The creators of Reddit and Solana are joining forces. At a conference in Lisbon, they announced a joint investment to create a decentralized social media.
A step towards independence
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Solana co-founder Raj Gokal announced at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Lisbon that they will jointly invest $100 million in a new social networking platform based on Web 3.0 technology.
For Raj Gokal, the initiative is personal, as he was recently banned from Twitter. According to him, centralized social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, and the aforementioned Twitter have too much influence over the content published there, being able to effectively restrict and censor it.
In Gokal’s own words:
“I need to break free from centralized social media, I want to leave Twitter”.
Ohanian meanwhile adds:
“Help me do it. Build the next Twitter, build the next Facebook, build the next Instagram. I have a special reward for anyone who helps me get off and remove my accounts from these centralized services.”
Combining experience with technology
Reddit is a platform known primarily for freedom of expression. It is also a social media medium visited by over 32 million unique users every day. The idea behind it, combined with the technology behind Solana, could influence the creation of a strong blockchain-based space, where, as the originators point out, Web3 projects will be able to turn users and creators, into owners and stakeholders who would also be active participants in the cryptocurrency market.
The answer to the increasingly bad PR of traditional social media
It is speculated that the joint actions of the co-founders of Reddit and Solana are a response to the situation in which the centralized social media currently find themselves. They are often accused of changing the idea that originally guided them. They no longer only connect people from different parts of the world, with similar interests and passions. According to many observers, they are becoming a source of frustration and deepening negative emotions and beliefs of their users. This has a particularly strong impact on teenagers. The social responsibility of these platforms is often pushed into the background. In response, services such as Mastodon are created, whose owners are the community gathered around them. The lack of presence, of an overarching entity, means that the interest is not put before the idea. This is the direction Alexis Ohanian and Raj Gokal want to take. Combining their ambitious plan with blockchain technology, they have the power to make a small revolution.
