WebFree: You Are the Platform
We’re experiencing an inflection point, a power shift on the web driven by Web3.
Originally published at https://brainflow.substack.com on February 14, 2022.
I’m so hyped right now, I need to get this out.
There’s so much to say so I’ll just start.
We’re experiencing an inflection point. IMO an important moment in history.
Using the word “moment” makes this sound like a small period of time. It feels indeterminate to me right now, but I believe in the large-scale of things, looking back at all of human history it really will be a “moment”.
And change is already upon us.
It’s been building since 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper titled, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
In a recent meeting with tech industry leaders, US Congress noted :
“Web3 is not yet too big to fail, but it’s too big to ignore.”
Now that’s exciting.
“Too big to ignore.”
Personally I feel vindicated about my decision to leave SpotHero and strike out into Web3 on my own.
But beyond myself, I feel so fucking bullish on the web community rn.
Web3 presents sooooooo many opportunities for people, it’s insane.
I could rant and rave all day, but you have more important things to do, so I’ll get to the point.
What’s the inflection point?
It’s a power shift.
Over the last 20 years we’ve seen Big Tech companies rise to dominate the web and take a disproportional financial reward.
And they have provided some of the tools to allow this next wave of web innovation to come through.
But power is starting to shift away from these companies.
With Web3 people can build their own communities outside existing Big Tech platforms and monetise these communities in a way we haven’t seen before with little upfront investment, often 0.
The number of NFT projects I’ve helped launch with 0 upfront investment is astounding.
The power shift is about who defines the web and online culture, and who the main beneficiaries are.
I believe individuals have always defined online culture but always within the confines of Big Tech platforms, within the guardrails defined by small groups of people in Silicon Valley.
Chris Cornell sung it best:
If you’re free you’ll never see the walls.
So I’m dubbing Web3, WebFree, because this intersection of creativity, technology, and empowerment is allowing individuals to monetise their unique knowledge, talent, and assets, enabling creative freedom at a scale we haven’t seen before.
People all over the world can now make a living from practically anything that other people find valuable.
The only prerequisite is an internet connection.
Entry costs that previously, say 10 years ago, were high are now coming down.
Blockchain tech allows you to accepts payments without an intermediary, social media platforms can expand your reach far beyond the people you physically interact with on a daily basis, and no-code website creators allow you to create and deploy your own website, as well as manage content or products, with no coding experience.
I’m not saying this is all attributed to Web3, but I want to compare and contrast Web2 and Web3 to highlight why I think the transition from Web2 => Web3 is so important and what it means to “be a platform”.
Web2
In a Web2 world, I can (and did) create a Shopify store, list products, accept payments, and ship physical goods or provide a service to people all over the world.
What does Shopify provide?
A platform for inventory management, checkout and payment processing, and no-code storefront creation.
They do other things too, but IMO these are the headliners.
Shopify holds all this data in centralised servers and could kick you off at any point, essentially cancelling your business.
I’m not here to say that centralised platforms are bad. After all they got us where we are today and we’ve seen companies like Shopify, Uber, and Apple use this model to provide great value to their users.
Centralised platforms became popular because they solved problems for a lot of people.
To illustrate this let’s use Shopify as an example.
Imagine how hard it would be to build an ecomm store from scratch, to build your own inventory system and integrate it with a website without any of their tools.
I expect most small business owners would pale at the thought of this.
Shopify has empowered business owners to bring their business online, helping them to attract online shoppers, and have been so successful because the alternative is not palatable.
Ben Thompson said it best when talking about iOS and Android phone platforms:
There is no competition-based alternative beyond building the entire platform from scratch (make your own phone!), and at this stage of mobile that isn’t viable. Developers are 100% at the mercy of Apple and Google in a way they aren’t on the web.
Platform companies do a great job of attracting users with outstanding customer experience and then locking them into the platform because there’s no alternative.
And once you’re locked in you’re at the mercy of the platform which is likely controlled by a small group of people.
In choosing to build your brand on a centralised platform there’s a tradeoff: you get access to great tools and infrastructure but run the risk of being rugged by the platform and you have no say in the matter.
For example, if you choose to build your business on Shopify they can:
- Shutdown your store at a moments notice
- Change their UI in any number of ways
- Remove integration with your preferred marketing provider
All of which are at the least an inconvenience and at worst an apocalyptic event for your business.
To prove I can talk about platforms other than Shopify, take this Twitter example: they can ban you from the site, closing your communication channel with your audience.
Love him or hate him, Twitter’s removal of Trump is a well-known example of the power held by Twitter and all platform companies.
If they can ban POTUS it seems like nobody else is safe.
Now let’s move on quickly as I tip-toe around the issue of free speech.
A free market is defined as:
A system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market.
I want to expand this beyond goods and services and say that it also applies to content in general.
The web should be a system in which the presence, relevance, and urgency of content is self-regulated by content providers and consumers negotiating on an open platform.
This is in contrast to the current landscape of platforms with indecipherable Terms & Conditions (that nobody reads anyway…), who regulate their own platforms giving their users very little say in the matter.
What’s the alternative though? How would we regulate the internet?
We vote with our likes, reactions, upvotes, retweets, shares, money (fiat or crypto), and whatever other methods of opinion-stating are available.
But if a small group of individuals can choose to remove your content, their power greatly outweighs the market at large and the free market is not all that free.
What do I care? We’ve been living like this for a couple of decades now and I’m good.
Pause.
Here’s the thing, I don’t want to come off like some conspiracy theorist sat in my office planning the downfall of “Big Tech”.
I’m not.
I love technology and all the advantages it brings to modern life.
I am a software developer after all.
I’m just tired of bringing somebody else’s creations to life, I want more creative freedom, agency, ownership, and value from the things I create.
How is Web3 different?
The power shifts to you.
By utilising decentralised networks nobody can cancel your business, your brand, nor your communication channel with your community.
YOU ARE THE PLATFORM.
With decentralised networks no single entity has the power to enforce change across the network.
Proposals must be presented, agreed upon by the majority of network participants, and then implemented.
There’s still a risk that the network could change in ways that you don’t agree with, but all is not lost because other participants may feel the same way as you, agree to fork the network, and proceed in a different direction to the majority.
Herein lies the big difference: You have the power of choice.
Previously if Shopify made a change, like adding a full-screen Shopify logo splash screen every time somebody goes to your store, you have little say in the matter and they’ll implement it regardless of what you have to say.
Your options are to live with it or move your store off Shopify and risk significant impact to your business.
It’s not like you can copy-paste your store to another provider…
But in Web3, you kinda can.
A major value prop of decentralisation is interoperability.
In a decentralised network, all participants must conform to the same standards in order to communicate with each other and transfer data.
Imagine you sell small kitchen appliances on eBay and your ecomm friend tells you that you can get higher margins selling on Amazon.
You can’t easily duplicate your eBay store on Amazon.
You can’t copy your listings from eBay and paste them into Amazon without rework.
Both ecosystems have their own standards for what data is required on products and how it’s displayed to users.
They’re not interoperable.
But in Web3 you can do just that. In fact you don’t even need to copy-paste anything, it’s already done for you.
Let’s look at 2 of the largest NFT marketplaces, OpenSea and LooksRare.
When I mint a new NFT it quickly becomes visible on both of these marketplaces, not through any action I took, other than simply minting a new NFT, but because there’s an open standard governing NFTs and any marketplace that wants to list NFTs must conform to the standard.
Also anybody who wants to create an NFT that’s compatible with the major marketplaces must conform to the standard.
This is powerful.
And standards are not new. We already had standards like this before Web3 came along.
Think about the device you’re using to read this article.
I bet it has an internet connection.
So it must be using the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the protocol used to transfer data across the web.
In 1992 version 1 of HTTP was defined as such:
HTTP is a protocol with the lightness and speed necessary for a distributed collaborative hypermedia information system.
The emphasis is mine.
HTTP is a decentralised standard created by network participants AKA the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
W3C itself is:
An international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.
This is not a corporation or government entity. It’s a community. A group of people who share a common interest, to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.
The point here is that to use the web your device must be compatible with HTTP.
This open standard and many others like it are what has allowed the internet to become so ubiquitous.
By creating a set of shared, open standards, W3C allowed for the internet to connect the whole world.
Imagine if Facebook, Google, and Apple each created their own version of the internet to network their customers.
They’d have different standards making web development incredibly hard because you’d have to write code just to build the same website for multiple networks.
And then of course they’d compete with each other for market share, and it’s likely the networks wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other, thereby creating siloed, competing networks.
Think I’m crazy?
Just look at Android and iOS.
They’re totally different ecosystems built with different languages in different development environments and they most certainly are not interoperable.
Yes, some smart folks have created abstractions on top of these environments to make app development easier (thank you React Native, Ionic, and Flutter) but that only serves to strengthen my point.
Why do we, the web community, have to do the legwork and make tools that allow us to more easily build apps for Android and iOS? Why couldn’t there be a PhoneOS that all devices conform to?
If we apply this thinking to the aforementioned multi-internet world, what kind of tools would we have to build to create websites for totally different networking protocols?
Having an open standard like HTTP and many others made it easier to develop applications for the web and distributed this ability.
Now, I don’t think centralisation is intrinsically bad.
Lots of good things have come out of Web2 over the past couple of decades and they might not have been created had it not been for centralised tech companies.
How so?
Centralisation allows for faster decision-making about lots of things: strategy, product development, procedures, policy, and many other categories of problem.
Fast decision-making has allowed tech companies to innovate where open standards were bogged down.
For example, in a year-and-a-half WhatsApp was able to implement full end-to-end encryption yet emails (an open standard) are still unencrypted.
The early days of Web2 served us well where companies were developing new products and providing huge amounts of value to their users.
Let’s face it, in 2008 if Facebook hadn’t provided value they wouldn’t be around today.
But now the focus of innovation has moved from providing value to extracting value.
Now we’re hooked on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, they want to get the most out of their early investment and squeeze $$$ out of their users who have nowhere else to go.
Fair play, that’s capitalism. That’s what CEOs and shareholders want.
But I don’t want that.
I’m sure many of you reading this feel the same.
I don’t want to be a product, because that’s what I am to Big Tech.
Check out this totally professional diagram that accentuates my exceptional artistic ability 🙃 :
So Big Tech provides free products to Me, You, & Everyone Else™️ (think Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, WhatsApp, Twitter etc.)
Through using these products we provide data to Big Tech who use our data to further refine their products, creating premium features that we pay for, while also selling our data to third parties.
(I use the term “selling” to cover both direct sale and indirect sale through offerings like Google Ads, Meta for Business, Twitter Ads, Instagram Professional etc.)
These third parties then use our data, bought from Big Tech, to sell us their own products which of course we pay for as well.
I say “we’re the product” because that’s what Big Tech sells to third parties, they sell our data, they sell us.
What does this have to do with Web3?
Well Web3 allows Me, You, & Everyone Else™️ to be our own platform.
Wait.
What does it mean to “be our own platform”?
What’s a “platform”?!
A platform is a 2-sided marketplace, where buyers and sellers of a particular product or service converge.
Some platforms you might be aware of:
- Uber — connects drivers and people who need to get somewhere
- Facebook — connects people who have something to say and people who want to hear what others have to say
- YouTube — connects video content creators and people who need information and/or entertainment
- Shopify — connects business owners and online customers
Oh look we’re back to talking about Shopify 🪄🎩🐇.
At it’s core a platform works like this:
And the platform makes money by charging sellers a subscription fee and/or % of sales revenue.
You might be thinking, why would I want to be a platform? I don’t have the skills or knowledge to build anything like Uber or Shopify…
The good news is you don’t have to, because (some of) the infrastructure is already there.
And really this is what platforms provide to start with.
Some industrious individual sees a fragmented, inefficient market with multiple buyers and sellers unable to communicate fully and unable to perform efficient price discovery.
Uber, a well-trodden case study, created the ride-sharing market by disrupting the cab industry.
Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp saw the cab industry in a state like that described above.
In 2009 we were still calling up cab companies, checking their availability, negotiating on a price, and eventually striking a deal.
Or even worse, hanging around on the street waiting for an empty cab to come along.
Maybe you had to call 3 or 4 different companies and go through this whole process.
Fragmented and inefficient.
Cabs have been around in one form or another for at least 400 years. I wonder how much time and money has been wasted on negotiating with cab drivers in that time?
Anyway, Travis and Garret came in, saw the industry as it was and sought to do better.
They provided a centralised service that would allow drivers, not just licensed taxi drivers but anyone with a passenger vehicle, to signal their availability and location to people who need a ride.
Uber facilitates the negotiation process by providing a dynamic rate that adjusts based on demand.
The previous process where you’d be calling and negotiating with multiple cab companies is now whittled down to a single app.
You open Uber, set your destination, review the price and waiting time, then confirm.
For the end-user this is a huge win because the process is effortless and much quicker.
For drivers this is also a win because now anyone with a passenger vehicle can earn income by providing rides for people, and they don’t have to be part of a cab company, get a taxi licence, nor build their own infrastructure to facilitate scheduling, routing, and price discovery.
(Yes, I’m glossing over Uber’s issues and questionable treatment of drivers, but this article is about Web3 not Uber so I’m focusing on the early aspirations of Uber.)
A key piece Uber provides is infrastructure.
Uber invested heavily in building centralised infrastructure to connect buyers and sellers and solve their problems. They didn’t build an open standard for use by all, because in the late 00s it wasn’t possible to make money like that.
Now this centralised infrastructure is a huge barrier to entry in Web2 and is the foundation of many tech companies’ competitive strategy.
To summarise, Uber identified a fragmented market and built infrastructure to provide value for both drivers and riders, thereby becoming a ride-sharing platform.
Now you know what a platform is, let’s talk about individuals as platforms.
You Are the Platform
At its core a platform is a system that connects buyers and sellers by providing infrastructure that wouldn’t be cost-effective for the average market participant to build for themselves.
And to generalise this even more, a platform provides services that can’t be found anywhere else and the cost of recreating them is too high for many market participants.
You can fill this role yourself in Web3 by creating something unique that can’t be found anywhere else.
One of the latest trends is NFT avatars.
People have been creating digital avatars ranging from apes to cats, robots to ethereal entities. Each avatar has different human features and accessories thus tapping into our desire for creative self-expression.
Now, I’d argue that each NFT creator is themselves a platform.
They provide a service that can’t be found anywhere else because the NFTs are unique pieces of art that can’t be found anywhere else.
And it doesn’t just end there.
NFT creators are providing further features connected to their NFTs (oft called “utility” in the space). For example, they might create a second NFT collection and airdrop it to their existing holders for free, or create a comic featuring the NFT avatars, or even access to a private members-only restaurant.
In this way creators are providing services to their community that can’t be found anywhere else, thus leveraging their unique creative talent, connections, skills, knowledge, and assets to become a platform.
Being able to monetise our own creativity is huge.
Finding people who share your passion, forming a community, making a living for yourself and helping your community do the same is even greater.
For 8 years leading up to 2021 I was all-in on climbing the corporate ladder. I thought if I just work hard enough and climb high enough I’ll have the financial rewards and freedom to do what I really want.
But it’s exhausting.
And IMO the rewards are not worth the investment, especially if you compare those to the rewards of those who benefit most from corporations.
So Web2 companies, you go to work for them, get paid a comfortable salary (but not so comfortable that you become complacent), you spend about 35% of your waking hours doing things for said company, and maybe you get some stock options that are supposed to be a way of sharing the value you’re creating.
But those stock options are so highly diluted that they don’t really reflect your contributions to the company.
You have every right to want more.
The whole Web3 movement is not just about money, it’s about freedom.
Freedom to Do Whatever The Fuck You Want™️ while still being able to live the life you’ve become accustomed to.
How you ask?
Tokenisation.
Oh we’re getting off on another topic but tokenisation is important.
As Chris Dixon illustrates in The Web3 Playbook, new networks require a critical mass of people to make themselves useful.
Imagine if Airbnb only had 3 apartment listings…
This is called the “bootstrapping problem”.
With Web3 new networks can use tokens to provide financial utility and overcome the “bootstrapping problem”.
I’m just gonna dangle the tokenisation carrot for now and come back to it in detail another time because it’s a big topic.
So I hope you can see now why I’m so hyped up about Web3.
It’s the biggest opportunity since the advent of the internet.
Go do the thing you always wanted to do and get paid for it.
And maybe I’m biased (yes I’m totally biased) because I was fortunate enough to make some money from NFT drops, quit my full-time job, and have a cushion so I can experiment with Web3 and support my family at the same time.
Not everyone is that lucky.
But I believe you can get there if you want it enough.
So all that’s left to say is LFG 🚀.
Originally published at https://brainflow.substack.com on February 14, 2022.
