Follow your ideals or fall into greed? is the question that many of us will ask ourselves in the near future.
Join me in this reflection on how content curation and user’s image can be affected by the intrusion of external factors and monetary incentives.
The role of curators
The least explored, and the role no one takes in count.
Who has not created content? It’s cool to be a creator, isn’t it? At the same time, I’m sure we all, consumers, have a huge collection of posts (probably most of it worthless, but it’s normal).
As you can see, we all fulfill both roles in an almost unconscious way, we could say. However, why don’t we mirror posts as frequent? Why is pressing that button in the middle of ‘comment’ and ‘like’ so difficult for us?
I do not have the exact answer, but I can tell you what is going through my mind.
Mirror 🪞
A mirror is not just “sharing content”, it’s opening the doors of your empire to a third party. Too exaggerated?
Think of all the work it took to get all your followers. Not only that, but the difficult it was to create a bond with them, a relationship.
Behind a profile with a large active audience, there is a personality and great hours of effort and work. The community is attracted and shares the same ideals that the creator posts.
Now, imagine lending all this to someone else? That is what a mirror can achieve.
In this way, it is logical to think that sharing content depends on whether the post in question aligns with the profile of the curator or if the creator and the curator have a strong friendship to perform that action.
But this is the theory, why don’t we see it in practice?
Mirrors and it’s Incentive Scheme
Someone new to the Lens ecosystem may be wondering what’s the difference between a Mirror and a RT.
It is a valid question and the answer lies in the interoperability it has with collects.
Basically a collect is a way to monetize with a post. Users (consumers) can collect that post in exchange for ‘x’ amount.
So how does the mirror come in here? Easy, allocating a % of the collections to the curator who helped expand the reach of the post.
Let’s see an example to understand it:
Imagine that you are a very talented artist but unfortunately you don’t have a very large audience, either because you are new to the platform or because you do not know how to generate that connection.
You finish one of your works that took so much effort and time to create and you decide to post it as an NFT on Lens. Thanks to the collect you can establish a price to be able to monetize with it.
Imagine the artist’s face when 2 weeks later opens the app to find that the post only has 2 likes…
This is where the mirror and incentives come in. The artist can establish that every user who mirrors the post, gets 20% of all the people who collect the post from the curator’s profile.
So I, Juampi.lens, come across with the artist work and see that it has potential, it seems beautiful to me and I feel that my audience might like it.
Seeing that I will get 20% of the possible collections coming from my audience, I decide to give it a mirror and bet on it success.
A day later, surprise! I got 20 people from my audience to have not only collected the artist’s post but also gave it visibility. The artist obtained a part of the economic remuneration that was looking for along with a new audience and, I kept **20% **of the revenue in exchange for my “promotion”
Until now, this system seemed very organic and healthy to me, but new schemes have emerged that make me reflect.
New Incentives: Paid Mirrors
As the Lens ecosystem grew, new protocols, creators, and modalities appeared.
Among these, we have the "Paid Mirrors" system. A system in which a user can allocate a certain amount of money to a post and, as someone mirrors the post, they will get a part of that pool of rewards.
Why this system generates me doubts
As of today, it’s true that not many people use this methods, and most people, use them to test features and strategies. But I think in the medium long term, and that’s when my concern arises.
What will happen when greed overcomes values?
I think there will come a time where people will start mirroring like crazy all the posts that offer rewards, like farming. This can bring many problems.
Loss of value
The mirror, as I mentioned before, is a tool that is used responsibly and conscientiously. It has a value. What will happen when it is lost due to the desire to earn money?
Many of the profiles will lose quality and the audience will be infected from all the non-desire content that is shared.
The profiles will have no relevance and will destroy the personal brand that they worked so hard to create.
SPAM
One of the most obvious consequences. The feed will be filled with unwanted, irregular content that we are not used to. All because of a few $WMATIC that are around.
Lens could become the social networks that we complain so much about its high SPAM content.
Decline of the figure of Curators
The worst of the consequences in my opinion.
The curator, that figure so valuable and at the same time the less visible, could be lost. A user dedicated to filtering content and expanding it to new audiences could lose their principles and indulge in greed.
There would no longer be curators, there would no longer be a balance.
What awaits us?
The future is uncertain and I don’t have the crystal ball. Believe me, if I had it, I would have bought BTC in 2011.
Incentive-based protocols are necessary to push the economic and social flow on Lens. However, I think we need more iterations until we reach an ideal model. Much of these iterations will be thanks to us, the users, and how we perform.
More platforms will emerge, new models will be proposed, some profiles will be tempted? Surely
In the meantime, I’m doing research and experimenting. I will use the protocols with caution.
Remember that social capital is real and is just as important as monetary capital. Let’s take care of our reputation and take care of the audience.