on Twitter at @paarugsethi as well.
Until next time, stay hydrated.