tl;dr: As the social media giants of Web 2.0 become more and more corrupted, the action will move to the Metraverse.

I saw a tweet recently that catalyzed a strong series of thoughts.

As I wrote the other day about NFT Oasis, the future is metaversal.

What that means, in practice, is that we will all have a place to congregate, share, co-create, collaborate, and feel valued and relevant.

As someone who started blogging in 2000, joined LinkedIn as one of the first 200k users, and was one of the early non-college members of Facebook, that was the promise of the original vision of the world of social media.

We’ve all seen how it has evolved (some would say devolved) since then into an overly commercialized, monopolistic, censored, addiction-creating machine.

Now, what’s to say that the Metaverse won’t end up the same way?

Well, on the one hand, nothing. I’m sure there will be a lot of “bad places” and unintended consequences of the arrival of the Metaverse.

On the other hand, this time the revolution won’t be televised and it won’t be “fed.”

This time, the revolution will be co-owned.

So while some may decry the descent into the lowest common denominator of trash and filth, I wonder if the underlying business models of Web 2.0 (get as many clicks as possible to generate as much data as possible to sell as much advertising as possible), will be upended by the Web 3.0 business model?

The Web 3 business model is based upon community ownership of common property, in this case the “media” that is social and the places in the Metaverse.

Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn where it doesn’t cost me anything to join and, consequently, I get no value, the Metaverse is different.

In the Metaverse, you earn value by ensuring high quality experiences for the greatest number of people. You have “skin in the game.” There are barriers to entry (‘no token, no entry’).

This fundamental shift in who benefits when valuable experiences are created becomes, I suspect, the ultimate gatekeeper. So while there will be hard core porn and violent extremist areas of the Metaverse, perhaps the nature of the business models will (hopefully) prevent, or at least limit, the spread and impact on the rest of us.

The more important point is that v1 of social media led to the creation of super wealthy, all-powerful organizations like Facebook.

The v2 of social media will lead (again, hopefully) to a greater distribution of the wealth created to those who actually generate it…the users.