Adamantium Hands

published: 2024-02-01

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post where I collected a list of web3 social media projects and ripped into each and every one of them. I went in expecting each one to be paywalled and their users to be more concerned about exploiting each other for tokens than actually interacting as human beings, but still hopeful that maybe, just maybe, someone would have figured out the "host an actual website on web3" thing. None of the projects I reviewed satisfied the latter, and most of them, at least from what I could see outside the paywalls, were accurately described by the former.

Last week (as of writing), out of pure curiosity, I decided to check in on all the projects again to see if my concerns from last year had been alleviated:

Metafora still resolves to a CloudFlare IP address. Users still can't post images.

Peepeth is still full of spam and cryptobro shit. Users still can't post images. (There is an upload button, but it spins forever.)

Share appears to no longer be a web3 project, as all the references to the Lens Protocol appear to have disappeared and you can only sign in/up with an email address. The change appears to have happened sometime after May of last year. The site is still effectively inaccessible to new users, as my attempts to sign up were met with an HTTP 403 Forbidden error.

gm.xyz doesn't exist anymore. Browsers and DNS lookups throw an NXDOMAIN error. The most recent snapshot of the homepage on the Wayback Machine just shows an infinite loading page, and the project's Twitter account has no indication why the project is now missing.

BEBverse now redirects to an entirely different web3 project that I have neither the time nor the interest to dig into. You'll understand once I get to the main point of this post.

Paragraph still functions like it did a year ago, but the Arweave transaction for the post I made still didn't exist nine months later. And you still have to cough up $50 to use a custom domain.

Twetch immediately threw this screen at me:

I don't know how being constrained by money and subscriptions is "freedom". Especially when the rest of the site is still paywalled.

Bastyon is still full of borderline-Christofascist bullshit.

Mirror still refuses to show you the post editor if the browser window is half of your monitor's width, but otherwise it still works.

Ten days after I originally checked on dArticle, they finally clarified that the NFTs it makes for articles are on the BNB blockchain. You're still forced to use the rich-text editor, but at least it functions properly now.

But you can't seem to add custom tags, only the premade options set by the site admins:

You can mint ten article NFTs on the Polygon chain for free, but if you want more, you're forced to join their Discord to beg for them. I was successfully able to make an NFT, at which point I was taken out behind the dArticle sheds by Nintendo's lawyers and summarily shot.

You'll notice that one project is missing from this list: Diamond. That's because, when I attempted to sign up again to see if it was still paywalled, I discovered that either

the site was no longer paywalled, or
I'd managed to glitch myself past it and get myself some $DESO airdropped to me with no regards to the lack of Ethereum in my MetaMask wallet.

And thus I spent the next week in a haze trying to post as much as possible, convinced that I could repost enough Reddit memes to buy myself yet another e-reader. I was hopeful, as in the first few days I'd managed to accumulate a whole dollar, but after that the "diamonds" (superlikes) dried up. Much has been written about the negative effects of social media on one's brain processes, so I won't wax poetic here, but I will say that after only a day on Diamond living was no longer about making art; it was about "producing" "content" that could be easily monetized. I saw many posters claiming to be "artists" that were simply using AI models to pump out as many variations of the same colorful sludge as they could in order to saturate the timeline and catch as many accidental "diamond" donations as they could. To put the despair I felt more succinctly, I'll quote from the book I'm currently working on:

Found myself all the next week
measuring all by how much I could squeeze
it for a few cents
in recompense.
I understood why so much "content"
was generated by computers, soulless:
when trying to be seen in a torrent
and unable to the waters drain,
why not further
dilute the rivers
but this time bearing your name?

Diamond's mobile interface also has a horrible time comprehending scrolling, as you were more likely to accidentally hit the "diamond" button or angry-react a random post than actually scroll. The "diamond" button essentially serves as a microtransaction for when you really really like a post, but there's no confirmation button before the money gets drained out of your wallet. There are other frontends for the DeSo blockchain, such as Gemstori, that are nicer about scrolling and thus don't have this problem. Diamond also likes to notify you about the same notifications over and over again with no obvious way to clear out ones you've already seen, and the notification screen has an exploit that spammers really like to use where they can tag you in a post and then quickly remove the tag; the post remains in your notification list as a post you were tagged in even though the tag is now gone, effectively forcing you to view that post every time you check your notifications.

Now that I've finally been able to go and properly review Diamond, I can confidently say that it's a worse Twitter (a low bar to clear, as Twitter has been a shithole for at least a decade) with a profit motive attached to it. A profit motive that undermines the whole point of a "social" network, as it leads every user to look out for only themselves and see others solely as wallets to extract money from in increasingly ludicrous rent-seeking schemes. Everything becomes about increasing the value of your "Creator Coin" so that you and your followers can profit; piss off the wrong person, and they sell their coins, tanking your Creator Coin price and making the rest of your followers feel betrayed.

The profit motive is poisonous to both art and to true social connection. The latter because the prospect of making money through posts entices one to spend more and more hours of their day behind a screen, churning out content instead of using the platform merely as a means of arranging interactions offline and away from the keyboard. And the former because, in a world with a collapsing economy and the majority of the resources concentrated in a minuscule global elite, the only people who will have the time and energy to make art (with the exception of those in isolated societies outside of the industrialized world altogether) are those who can make enough money off their art to survive, which means appealing to the tastes of said elite and avoiding offending them for fear of having their revenue stream taken away.

To quote Ursula Le Guin:

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

This is not the kind of life I want to live. This is not the kind of world I want to help bring into being.

And besides, "DESO" was already Dead End Shrine Online to me. A swirling vortex of all the ugly things about capitalism, or a metal shed in the wilderness where I can make art without distractions and give away the things I make with no thought of profit in return. Which one do you think I'd prefer?