The world is on the brink of a content revolution.
This guide is a super quick guide to web3 and blockchain for beginners. If you’re in a hurry, you can download the PDF version of this article for free to use it for reference later.
That revolution is web3 (or blockchain) and will change a lot for the current writing and creating community, allowing them to do a couple of things:
- Own their work and their audience.
- Make central institutions obsolete.
- Build a 1:1 relationship with their readers.
- Prevents unfair censorship by big tech.
Once you start seeing the benefits of this thing called web3, you want to try it out and you wonder when it will happen.
Many people still see blockchain solely meant for Bitcoin. It’s not just Bitcoin. The blockchain is the decentralized network that a coin can be run on.
But we can also run applications like writing platforms on it.
That gives us the ability to make our content decentral and distributed instead of served through a third party that owns our content instead of us.
If you want to start learning more about writing in web3, read on.
Community first, central institutions last
The thing about blockchain technology and web3, in particular, is that it’s not controlled by one company or person.
The community owns all of it.
Bitcoin and the blockchain network were initially designed to make peer-to-peer financial transactions possible and to take away the role of banks.
It now has evolved into something that stores content as well and allows us to digitalize our content in the form of NFTs and Smart Contracts using the Ethereum network.
There are so many advantages to using this technology, for example, censorship by big tech is gone. Just like that.
The community decides whether something is wanted on the platform or not. Still, with blockchain, it’s impossible to remove something from the chain but it will get voted down to the background and nobody will ever see it again.
That’s better than censorship.
Writers own their work and their audience
With NFTs, writers do now own their full audience and their work.
Since there’s no central company to keep track of the users, everybody can now keep their own “wallet” of fans.
By creating your work as an NFT, you are the only owner and that information will be stored inside it.
There can’t be tampered with it either.
You’re also having a 1:1 relationship with your readers (or audience) because they are willing to purchase a part of your content by transferring a couple of coins to your wallet.
That’s a peer-to-peer transaction.
You’re now sharing ownership with your readers and fans. But you will always be the original creator and everybody can see that.
That solves your copyright problem.
Writers get paid directly by their readers
With this peer-to-peer transaction between writer and reader, there’s no third party to take away a 10% fee on your earnings.
A great new way of earning money online.
Creators will be able to create their own crypto coin as well which makes it possible for readers and fans to “invest” in their favorite content creator.
You’ll be sharing in their success once the value of this coin goes up.
There was this platform a while ago that allowed users to do this. It’s called DESO.
This decentral social media kind of platform hasn’t really delivered what it intended to but I think this is the way to go in social media because followers mean nothing.
The platform can take your account away and you’re at zero.
Currently, you have to convert your followers into sharing their e-mail addresses with you so that you can reach out to them as part of your audience.
With web3, you’re directly connected and there’s no platform to take that away.
Final thoughts on web3
I think there’s a great future waiting for us regarding web3 and blockchain technology that will make us all more independent creators.
We’re still at the start so it’s not weird that there isn’t one great platform where we can migrate to if we want to but there’s plenty of time and great entrepreneurs that are building these platforms right now.
I’m sure of that.
Just notice that once you’re into web3 now, you’re always an early adapter.
Compare our position to those who adapted to the internet at the beginning 2000s when everybody was quite skeptical about the future of the digital revolution.
We’ve seen how that went.
This is only the beginning of the revolution.