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Crypto critics have had a very good year. Much of what they predicted has come true. High-profile projects come to light as Ponzi schemes; that Security revocation leads to mass theft; and that the average person will leave the bagBitcoin, which was trading around $67,000 in November, is now at $21,570. Many other cryptocurrencies are even worse.
As pointed out here last monthOn social networks, though, it may feel like the cryptocurrency crash never really happened. the last few months, Facebook When Instagram Added a way for users to introduce non-fungible tokens, Spotify lets artists use NFTs as profile pictures.
The origin of the work was redditThe venerable social news aggregator and discussion site is the firstBlockchain-backed collectible avatars what others call NFTs. Avatars created by a handful of artists are posted on Reddit under “SnooAn alien mascot that can be used as a profile picture for your site.
In the video game industry, NFT sales often rioted Among gamers, it’s pissed off for what they perceive as pure greed. But while Reddit takes his 5% of sales from his NFT, the announcement came without much ado.
This month, the company went one step further. Starting August 17, he began distributing collectible avatars to 10 million users for free. Nearly 50,000 have been gifted to his longtime Redditor who has contributed extensively to the community. The rest will be distributed over the next few weeks. The only problem is that users will need to set up a cryptocurrency wallet to receive it. Reddit sees it as a first step to encourage millions of users to start exploring the concept of a “portable identity”.
Some people may hear phrases like that and their eyes will recede in their heads and never recover. We continue to believe that somewhere in all of this lies the solution to the many criticisms of our online lives. that our data is locked and inaccessible; That platform asks us to share more of ourselves than we are comfortable with.
Steve Huffman is one such executive. Huffman, who co-founded Reddit and has been CEO since 2015, says he has been fascinated by blockchain technology since the early days of Bitcoin.
Avatar was a natural starting point for Reddit’s blockchain exploration, he said. Reddit uses features differently than his iMessage and Snapchat. There, avatars typically represent users with some degree of accuracy as cartoon versions of themselves. Reddit avatars, on the other hand, are alien, meant to highlight aspects of a user’s personality without revealing the user’s true identity.
About a third of the users who log into Reddit, which launched about a year and a half ago, have created an avatar before, he said.
“It’s okay to reveal your tastes without revealing your race. You can reveal parts of your style without revealing your age or gender.” This idea is very Reddit, and I wish we had done this 10 years ago because it really fits Reddit.
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According to Huffman, allowing artists to sell avatars on the platform was related to another goal of helping Redditors make money from other users. We also want to move away from a world controlled by the platform that created .
What cryptography adds is the ability to own digital things, he said. “Before that you can Create digital goods like games. But those products are ultimately at the mercy of the company that creates them or operates the database. In other words, we want to be closer to real ownership, not actual ownership. “
Already, users can choose to display their digital Reddit avatar as part of their Instagram collection or use it as their Twitter profile picture, he said. The two companies have not signed a partnership agreement to make that happen. It just works because the blockchain runs on open standards.
“We are not working with any of these companies,” Huffman said. I wouldn’t say we’re best friends. But now we have this third-party database, the interoperability layer.
Of course, I’m not saying that many people will race to bring their Snoos to Twitter. But it hints at what might be possible in the future, Huffman said. People may start by bringing in profile pictures on the internet. Other bits of the ID may later become portable as well. Reddit users reward each other with ‘karma’ points for sharing quality links and making good comments. What if Reddit Karma allows you to log into other of her websites?
The company will take a step in that direction in 2020,community pointsBased on Reddit’s existing karma model, community points will allow the subreddit to award users with tokens that live on the Ethereum blockchain.proposed by the company various uses These tokens include voting focused on active community participants, contest prizes, and allowing reputable users to access additional features on other apps and websites.
In a way, the company’s bet on Avatar is even bigger, an effort to get 10 million people to actively start using cryptocurrency wallets.
‘We try not to use encrypted words at all. It just confuses people,’ said Huffman. “The ecosystem is so messed up. Me I can’t understand half of this.
Huffman provided a metaphor to explain his claim.
One of my frustrations with the crypto community is, you know everything in open source is a little bit worse? wonderful! Check out this Microsoft Word alternative. No, it’s not. Cryptography is like that. “
Like all crypto builders, Huffman’s challenge is to abstract away all these confusing terms and arcane user experiences and replace them with something familiar and valuable. Despite years of trying and billions of dollars of investment, few companies have met that standard to date.
Reddit also needs to conduct research without causing the kind of backlash that video game companies experienced when announcing their blockchain projects. Huffman said he’s confident the company can and the recent crash has made it easier to focus on building utilities.
“I was against profiteering, I was against bubbles,” he said. “All these crypto stuff I’ve found over the years to be very uncomfortable and unproductive and that’s why we don’t talk about it. So I think it’s parasitic and delusional.Our business model is never about selling NFTs to crypto people to make a lot of money.Our goal is to It’s about getting reputation into a third-party database.”
The next step is to get people to use the wallet and from there see what other parts of Reddit will be delegated off the platform to users and their community.
I enjoyed talking with Huffman. He brings the right kind of skepticism to a technology that has been poisoned by wide-eyed optimists and outright con artists. At the moment, it may feel like the tech world is investing most of its energy into Lego sets, but no one understands how to put it together identity, ownership, decentralization, etc. Using the building blocks of make hope that the final product will be worth all the effort.
Huffman told me “Products may or may not work. But their success doesn’t come at the expense of users.”
