Motivation Don’t be a PBC

• 1

  The year 2020 was the year of deplatforming. Major social networks deprived millions of people of any information from the person they were following. On the other side people are flooded with useless and unwelcome information.

• 2

  Someone who would like to acquire a holistic view, has to combine different information sources in his mind, which is challenging because of context switching. Usually people choose the simplest way and stay attached to the single source of information that is usually biased.

• 3

  The core of the issue is the fact that the owner of the communication channel has full control over the user’s attention. The decentralization proposed by the crypto community doesn’t solve this problem, because it operates on the infrastructure level, and the communication channel remains exclusively owned by a central party.

• 4

  This monopoly also has another side. The platform owner completely determines which business processes are available to community members and which are not. This is also censorship, but not in relation to opinions, but in relation to the services available to community members. In general, the owner of the platform owns not only his platform, but also its community. We don’t like that.

• 5

  Augmented Web fixes that. It gives users a tool to combine complementary sources of information seamlessly in one picture. Users shape their global picture actively instead of being a Passive Bullshit Consumer (a PBC). Augmented Web can open any closed community to tons of other services outside.