People are the New Platforms

When people own their own content, including its data and metadata, they own its distribution as well. They become the new intermediaries.  People become the new platforms.

To paraphrase Marx, we might hunt for jobs on LinkedIn in the morning, fish for compliments on Instagram in the afternoon, criticize each other on Twitter after dinner, and be as lascivious as we like on Tinder in the late evening, without letting any of these identities define us...  Nevertheless, something is lost in this fractionalization o... See more

So much for the fat protocol thesis, we might say. The platforms of web3 start to look a lot like the p2p platforms of web2 and web1: the Pipes, the Airbnbs, the Ebays that win markets by capturing liquidity for rare, non-fungible items and services, their strong liquidity moat giving them strong commissions.

Or if you like: people become the new platforms. 

On the simplest level, web3 can allow us to “bring our whole selves” to platforms without fear of scrutiny or judgment by aggregating our online data and sharing the parts we find relevant to receive better recommendations and find better opportunities. Web3 enables us to traverse all these spaces and carry this identity—in the form of an address w... See more

But I would hope that in the future, the organizing principle will be you, your identity, your stuff, your digital goods, your connections, and then you’ll be able to pretty seamlessly go between different experiences and different devices on that. 

Zuckerberg understands that in web3 fragmentation is inevitable, as users come to own and manage their data and metadata management—even if, in the world of Meta, they’re not quite able to monetize it. After all, people still need to manage their own data not only to cart it contiguously from one platform to another but in order to experience a met... See more

The internet, we could say, is still running in a fairly agrarian economy, as that most precious digital commodity—data—is consigned to the localities of individual platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and, yes, Facebook. The metaverse, Zuckerberg suggests, is a railroad between these local economies that lets them exchange data with the u... See more

In other words, the next step is not giving users ways to aggregate existing types of data, but to mediate and collect new forms of data altogether.