This is an idea I've had for a long time now and I'm kind of excited to be able to work on it.
Some of you may remember decentmemes from way back on the legacy chain. The dev behind it was netuoso who felt like he wasn't really in it so side from a barebone front-end that posted memes as posts he wasn't interested on developing it further.
Things are a bit different now however.
We have short form content, we have front-ends who are constantly working on improving them and listening to feedback, etc, so I'm excited for this if they're up for implementing it onto their front-ends!
Decentmemes is making a comeback!
This time as a widget as well as website with potentially more!
Core idea:
Upload a meme template, give it tags to make it easier for people to find and use it.
Manual whitelisting and small cost to prevent flooding/abuse attempts.
Can be templates that already exist or original ones you want to memefy!
On the website is where you submit meme templates and wait for approval.
On the front-ends is where you create the memes using a widget, similar when you search for emojis or tenor gifs.
Here's a preview of what that'll look like:
Easy search for templates, easy way to place text at the top of the template and bottom, and an easy way to add it to your comment/post after you're done creating it.
The harder part comes on the backend side of things.
Since front-ends have implemented the widget, they get some data from it when it's being used.
Data such as, who does the template belong to (owner/issuer), is it original (if issuer isn't owner, part of the rewards go into storage), etc.
The idea is that if the widget is used, part of the post/comment beneficiary rewards go to the project + issuer + owner + front-end.
Now I know what you may be thinking, post rewards very low in general, especially for comments, but that's fine, this is a long term project.
The idea is to have our own widget rather than relying on centralized ones who leave watermarks on the memes or spam you with ads when you're trying to simply create a quick meme. Naturally we also wanna respect the original creator of the image so part of the rewards will go into storage for them to be able to claim any pending rewards their meme may have generated through us. That's a bit of a longshot from happening however so let's not focus on that for now.
You may also be thinking, what stops us from just using the widget, creating the meme and just downloading/copying the image finalized meme and not allowing the front-end to automatically set beneficiaries on our posts/comments. Well, nothing, it's a convenience thing and most people would probably want to support a project they're using over being seen having the small beneficiaries of potential rewards being removed.
Memes are easily copied, just like nft images! But we can gamify the process for those who don't go the extra mile to remove some beneficiaries with stats, achievements, etc.
Memecoins suck, let's make real memecoins
Now without going too much into the next step, there's an idea to cryptomeme meme templates as well. Why gamble on mostly useless memetokens when you can gamble on meme templates instead?
The idea there is that at some point when tokenization is easy and cheap (maybe with Magi), every newly whitelisted template could generate tokens that people are open to buy into. An easy and not so thought out example could be this: Let's say I upload a template that's not mine but it's a favorite of mine, so I pay the 1 hive issuance fee and generate 1 million tokens of this template based on its name. 10% go to me for having created it, 10% go to the project for costs, 10% to front-ends and 20% to the original owner of the template (if one exists) while the rest of the 50% are placed on the market to be sold for say 0.01 hive per token (5k hive to purchase all the tokens or some kind of bonding curve).
Now you may ask yourself, why?
The idea is that you'd "invest" in templates you think have a chance to be popular on hive over time. If it's a very popular meme and 100 users use the same template every day in snaps/comments, that's potentially a few $ per day in rewards generated through beneficiaries that'd go back into the template token.
If they're not that popular at the time or never will be, then that's it, it gets the same demise as most other memetokens we're being spammed with daily, at least these ones have and will always have a usecase and a way to generate some rewards for holders.
Anyway, obviously that part isn't necessary nor is it thought out properly at this time, the widget and idea can do without it and I'm sure we could also figure out some ways to burn some hive by using it. It's there for convenience and to keep our memes clean off of watermarks
as well as potentially reward and onboard the real creators of the image if they find out about them.
Anyway, that's pretty much it. Let me know your thoughts/feedback. I'd personally use a widget like this more often than having to google memecreator and some times not being able to find the template but having to google that one separately and trying to find one with a blank canvas I can upload to the memecreator to finally create the meme with the words I want it to say to then wait for the website to create it so it can leave a watermark to then copy it over to use in snaps. Would save me a lot of time!