Hashtag (#), everyone has heard of this word. Hashtags are commonplace these days. Not only are they used by almost all users on social media, they are also covered in news and magazines. In the world of Web3, Hashtag is about to be given a new meaning.
01 Hashtag
A Hashtag is a word (or a series of consecutive characters) following the # sign, which is a kind of metadata (data used to describe another piece of data).
1.1 Source of Hashtag
Hashtags first appeared on the IRC chat network and were used to tag topics and chat groups. It is also used to flag a single message to show if it is related to a specific group/topic.
On August 24, 2007, open-source software pioneer Chris Messina proposed the use of hashtags on Twitter to group related tweets together.
This is the first time the Hashtag has been used on Twitter. Since then, Hashtag usage, reach and utility have continued to grow.
1.2 Features of Hashtags on Social Media
A hashtag is a movement or intellectual development that disseminates ideas, news, or opinions on a specific topic. Hashtags are given various meanings on social media,
Participate: People can participate in the discussion of trending topics through simple hashtags like #YesWeCan, #Smile, #GoodMorning, people can follow, connect and have conversations with topic hashtag experts through hashtags;
Zoom: Let more people who follow your Hashtag see what you post;
Search: Became a tool for people to find existing sources of content in social media;
Community: Changed the way we build virtual communities, as it’s easier to build relationships after a topical hashtag attached to trending news or premium content;
Measuring: Ability to track the impact of specific conversations via topic hashtags.
People freely create different hashtags for various purposes. When any Hashtag becomes popular, it can attract more users to discuss issues related to that Hashtag.
02 Tokenization the On-chain Hashtags
Hashtags naturally have network effects and are attention-grabbing. What if thoughts, news, or opinions on a particular topic contained in a Hashtag were synced to the chain?
2.1 On-chain Hashtags
What On-chain Hashtags contain is a time-stamped stream of information around a specific topic, which aggregates the consensus of the network community on a specific topic.
Different Hashtags are freely created by people for various purposes, and each Hashtag can be regarded as a "one group" gathered around a specific Meme theme. From this perspective, an organic, automated community is built around the On-chain Hashtag, and its value is tied in part to the network effects and attention it garners.
2.2 Post to On-chain Hashtag
Once an On-chain Hashtag is created, anyone can submit information to it, i.e. publish a post with an On-chain Hashtag. At this time, On-chain Hashtag is like a blockchain, and the posts with an On-chain Hashtag are like blocks, which constitute all the historical information of the On-chain Hashtag.
Community members' likes, comments, and reposts of posts with On-chain Hashtags are votes for the status updates of On-chain Hashtags. Posts that are liked by the community will be voted by more members, and these are recorded on the blockchain and become group consensus (group memory).
Group memory (or group consensus) is the most critical part of an organization. On-chain Hashtag makes it non-replicable and is stored and maintained in a distributed manner. Thus, we consider On-chain Hashtags and topic-specific, time-stamped information flows created around them to be an integral part of a DAO.
2.3 Tokenization the On-chain Hashtags
On-chain Hashtag is a new organizational model and method that allows people to freely engage in social interaction and community building around a common goal (On-chain Hashtag).
It redefines the organization—the organization itself is a collection of information. The core values of these On-chain Hashtags include:
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Create value without a third-party trusted platform (controlled only by the protocol)
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All Hashtag or topic content automatically owns the value of its own network
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Any network, creator, and attention grabber can accumulate value for it
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Allows reasonable investment/speculation in Hashtag or topic content (like betting that the topic will get more attention in the future)
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The value of each network increases as more people follow it
Just as Bitcoin DAO uses bitcoin to reward miners, On-chain Hashtag needs to reward the behavior of making it popular and curating Hashtag, and more importantly, reward behavior that is generally recognized by the community.
Blockchain technology enables On-chain Hashtag's sub-reddit, topic content, characters, Meme, events, etc. to mint tokens, and automatically distribute tokens to content publishers who create value for them according to smart contracts or agreements, curators (planning exhibition Hashtag information and activities).
03 Building a DAO around On-chain Hashtags
It's a fascinating concept - see On-chain Hashtags as an important part of DAOs
3.1 Register On-chain Hashtags
Anyone can sign up for an On-chain Hashtag on the Web3 Social platform through Wormhole3 as an important part of their community.
Once created, anyone tweets on Twitter (with a specific hashtag, such as the community hashtag - #Nomadverse and the synch on-chain hashtag - #iweb3), and this information is automatically synced to the On-chain Hashtag's on-chain community. If other people like, retweet, and retweet it, such actions will also be synchronized on the chain.
3.2 Create content around On-chain Hashtags
Information will grow/spread automatically, and the same goes for On-chain Hashtags. On-chain Hashtags with richer and more valuable information will spread more widely.
In the Web2 era, people created a large number of sub-reddits on Reddit, where people shared hot news and interesting events. Sub-reddit is a community Hashtag, and the information shared by people constitutes this Hashtag and enriches it.
UGC devotes its own time and knowledge to producing content, and the content on the chain is an NFT. This content can also be rewarded (SBT/NFT/FT) from the On-chain Hashtag based on the curator's (like/comment/retweet) evaluation of it.
3.3 Curation On-chain Hashatags
The whole concept of "content monetization" is becoming more and more outdated, as anything rich has less value. What is scarce in today's world is mainly "attention". More and more apps, services, products, and news are competing for your limited attention, and the competition is getting tougher.
Attention currency's "central bank"
In the age of Web2 search, Google was the "central bank" that controlled the "currency of attention". By crawling links across the web, it creates an internal link ledger on the web. This "ledger" represents all transactions that take place between websites in the network. Google PageRank delivers a link's reputation score, which influences the link's ranking in Google search results, so these links have quantifiable economic value.
By maintaining a closed internal ledger of how websites are linked together, Google allows it to provide a search engine and build countless other services based on that data.
Decentralized Curation Protocol
In the future Web3 world, attention networks (network link graphs, social graphs, etc.) and value networks (financial networks) will be exchanged on blockchain-based link graphs.
Just as links are the "attention currency" of the Internet, and curation is the "attention currency" of Web3, On-chain Hashtags gain wider connection/dissemination through curators' retweets and other behaviors and even become popular. Based on curation behavior, blockchain can build a public, open, transparent, and immutable linked graph of any type of data for any organization. Decentralized curation protocols are like Google Page Rank, delivering a curation’s reputation score, and giving curation a quantifiable economic value. And the graph of links between curated data may form the basis of future DAOs, social networks, search engines, and more.
Wormhole3 has built a decentralized curation protocol, providing On-chain Hashtag with an algorithm that pays curators based on curation effects. On-chain Hashtag, or any creator, can evaluate and reward curators' contributions according to this curation algorithm.
Curation On-chain Hashtag contents, online/offline activities
The attention, time, and resources available to each individual are limited. Curators (likes/comments/retweets) spend their influence network or attention to curate On-chain Hashtag, and On-chain Hashtag needs to pay them (FT/NFT/SBT).
On-chain Hashtags also require online (such as Twitter Space) or offline activities (such as various IRL activities within the community) to make hashtags popular. For the curators of these activities, On-chain hashtags can also refer to the curation of their content, evaluate the contribution behaviors of the communicators and organizers of the activities through an extensible voting process, and distributing rewards.
There are still many contribution behaviors around On-chain Hashtag. We can start by curating On-chain Hashtag and explore the use of scalable smart contracts or protocols to quantify and reward contribution behaviors.
Summarize
All in all, On-chain Hashtag is a brand new concept. In an age of abundance where our time and attention are the most valuable assets, the current influx of DAO contributors into the Web3 world is also different from the pure financial contributions of the past. After On-chain Hashtag brings people together in like-minded communities, a decentralized curation protocol is needed to empower On-chain Hashtag to evaluate and reward contributors for their work. This will bring a new way to build On-chain Hashtags, and it will also drive the DAO to develop more rapidly.
We hope that more colleagues who are interested in this will participate in the construction of this new world of On-chain Hashtag, which is very, very important to the development of Web3.
References:
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Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information (with code)!
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Hashtag Markets: Mashing together Reddit, Schelling Points, Tokenisation & Autonomous Organisations.
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Hashtag (#) as Message Identity in Virtual Community
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Is a Hashtag a Community?
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Recreating Google’s PageRank on The Bitcoin Blockchain
