I already wrote a few days ago, about the connection between Facebook's announcement to focus more on user interaction (and less on news) and Mark Zuckerberg's new year resolution to learn more about "the cryptocurrency phenomenon". In that post I was suggesting that Facebook is switching their business model: from a corporate-centric approach, to a user-centric approach.

Now, Facebook moves even further and announces a new change: news sites will be ranked based on user's votes. In other words, people will decide what news site is more respectable than others, not Facebook's algorithms.

This is going straight in the direction of Steemit, if you really look at it, and I'm almost sure there will be also some sort of an incentive for users to "upvote" a new site. If not from Facebook directly, then from the sites themselves, which may want to "buy" Facebook votes, in order to increase their reach.

It's another step in the direction of the "decentralization of Facebook", as much as difficult - and unlikely - this decentralization may seem now. And although I'm sure the user's vote will be weighed in by other algorithms too (it won't be 1:1) the shift Facebook is cracking in its business model becomes more and more visible.

On one side, I'm sure Mark and his team have had enough heat from the "fake news" clusterfuck last year and they are looking to distance themselves from news, as fast as they can. But on the other side, they're still a publicly traded company and the investors are pressing for returns.

So, they still have to make some money.

Only with this shift they're putting their users at least on the same level with companies, if not higher.

Because, if users will decide what news site is "more reliable", that will weaken their "we are the product being sold" status, and enforce the "we are the ones who decide what's valuable" status.

From here to finding a way to measure how much their vote is worth is only a very small step: they just need to launch their own token.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me Hive account@dragosroua.

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