Cryptocurrency and Social media are a match, as Steemit proved to us. But more social media built around cryptocurrencies are on the horizon! One of these is Narrative (NRV), which is having it's ICO on the NEO blockchain. Narrative looks to be very promising at first glance, let me tell you why!
NARRATIVE (NRV)
for pointing out this ICO to me! It went under the radar for me, but has been by far the most fun project I've researched in a while.
Narrative is a social media site which calls itself a mashup between Medium, Instagram and Twitter, but with more focused
subject-matter. Upon inspection, the main socal media site I would compare it to instead would be Steemit, actually. Narrative is, like Steemit, a website where you can blog and receive rewards for creating content that other people watch and like.
Narrative initially was set to launch on the Ethereum blockchain, but has recently made the move to NEO due to it's many advantages such as speed & scalabiltiy, digital identity (for KYC) and the free transaction cost.
STEEMIT KILLER?
At first I considered this to be yet another social media crypto. We've seen a bunch come by lately, and some of them look great and others not so much. Narrative is the first one that actually manages to get me excited.There are many similarities between Steemit and Narrative, so perhaps the best way to grasp the project is to look at their differences. Both are platforms where you can post content and receive rewards, so from the front-end there don't appear to be too many differences.
Looking at the back-end however, it seems like Narrative is operating in a different way to Steemit under the hood.
Some facts:
- Narrative rewards participants with 85% of all revenues generated by the network
- Narrative will feature an advertisement element from where a large part of the revenue will come from
- Narrative offers 'channels' for corporate brands, and 'niche communities'
- Narrative offers democratically elected Moderators
- 15% of the rewards are fixed to go to the development team to ensure continued development
- Narrative is NOT fully decentralized, but will start as a hybrid and strives for further decentralization later
- Narrative offers a direct FIAT conversion and indeed offers payout in FIAT money as well
- Narrative rewards are distributed on activity (views/upvotes/comments) and not based on vesting power
Essentially Narrative tries to re-create Steemit, but in an improved way. If you've been around on Steemit for a while you know about the problems that plague it: Power centralization in the top few whales, abuse and 'rewardpoolrape', flag wars, spam content, upvote bots, and so on. One big problem Steemit faces in fixing these issues is the decentralized aspect of the blockchain, which makes it very hard to change aspects of it. There is no moderation on Steemit, and nothing that can really be done against abusers or change the distribution of power.
LESS DECENTRALIZED
Further centralization is added to the network by introducing Moderators, who Narrative calls the Tribunal. The Tribunal is responsible for maintaining order and fighting abuse. They get the power to suspend accounts and generally other moderator priviledges that we are used to seeing. Moderators are democratically elected on the network and when they go off the righteous path they can be de-elected and replaced. This should prove to be a very effective tool in fighting blatant abuse, something we cannot do on Steemit today.
The main thing that Narrative has decentralized, is it's currency and content. The other aspects it tries to keep some level of control of.
REVENUE SHARING
One question most newcomers to Steemit have is: Where does the money come from? and indeed this often remains a question that is difficult to answer. Narrative expands on the Steemit-style economy by adding tangible revenue streams to their revenue-sharing model. Not only are NRV tokens 'minted' like STEEM tokens are, but Narrative also offers actual advertisements to be placed on the network, creating an actual money influx that will be redistributed for 85% to all participants.Similarly, Brands (for example Coca Cola) can set up brand channels, much like on Youtube, which cost a fee to set up and operate which creates another dollar-influx with which revenue can be passed on to the users.
NO VESTING
The centralization of power and earnings on Steemit is a big problem. You'll see many terrible posts raking in hundreds of dollars not because they are good, but because people are chasing the money. Those with a lot of Steem Power are usually the ones making the most money as well, and newbies who join the network face an uphill struggle to get anywhere at all on the platform.
Instead of determining payments based on how much SP you hold, Narrative offers a Reputation system which influences the rewards. Reputation is a combination of account age, average content ratings, correlation between a user's vote and overall content scores and the activity points received in the past months. If your reputation is too low, you may be excluded from receiving rewards.
To prevent spammers, Narrative pays only the top 90% of rewards out to it's users. The lowest 10% do not receive rewards. This means that the bots spamming Steemit with hundreds of accounts will likely have a hard time on Narrative, because they will need to put in actual effort to create enough value to rise about the lower 10%.
NICHE COMMUNITIES
Unlike Steemit which utilizes tags, Narrative will offer 'niches' which are similar to Brand Channels but for specific topics. Think something along the lines of Reddit and it's subreddits. The intent is to create focused subject channels to discuss particular topics. This is a great tool that Steemit is sorely lacking (but is apparently working on creating 'communities' also) and will allow for newcomers to stand out within a specific community, as opposed to trying to garner attention in the wide-scale shouting match that is the Steemit New/Hot/Trending pages.Niche community owners can set their own moderators for those communities, as well as their own moderation rules. The network-wide Tribunal moderates these niches on a higher level, ensuring that there aren't duplicate niches (so there is only one 'cryptocurrency' niche, and not a second one called 'crypto' and a third called 'blockchaincurrencies', etc.) and that there is no abuse by moderators towards their users.
Just like Brand Channels, Niche Communities cost an annual fee to maintain the Niche community. To offset this, Niche owners receive rewards for running their Niche community too, which is based on how popular that Niche is.
THE NRV TOKEN
Now while there are many similarities between Steemit and Narrative, there are big differences also. One main question I always ask is: What is the token value?For STEEM the main value of the token is to increase your vests, which enable you to earn more. This leads to people hoarding STEEM, reducing the supply and therefore increasing it's price.
On the other hand, the NRV token has a lot more use-cases than STEEM does. NRV can actually be used, as is in fact the only token that can be used for paying for things on the network. Advertisers will need to pay in NRV to rent advertising space, but also to start Brand Channels/Niche communities. NRV can also be used to send eachother 'tips'. This should create a steady stream of demand for the NRV tokens.
On the other hand, without any incentive to actually hodl NRV, I imagine most people will not by stocking up on them either. It seems more like a utility token which you buy when you want to use it, but not pre-buy for a later stage.
Though yet on another (third?) hand, the supply of NRV is fixed and capped at about 200 million NRV tokens, of which half will be sold in the crowdsale and initial distribution. The other half will be slowly minted over time by the network over the course of 30 years. This essentially means that even though there is no native incentive to hodl NRV tokens, due to the scarcity of the tokens there should still be a price increase as the usage of Narrative increases. After all, there are only 200 million tokens and if there are more people then everybody receives a smaller portion of these rewards. As such, if you manage to get a large piece of these tokens at an early stage you will be holding a relatively larger part of the rewards.
LEGAL BENEFITS
Narrative has thought of the legalities of their business model as well. There apparently are regulations that mean that users should have the right to edit or remove their content from the network at any time. As you know, Steemit doesn't have this and content is immutable after a certain time. This could be in violation of the law, and Narrative is at least guarding themselves against this. Since blockchains are immutable, this means that for the time being some centralized aspects are being used in order to offer this functionality.Another consideration is KYC, which Steemit does not have. Since Narrative strives to be a FIAT gateway as well, KYC is pretty much a given requirement. Through digital identities which NEO has, KYC and regulatory compliance is a possibility. This gives Narrative a significant edge over Steemit.
THE TEAM
Although Narrative makes me excited, the team doesn't quite do the same for me! They've got four people listed as the team (leadership? there may be more 'workers') as well as five advisors. Nobody sounds or looks familiar to me, and I'm not seeing big corporate names that excite me. The background blurb of each individual lists some of their prior work, but if you read closely and critically you won't find that much of interest.
An example of this is the text blurb underneath the co-founder. Normally this lists their major accomplishments and jobs from their past, but among other things on the co-founder it says: "...interviewed by HuffPo, Fox & Friends, BBC, and NPR’s All Things Considered regarding Social Strata’s pioneering unlimited paid leave program."
Now, it's all good and well that you've been interviewed by the media, but that hardly sounds as a qualification or selling point of why I should trust this team member to be competent. I'd be much more excited in seeing 'CTO at Google Labs' or 'Quality Control at McKinsey' like I've seen on many other projects. I would not call the Narrative team a 'Superstar Team' at all. Instead it looks to be a husband and wife who co-founded the project, and some other people who decided to go help.
I'm finding it hard to discover anything about the team that makes me excited.
On the other hand, who ever heard of Vitalik Buterin before he created Ethereum? Past results do not guarantee anything, and even Mark Zuckerberg was a nobody at one point. All it takes is a good concept, the right timing and some luck.
SO, IS IT A STEEMIT KILLER?
I can't say for sure, but I do feel like Narrative has a good chance at becoming succesful. Yes, it's not fully decentralized! I know! But does it need to be??The main benefit of decentralization when it comes to social media, is censorship resistance. It is clear that Narrative doesn't place censorship resistance as a very high priority. Content is moderated by the community, but you can bet your behind that for example Neo-Nazis will be dealt with swiftly on the platform. With a centralized entity (or some parts of it, anyway), they can simply not run any legal risks like this.
But for the majority of users this is absolutely no issue at all! For someone like me, I don't really care because my content is most likely fine on both Steemit as well as Narrative! Only if you post 'grey area' content you should be wary of doing so on Narrative, and you may prefer to use something like Steemit. For all other, normal, subjects you may as well post it on Narrative. In fact, by removing some decentralization it becomes possible to moderate as well and fight abuse. Although this runs the risk of becoming autoritarian (see: Reddit) it also cuts down on serious abuse significantly. And since moderators can be removed from power, a checks and balances system of sorts does exist.
Since censorship resistance is a minor feature for most users, what remains of blockchain is it's cryptocurrency aspect. And this is in my opinion the greatest innovation of Steemit, and indeed Narrative. And it is what brings most users to these platforms as well: the ability to earn rewards in a frictionless manner.
The removal of vesting power from the equation is an interesting one, and probably a good decision. Steemit faces serious issues where minnows have an increasingly hard time getting anywhere. Narrative evens this playing field by removing the vesting power, and rewarding primarily based on content popularity. This makes the uphill battle significantly less steep!
Additionally through communities it will be much easier to stand out, and connect with likeminded individuals, which should lead to some level of success much quicker than on Steemit.
On the other hand, without vesting power and incentive to HODL your tokens it seems like there is much less incentive to stock up on NRV than it is to stock up on STEEM. After all, SP has value to all users of Steemit but NRV only has value to people who want to pay for advertisement and channels/niches on Narrative. Average users, I expect, will pretty much always cash out their NRV because I can't see many reasons for them not to do so. Additionally, due to the feature of being able to get paid in FIAT, I expect many mainstream users to choose this route as well. Everybody who gets paid in dollars, is essentially 'dumping' their NRV for it.
That being said, a 'better token' for investors does not equal a better social media platform. Yes, as a SP holder I am not keen on 'giving that up' so to speak. But for the overall health of a social media ecosystem, I think it is probably better to have an environment without vesting power and revenue-centralization (like on Steemit). I can see Narrative being very attractive to many, even late/newcomers. It won't outright kill Steemit, as decentralization and censorship resistance remain unique features that Narrative cannot match, but these are also very minor features to most users so I do expect there to be some migration.
I think Narrative has a pretty good shot at becoming popular. Especially the low-friction vision and crypto/FIAT gateway should make this platform very accessible to newbies. The removal of vesting power and introduction of fair distribution further lowers the learning curve, and probably makes things 'better' overall anyway. Yes, it's more centralized than Steemit and as such it is probably not a good place for Wikileaks postings or politically controversive themes. But for the mainstream users this centralization actually offers many benefits in terms of ease of use, but also in terms of revenue streams which are tangible. It also allows Narrative to be regulatory compliant in certain aspects like KYC and user's privacy, and so on, further enabling mainstream adoption.
I myself won't be participating in this ICO, and I don't think I will be buying any tokens on the market either. I don't see the point right now for myself and the value proposition of the token could be a little stronger for my tastes. But I will be making a Narrative account as soon as I can, in order to try out the platform. I am very excited about the level playing field as well as other features that fix problems that Steemit has. The main concern I have is that the centralized aspects may lead to autoritarian tendencies. Moderators could be harsh, communication/service may be lacking, and who knows how it will turn out? On the other hand it does give the community tools to actually fight abuse and try to keep things fair while on Steemit we're powerless to do anything.
As a content creator I won't be moving away from Steem and Steemit anytime soon, but I do think I will crosspost my content on multiple platforms at some point. If both Steemit and Narrative exist, I may as well post on both. As a user and content creator, I must admit I am excited about Narrative and will be keeping a close eye on it.
>> Click here to visit the Narrative website <<
