The Problem With Centralized Social Networks and Why We Need a Solution

Nowadays, social media platforms have become integral parts of our lives – and for an excellent reason.

From chatting with their friends to reading the latest news to posting memes, social networks allow users to express themselves and communicate more efficiently in the digital world.

However, in the last few years, the social media landscape showed its teeth, revealing numerous problems originating from the centralized operation of the solutions.

In this post, we will explore the dangers of centralized social networks as well as a possible solution to this burning issue.

The Dangers of Centralized Social Networks

Today, the most popular social media solutions are operated by massive tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and ByteDance.

Due to their centralized architecture, service providers have full control over the social networks' they manage.

As a result, they can set their own rules and exercise their authority to achieve various goals: for example, generate extra profit by selling user data to advertisers. For that reason, while social media is free to use in theory, you pay with your personal information to utilize the services.

And, despite the fact that users power these platforms, social media giants extract value without distributing fair rewards to content creators.

In addition to data privacy scandals like Facebook's infamous case with Cambridge Analytica, social media platforms face increased risks of cyberattacks. Storing user information on centralized servers creates a single point of failure, which means hackers have to exploit a vulnerability within only one part of the network to gain control of the whole system.

It's also crucial to talk about censorship, which has become a significant issue on traditional social media platforms. Due to their increased authority, providers can easily delete the posts, restrict the content, and ban users who share different views than theirs.

The Mission to Decentralize and Democratize Social Media

Subsocial has identified the key issues of the social media landscape, which it aims to solve by leveraging blockchain technology and decentralization.

Utilizing the Substrate blockchain framework, Subsocial built a robust social networking protocol that promotes decentralization and democracy.

By using IPFS for decentralized data storage, we eliminate the need for central servers, which enhances network security and eliminates all risks related to a single point of failure.

With the goal to end the status quo and challenge the increased power of tech giants, Subsocial follows the standards of Web 3.0 to offer users the ability to create the decentralized communities of tomorrow where they set and enforce their own rules via transparent on-chain moderation.

In fact, Subsocial just announced the launch of its first social dapp: Polkaverse.

Polkaverse is the first decentralized niche community for everything Polkadot and Kusama, where users can discuss the latest updates of the two platforms, the best projects within the ecosystem, and the hottest tokens without any irrelevant information.

You can learn more about Polkaverse and the future of Subsocial dApps by taking a look at the following article. Meet Polkaverse: the First Decentralized Community for Everything Kusama and Polkadot

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