The Dan Larimer Problem Of Cross-Platform Blogging
How best for authors to package and deploy their content across different platforms?
Photo credit to fabio on Unsplash
Fittingly, the article which inspired this one has been deleted from the internet. It is possible that this artifact has been preserved by reposting to another site, and I could potentially learn the answer to this question by solving this problem in a rudimentary way (by Googling, to be specific) that would be likely to return results but not completely effectively as I do not remember the title of the article which I read several months ago.
In this article (as far as I recall, it has been awhile since I read it!), Daniel Larimer discusses the problem of cross-platform (read: decentralized) blogging. Essentially, it’s tough to get people to follow you from site to site to read your content. This difficulty is compounded by paywalls and other barriers to entry which effectively prevent willing readers from accessing the content they want to access.
The Problem: Being Tough To Follow
Users follow people on websites they like. It’s the underlying principle of the social media approach to content distribution. Websites such as Medium.com and Publish0x.com allow writers to earn a living from their posts, but mostly you end up making $20 per month and get bored after awhile. Part of the reason that this happens is that we tend to tailor our content to the audience which responds to it, and we change up our style as it becomes clear that particular sorts of content meet with a more favorable result when presented to a given audience.
Bandwidth becomes an issue on the part of the reader, however, because this system has a flaw in it. The various paywalls and even web stacks are different enough to take some time to become familiar with, and bad experiences can send a reader packing for months or even years before the decision to return and see what one has been missing occurs. Some readers never return to a website simply because they didn’t enjoy the experience they had there the first time around.
So content sites come and go, and yet a blogger lives for 75 years or so. The content and its author need to be sustained far longer than the average life-cycle of a blog, if alignment between the author’s current and future interests is to be sustained.
What Would The Best Solution Look Like?
Having highlighted the main points for a writer (content is difficult to follow between sites, and sites go down all the time possibly resulting in the loss of years’ worth of content that readers could still be engaging with) that constitute what I affectionately term the Larimer Problem of content management, I would like to postulate a solution. NFTs as a platform offer stability and decentralization which, combined with sufficient support from a community of interested people, could potentially last forever. No investor might ever “pull the plug” so long as the content is memorable enough (and the cost of maintenance is low enough).
My book, “crypto.” represents an early, simple, and basic solution to the Larimer Problem. It was a one-off concept which was executed by four people: myself, the author; an artist, who did the cover; an English philosopher who cared enough about my work to pull it down from around the web; and a Canadian magazine man who put together an amazing physical offering of the work. The content is a hodgepodge of articles I wrote during the year in which I explored cryptocurrency in depth for the first time and also maintained a fairly remarkable online blogging output.
You can find the book at the Unifty Matic Market or at OpenSea and it is free to read if you find yourself interested in doing so. Additionally, you will find that you can purchase an NFTBook Genesis on ETH or MATIC via OpenSea.io or at Unifty’s Matic Marketplace under Interactive. Currently, “crypto.” is the bestselling NFTBook Genesis series offered by WIP Publishing, but new books are coming out all the time and it is possible that “crypto.” could be dethroned in fairly short order as ETH makes its way to the MATIC sidechain so that collectors can avoid paying high gas fees to purchase art on a quality smart contract.
The Future
Nobody knows what might come next in this world, but I am interested in what Mr. Larimer might have to say in response to this article. I believe quite passionately in the cause of the NFT as a way for artists to more effectively monetize their work; however, I am even more interested in the potential for this technology to allow audiences to directly reward authors for producing quality content throughout the duration of the life of said content.
An ETH address is a reasonably easy thing to follow, but perhaps liquidity pools can be adapted to feature the work of an artist or a group of artists in collaboration with one another who use novel technologies to monetize their work in effective (and unexpected) ways. I believe this to be a conversation worth having in NFT-oriented communities throughout the world, and I am extremely excited to be a part of the vibrant Literary NFT Community. We’ll see what comes next together.
Thought provoking indeed! As a novice writer this is great perspective to take on board. Now to follow WIP Publishing on Twitter and follow up on the other names you mentioned!
I've thought extensively about how to most effectively utilize NFT technology as a tool. I've created several "schematics", so to speak, regarding how I think it could work for various different markets. NFT's have the potential to bring not only ownership of material, whether it be written word, music, art, etc... but the freedom for the individual to create it freely in the first place. No middleman, no publishing company/producers, just a creator and their work.
You write an article and post it to 12 different blogs (probably more), because those 12 blogs are visited by 12 different groups of people that appreciate your work on their 12 different preferred platforms because the platforms are 12 different colors and each group likes their own color. They have the right to do so since you can not change their preference. What you can change is the delivery method. NFT's are, in many ways, like a key. I mean heck, in some cases they are LITERALLY a key to access content.
Content creation sites would benefit greatly from the creation and implementation of a decentralized "ledger" of creators. I envision it as a network that is fully based on NFT's that incorporates social media, blogs, art viewing, music, video, podcasts, and even Etsy-like content. Step 1, you write an article, you mint it into an NFT. Now you want to post it to be read. Step 2, you secure access by staking/delegating network tokens to sites/dapps/etc... you want to post to that have joined the network. Step 3, you submit your NFT to be posted into the central ledger (art, article, music, etc...) and it is routed to the locations you have chosen to stake/delegate tokens to for access. Step 4, readers/viewers/listeners can then access your work and freely partake of it. They can "tip", "subscribe", "donate", or whatever you want to call it as appreciation for the work. Anonymous "traffic" is tracked and you as the content creator get rewards based on an algorithm that takes your staked amount and traffic generated by your content into account. Rewards are distributed on a schedule, like other platforms, and you can then either cash out, delegate to more locations to increase distribution, or increase delegation to existing locations that are successful to increase rewards profits. I mean, I don't know if this already exists... it very well could... but I have been working on the roadmap as a hobby in my spare time because it just seems like something that could be very efficient and beneficial to creators as well as rewarding to distribution platforms.
Who knows where the road will lead!