Some thoughts on the new Voice.com project

This evening we finally learned what the #B1June hype was all about: among other things, a new social media system called Voice.com, built by Block.one, the company behind the outrageously well-performing EOS token. (Full disclosure: Everipedia, where I am CIO, is built on EOS and is the recipient of a major investment from Block.one.)

The site isn’t operational yet, and I couldn’t find an app in Apple’s App Store, but you can sign up for the beta on Voice.com and view a very interesting-sounding rundown of features.

In their introduction to the project this evening at a very glitzy gala event at the D.C. Armory in Washington, D.C., CEO Brendan Blumer and CTO Dan Larimer said that there were huge problems with existing social media giants. The small changes Big Social Media is likely to make won’t solve the root problem: you are the product. As long as the social media giants make their business the collection and sale of data about you, you will lack control over your data and your user experience.

They also find a serious problem in fake accounts. Certainly I wonder how many accounts upvoting my posts on Twitter correspond to at least one person, and some responses one sees there sound mindless and robotic enough to have come from bots.

The fact that Block.one has got that much right makes me optimistic about what will be eventually released.

The coming features they advertise:

• Voices.com will confirm that every user is a real person. I pressed Block.one engineers for information on how this would work, but they remained mum.
• The Voice network features a new token, the Voice token (I think it’s officially rendered as $VOICE). The only way to create the token is when others upvote your content. There will be no ICO or airdrop. And you can’t purchase Voice tokens. That’s kind of neat. No word on whether you can cash in your Voice in dollars or EOS somehow. A fair bit is rather vague at this point, to be honest.
• If you have a message you want to get out, you can spend Voice tokens that you have legitimately earned to boost it, even to the top of a queue (not sure which queue). If others agree that your post is important and upvote it, you can get your Voice back and then some. That’s kind of neat.

To my mind, there are as many questions raised as answered here. Anyway, I had two thoughts I wanted to pass on to Block.one and to the Internet void.

First, getting “one person, one account” correct and operational is very important and very hard, and I’ll be watching closely to see if they’ve done it. As I explain in a requirements paper I’m at work on, there are at least four requirements of such a system:

1. That a person with some essential uniquely identifying information (such as, perhaps, a name, a birthplace, and an email address) actually exists.
2. That the person thus uniquely identified is actually the owner of a certain account on the network (and thus bears that name, has that birthplace, and owns that email address).
3. That the person is not in control of some other account. (This is particularly difficult, but it is required if it is one person, one account.)
4. That the person remains in control (and has not passed on or lost control of the account).

This, or something like it, I want to propose as the gold standard of online identity. I take an interest in this because we need to verify that Everipedia accounts are “one person, one vote” (OPOV) accounts for purposes of voting on encyclopedia articles.

Let’s see how many of these requirements the new EOS identity protocol can satisfy.

Second, since Everipedia is built on EOS, I very much hope Voice.com ends up being fully decentralized. The first requirement of a fully decentralized system is to use open, common standards and protocols needed to publish, share, and give all users control over their own social media experience, regardless of which app they use. But I heard nothing about open, common social media standards this evening, and while the Block.one engineers I spoke to this evening did say they were considering adopting some such standards, it didn’t sound like that would be part of the upcoming launch. I could be surprised, of course.

Another requirement is that posts from outside of the network should be readable (if a user so desires) inside Voice.com feeds. Otherwise, each social media ecosystem is its own silo—and not decentralized. I’m not sure if Voice.com is working on this.

Actually letting users export their Voice.com data very easily (i.e., with RSS-like feeds) so that their friends outside of the new social network can view their posts on other networks is another crucial requirement the new project will have to tackle, if they want me 100% on board.

Finally, lots of fine-grained control over how the user’s feed works will all by itself go a long way to convincing me that a company is serious about letting users take back control. No word yet on whether this is in the works for Voice.com, although I did see a nod in that direction.

I would encourage Block.one to consider adding these features so that I can get behind them in the upcoming push for a Declaration of Digital Independence (about a month away), accompanied by a social media boycott and, eventually, mass alternative social media try-outs.

One last thing. I would like to know whether Voice.com will have an end-to-end encrypted messaging system. This isn’t easy for anyone to build, but if you want to go head-to-head with the big boys and demonstrate commitment to privacy, it’s a very good idea. Maybe Sense Chat can help, since they’re moving to EOS. I am thinking more about the importance of this, being already very convinced of the importance of privacy; in fact, I’m increasingly hardcore about it. (I’ll be very curious to read Voice.com’s new privacy and community policies. Minds.com just updated theirs, y’know.)

But Block.one does seem to be on board; after all, they gave every attendee a hardware security key, something I was going to buy soon anyway. Thanks, guys!