Crypto and Web3: A Call for Real Risk-Takers

At M1X Labs, our goal is to get artists and content curators paid. I've been in crypto for a decade now and they've consistently said this was part of the goal of crypto/blockchain technologies at every cycle, but the goal seems to get further away over time, rather than closer. Why is that?

In a nutshell - it's about risk tolerance and its distribution: Web2 made the decision to make artists shoulder basically all the risk, and stay out of any meaningful curation processes, aside from the raw numbers of clicks and views. (Not even money - just pure vanity metrics. 🤔) A lot of these bad habits from previous eras still carry over, even among those who consider themselves to be "Web3".

On the internet, the money comes from advertisers, which goes into a convoluted process of converting views into "impressions", which is then justified based on datasets of clicks and views. (Again, not even money.) Which then gets submitted into a black box of who-knows-what, then somehow someone at the end gets paid, eventually.

Are they skimming at every step of the process? You bet. Are the measurements accurate and meritocratic, as they say they are? (Even further, are they fabricating or fudging the numbers itself for self-gain?) Well, we'll never know, since they'll never tell us how things are actually weighted on the back end. Crypto can do a lot to fix this by bringing transparency to the process, which is why a lot of people got excited for the technology to begin with.

But by now maybe you figured out that this isn't a tech problem - it's a culture problem: that transparency isn't something that a lot of the big players want (because it brings in competition) and that the idea of being equitable to artists simply isn't there right now. But of course, that means that we're now on a race to the bottom, where the internet just gets a little worse every single day.

Web3 has the potential to turn Web2's race-to-the-bottom model on its head and solve big problems like fake-news, bot spam - by valuing real economic transactions and simply giving curators a share of the cut - incentivize people in the right way, and most things will get solved on its own. But in an industry that lost its appetite for risk, that becomes a hard sell.

The thing is - the risk isn't even that big - whether or not and artist/curator pairing does well (which is 80%+ of the market in traditional arts/entertainment industries btw) will still be largely on them, not the platforms themselves. But yes, you might have to share a tiny portion of the revenue to curators to incentivize them to actually promote things that they think are actually good.

The solution has always been simple - let the people themselves decide what they like, and let it grow organically, in a decentralized way. We know that the top-down approach isn't working at this point so the solution is already obvious - we just need to do it.

Or we'll just get another iteration of the Apes, where the original artist got left out of the growth and never bothered "fixing" the satirical nature of the art itself. The art of the Apes are mocking its owners yet the owners themselves don't notice. Do you see it? The definition of cringe, really - if we want to escape this nightmare of perpetual toxicity and existential despair, I think a new way to approach our arts and entertainment is sorely needed at this point, personally.

In a nutshell, Web3 ecosystems need more real risk-takers in the space, that are willing to simply pay the curator classes, at scale. (Previously this may have been difficult/impossible to do, but it is now possible with the blockchain.) This may be a very difficult thing for a lot of people out there because it means admitting that they might not have all the answers and the definition of what is considered "good" is best left to the markets and the people themselves.

Remember when Google used to have the slogan "Don't Be Evil"? They don't say that anymore - for good reason, too. The definition of Good and Evil is not something you want to be doing as a business - but at the time, it at least provided some moral guidance to the industry as a whole. But now that that's gone, there's a big cultural vacuum that's just waiting to be filled. That's where crypto and Web3 comes in, really.