Sangam is an attempt at reversing the damage social media corporations have wrought on society by creating a new content creation platform that serves users rather than corporate interests. Rather than making false promises of good behavior to users and then being forced into the same bad practices by a broken business model; Sangam is designed at the protocol level to sustainably support the interests of its users by having no business at all at its center. Sangam is a decentralized content creation and reward platform that will serve as the bedrock on which many self-sustaining communities can flourish. The only way for a platform to reliably serve a community is if it is owned and operated by the community: Sangam is our attempt to do that.
Today, the internet is controlled by a few giant corporations like Facebook and Google. The vast majority of user-generated content is routed, distributed, owned, filtered, controlled, and monetized by these oligopolies that can exploit content and their consumers for profit. This has led to disastrous consequences that have rippled into our politics and infected our minds; altering patterns of thought, attention span, and the ways we interact with each other. The corporate control of the internet has suffocated necessary and useful conversation, while amplifying bite-sized politicized discourse that has intensified tribalism and conflict and made it harder to come to consensus. The ad-driven model that has become ubiquitous on these sites incentivizes and optimizes for maximum collective attention spent on content over any other human value. Meaningless drivel, outrage porn, and other forms of addictive content gets promoted and pushed onto internet users to maximize ad revenue; while nuanced and more meaningful content get suppressed and pushed out of view since they do not have the attention-capturing ability that advertisers desire.
Any content that offends a politically powerful bloc, has the potential to threaten corporate profits, and thus is at risk of being purged from the centralized servers that own and host that content. This allows vocal minorities to control and stifle speech on privately-owned platforms that have become modern public squares, alienating their opponents and forcing conversations into the dark where they are given free reign to fester and amplify; while simulataneously creating a vast silent majority that can not effectively counter a more vocal minority for fear of being censored themselves. Powerful nationstates are also able to put pressure on platforms to silence protests and revolutions, remove or censor sensitive information, and track and deanonymize political dissidents. Censorship on the Internet is not guided by any moral principle, and instead is entirely contingent on which parties can apply the necessary pressure on platform companies to silence their enemies.
Moreover, the censorship policies companies adopt are often opaque, inscrutable, and arbitrary. Decisions made by censorship committees are difficult, if not impossible, to appeal and reverse. The committees themselves are unelectable and unimpeachable by the users of the platform. Rather than having the users of a platform come to consensus on content policies and the committees in charge of enforcing them, the entire decision process is controlled by the companies who own these platforms. The only way to influence their decision-making with regards to censorship is to apply legal or financial pressure; a power largely confined to nation states, advertisers, and well-organized activist groups. None of whom accurately reflect the majority of the userbase.
Even without explicit censorship, platform companies own the content they host and thus can arbitrarily demonetize content they don't like, making creators who depend on the platform for their livelihood beholden to the company's arbitrary rules and policies for monetization. This inevitably influences the type of content that gets published to the platform. The revenue-sharing model incentivizes creators to make more ad-friendly content; thus flooding users with more and more forms of addictive content, that is often neither psychologically healthy nor socially useful. On the other hand, content that is not advertiser friendly but perhaps more useful, gets disincentivized and if it is controversial enough to risk company profits, it can be demonetized or even removed. Even when creators aren't directly influenced by platform policy, the incentive structure of the ad-driven model promotes profitable content at the expense of useful content.
The absolute control companies have over their platforms would be tenable if their were reasonable means by which a userbase could migrate to a different platform if the platform company abused its power, however exiting a popular platform is effectively impossible. The network effects that internet platform companies can produce, tend to create natural monopolies such that the threat of being replaced by a new competitor is minimal. This allows companies to extract inordinate rent from users of the platform and impose draconian policies without fear of users exiting. Content creators cannot abandon a platform without abandoning access to a large audience and their own painstakingly constructed reputation on the platform. Users cannot abandon a platform without losing access to all of the content along with the social graph they have accumulated on the platform. Thus platform companies only need to grow a large enough userbase to become entrenched, at which point they are free to hold their users hostage and maximize for corporate profit over utility provided.
Rent extraction can be in the form of platforms taking a lion's share of the ad revenue from user-generated content. Often, the rent being extracted is the invisible collecting and hoarding of user data. Platform companies have exclusive access to the data of their users, and can leverage this proprietary information to skew the platform's functionality to maximize revenue. This often entails extracting as much information about their users as possible in order to understand their preferences; a task that inherently violates user privacy. This information can be abused by platform companies themselves who can sell it to third parties in the past without user consent, it can also be stolen by hackers and seized by governments who can then use this sensitive information to ransom, attack, or otherwise harrass their targets. The universal practice of collecting, hoarding, and training of sensitive user data by private companies not only poses risks for the individual, but poses serious risk to society as well. In their efforts to maximize user attention span, platform companies use private data to create filtered feeds that place users in increasingly isolated echo chambers and further exacerbate the problem of tribalism; making it impossible for online communities to come to consensus.
We've exchanged a free internet for a "for free" internet. In doing so we've allowed our minds to become commoditized and sold to the highest bidder, we've allowed our voices to be skewed in ways that intensify conflict and hinder mutual understanding, while placing the digital content we create for the sake of our online communities at the mercy of profit-oriented corporations. The current system is reaching a breaking point. Platform companies are routinely embarrassed by one privacy violation scandal after the other. Tribalism is erupting into the real world creating distrust between communities and enabling the return of fascist and racist movements. The hasty adoption and enforcement of censorship rules without input from the community has led to a chilling effect on discourse; even as these privately-owned platforms are becoming the public squares where the most important conversations must be had.
In order to realize a vision of people freely sharing their ideas and content to the world without the pernicious influence and control of profit-driven companies; we must create open, permission-less, peer-to-peer, decentralized platforms that can enable online communities to flourish organically while removing the possibility for them to be controlled and manipulated for profit by a centralized authority.
In order to disseminate control and ownership of content from platform companies back to the users of the platform; data must not be stored on centralized servers and instead must be owned and hosted by the users of the platform themselves. To accomplish this, creators host their content on IPFS and act as the initial hosts (or "seeds") for their own content. Anyone who wants this content may retrieve it either from the original creator or from any other user that is willing to host it as well. This allows content to be owned, hosted, and shared by the interested parties; without relying on a centralized server to reliably store and serve it to end-users. This prevents content from being lost on account of centralized hosting servers shutting down; it also prevent content from being in the hands of a single authority that can restrict or otherwise manipulate access for their own gain. Since anyone who downloaded content through IPFS can trivially host it for future downloaders; it is effectively impossible to censor or remove content from the network. Instead the availability of content is directly proportional to how popular it is; the more a piece of content is downloaded, the easier it gets to access and download it for the next user. Content that is popular enough attain a kind of permanence that is hard to match by even the most robust centralized hosting platforms. By design, IPFS lays the foundation for a decentralized, peer-to-peer content hosting and sharing platform that is robust, reliable, and censorship-resistant.
However, IPFS alone is not enough to support a community of content-creators. Since all content is hash-addressed, there must be a human-readable way to address content such that users can find the content they are interested in without having prior knowledge of its hash. Furthermore, there is no way to attribute authorship to content with IPFS. Even if a cryptographic signature from the original author is included along with content; it can trivially be removed and reshared by a different plagiarizing user. Once there is means to establish authorship, there must be a censorship-resistant, permissionless way to reward the authors of content in a way that doesn't incentivize the addicting forms of content that currently plague the internet. Thus there must be an immutable, decentralized ledger maintained by all participants that can come to universal consensus on the names and authors of content on the network along with the financial transaction history between users of the service.
IPFS will serve as the raw content-distribution backbone of Sangam, while blockchain(s) will enable communities to form around that content and reward the creators that contribute to the network.
Since content can be freely shared peer-to-peer without any access control from a central party, there is no way to enforce payment for digital content; nor is there a way for a central party to inject ads into user-generated content. Thus Sangam, by design, will be driven by donations from users to the creators they enjoy. This fundamentally transforms the incentive landscape from encouraging creators to produce addicting forms of content that capture the most attention to creating the most compelling forms of content which encourage donations. The content that gains traction on a donations-based network is fundamentally more likely to be higher quality, more useful, and less destructive than the content that gains populariy on ad-driven networks.
Creators also have more independence as they are solely dependent on their own followers for support. There is no central authority who can censor, demonetize, or remove their content. Creators do not have to remain in the good graces of advertisers in order to generate revenue. Thus, individual creators have the freedom to express themselves however they wish to their communities without undue influence from the outside.
While it is important to remove the control of content from the hands of centralized platform companies or advertisers, the Sangam community must still have the power to punish bad actors and remove content that is against community policies. However, these rules will be explicitly voted upon and adopted by the entire Sangam community rather than being explicitly imposed by the platform company or implicitly enforced by advertisers. The committees in charge of enforcing these policies will also be elected and directly rewarded by the community and are thus accountable to the userbase rather than the profit motives of a corporation. If the committee abuses their power, this abuse should be inspectable by all users and the committee should be impeached and re-elected. Content policy on Sangam will be motivated by the consent of the governed rather than a company's bottom line.
Sangam will have to integrate different decentralized technologies and concepts to realize a self-sustaining, censorship-resistant, open platform for content creation that can sustain an internet of communities cultivating meaningful content; rather than a platform that naturally tends towards low quality content and user-commoditization.
This network of altruistic creation, hosting, and donation will initially support micro-communities of hobbyists, and existing open-source communities. Friends can share their hobby creations with other friends and family, who in turn, can show their support by hosting/sharing the content (making it more accessible and visible to others) and directly donating to the creator. Open-source developers that are already creating code for free can register a profile on Sangam, and upload their commit hashes to IPFS, allowing them to receive donations for their work from other Sangam users.
Since Sangam is content-agnostic; any content that is representable in binary can be uploaded to Sangam and rewarded by users. This allows for content of all types (blogs, podcasts, videos, musics) to share the same platform and benefit from the same network effects. Creators that span multiple content mediums can have their content in symbiotic relationship with one another, consolidating their reputation on a single platform rather than fracturing it across multiple websites. The content-agnosticism even allows for new forms of content to be created and rewarded. A user can meaningfully contribute to the network by compiling a list of their favorite creators, curating a playlist from similar artists, sharing a recipe, or even pairing a blog post with suitable background music. All of these contributions are uploadable on Sangam, and they can all be rewarded by users who appreciate the contribution.
Since the blockchain allows for open, permissionless, programmable money; creators can define their own donation models for their content. Creators can choose to route a certain percentage of their donations to their favorite charities. Creators who build off of the work of others can route portions of the donations to the content to their influencers based on how important the influence was. An artist might send 20% of all donations from a song to the artist that created the underlying sample while sending 10% of her total earnings to her favorite charity. Meanwhile, a playlist creator might send 90% of all donations to the artists themselves while reserving 10% for himself. This liquid donation model could inject an atmosphere of creative collaboration in a current environment suffocated by DRM and strict copyright enforcement.
Eventually, the goal is to have the Sangam network become robust and liquid enough to support larger, more popular creators who now see donations on Sangam as a viable business model. Charities will register on Sangam so that users can directly donate to them, and creators can route some of their revenues to their favorite charities. Future extensions (such as the integration of real-world Oracles) will allow users to run kickstarter campaigns on Sangam, as well as allowing creators to attest to non-digital creations and receive donations for work they do in the real world.
Sangam has the lofty ambition of creating an alternative altruistic economy that can serve as a basis of livelihood for creators across the world and across any medium; however there is much work to be done before that is a remote possibility. Join us in making this vision possible. Join us in taking back the internet from the grips of corporate greed and restoring it to the hands of the community it serves.