Token Economy: How Web3 Will Reinvent the Internet Review
Brief Synopsis:
Two chapters distinctly mentioned how Web3 and blockchain servers recreate social networking behavior and engagement. The book took an interdisciplinary approach, complexly breaking down everything from how users would be cryptographically private to game theory, a theory about incentivizing behavioral economics to persuade user engagement. With each chapter, both theoretical explanations and real-life cases of already operating web3 programs were used as information tools as a reference.
Key Takeaways:
Blockchain communication is still an expert topic today but may not be sooner than later. Blockchain is a great example of a known unknown item, capable of new boundaries of computing, advertising, and organizational governance but with no clear end goal in sight. Web3 will be commodified with tokens, and eventually, user interaction will be monetized like it is in Web2 but with different attribution models. Time and attention especially will become scarcer as more attention will be forced to compete with more app services, social media, and social networking platforms. Web3 social media sites acknowledge this, and advertisers stated to create symbiotic relationships between users and servers with Basic Attention Tokens to reward users with fiat money or social currency. Advertising could become more compelling if Web3 can fix target audience awareness for us.
Another big takeaway is scalability. This technology isn’t all that adoptable at the current moment to the vast majority of users which limits its ability to foster widespread social growth and media consumption thereof. The book detailed how there is still a lot of operational governance issues that have trouble creating a completely decentralized, utilitarian world of finance and P2P social networking.
Personal Opinion:
This book was extremely technical which made it hard to follow but the specific purpose of this book was to be challenging. The author did list current websites(.io) or platforms to look at learn practical knowledge of these topics. The information in this book would not yield a great conversation with a peer unless they were equally informed or uniformed of this topic. However, as big tech creates the entire social world we operate in, it is useful to better grasps how developing industries affect our career trajectory as advertising or PR creators.