What does the social biology of ants have to do with online reputation? What kinds of organizations will dominate the future? Decentralized reputation might sound innocuous, but it has real implications for how we navigate online data, especially social ranking data that is used by consumers on sites like Yelp or Reddit or even Amazon.
But the idea of a decentralized reputation system makes other possibilities, well … possible. Matan discusses his vision for how these types of tools will enable new forms social organization on a massive scale, potentially replacing the corporate organization model that has been so dominant for the past years or so. My name is Matan Field, I am a theoretical physicist. I studied mathematics and physics. I hold a masters and PhD in theoretical physics and string theory. Backfeed is a distributed governance system for blockchain-based applications allowing for the collaborative creation and distribution of value in spontaneously emerging networks of peers.
After my studies concluded, I continued with physics for a couple of years. During all of those years, I was always interested in alternative economies, alternative organizational structures, cooperatives, etc. So, I played around with those models. Somewhere during the past decade I kind of played around with an idea to make a real-time, ride-sharing application.
I started working on it with some friends and through the progress of that project, we saw an enormous problem in raising the critical mass of users. The solution we came up with was to look at our users as members of a single organization.
For example,people, employees, partners, all within a single organization. That would be your critical mass. It raised the question of: How would hundreds of thousands of people agree about stakes and share the value created, so on? That was the same time where these questions popped up around the world with the launch of the Ethereum blockchain. We started October, Ethereum published their whitepaper in December, Everything kind of came together. The more I went along, the more I realized there are theoretical and practical layers which are still missing from the program, in the larger aspect.
I decided to quit at the ride sharing company and to found Backfeed to build or fill that gap. That gap of systematic and collaborative decision making, allocation of resources, governance, and voting distribution and, in particular, reputation system.
Decentralized and distributed organizations have not beenas efficient or powerful as centralized, top-down organizations. The first challenge was to design a new kind of protocol which would give reputation on a decentralized network, which leads to a completely new notion of reputation and decision making.
Is decentralized reputation similar to how a Reddit community votes things up or down finding a fluid reputation score? You have tons of ranking systems from Amazon to Reddit or Ebay. But all of them, from Reddit to Amazon, etc. One way to look at it is to say: Another way to look at it is to say: Once you identify the right structure, it is less complicated.
Yelp has been in the press recently for people being able to completely decimate a company by writing devastating reviews of it, whether those reviews are warranted or not. Many people are moving away from online reputation, in general. Are there similar pitfalls in a decentralized reputation system?
Yelp is a great example to look at and imagine decentralized. And there are several ways to look at it. In that way, you can organically, naturally, dynamically organize the network into a network of networks, each having their own set of values.
So a particular community could explicitly say what their values are and organize around that? You can rely on a mechanism called stigmergy. There is no direct coordination. They just feedback; or, Backfeed. Out of that feedback, the whole takes shape. Communities are organically divided into subgroups and so-on that are more in line with one another. Networks naturally obtain micro-alignment and macro-diversity. This works out organically without a coordinating authority.
But physics tools are available and helpful. Each of these is quite dramatic. For example, one is scalability. Centralized networks are simply not scalable.
The problem is, the more you scale, the more overhead costs or transaction costs you have per-person. There is a growing tension between scalability and efficiency.
Even then, the only way to pull the tide is to make the system more and more rigid, less and less freedom and creativity — and even that is limited. Whereas a decentralized network is fractal. It works the same for millions as for hundreds. It becomes more and more resilient with scale. In nature, decentralized networks are more resilient, they encourage freedom, creativity, flexibility.
There is no one saying no. So scalability, resilience and freedom are the major advantages. Online reputation involves a kind of social collaboration. Do you see Backfeed promoting this collaboration? In the free market parlance, competition is incentivized. With this kind of mechanism here, it makes a new kind of framework where collaboration is the winning strategy. If you look at a diversity of opinions, nobody is forced to put anything.
Not even encouraged to put anything, but in a way, different groups or agents will cooperate on the things they agree and compete on the things they disagree about. Everything is equally valid. I believe it will lead to a completely new notion of organization and scale. What will it look like when millions of people organize and work together? Once the infrastructure is well-established, it will simply become more efficient.
No centralized network will be able to compete with them. In the industrial age we moved so far towards efficiency that corporations have become unable to handle the current atmosphere. These kinds of old-school organizations tend to be more efficient in small time-scale, less efficient in long time-scales. More efficient in technical stuff, less efficient in creative. What kinds of services have been implemented, using this protocol? What do we have to look forward to? We have built several proof of concepts and are collaborating in partnership with many groups to build tools together more efficiently.
One proof of concept is built as a chrome extension of Slack, so that teams that already use Slack can start using reputation tokens. There is a proof of concept for a decentralized game. For a decentralized curation of a library of content for a search engine. Another group is doing decentralized journalism. We are working on something not quite like Reddit but maybe more like Medium. It involves decentralized curation.
Reddit is about posting links and commenting on them. Once we establish posting links then we can establish commenting on them.
How do you see this sort of system being used by large amounts of people. Do you see a path towards mass adoption? But after the pioneers, there were enough to make such a difference and they had such a big advantage that everyone else had to catch up. The same thing happens to any technology. Any new technology that changes the mindset. At the moment it seems very technical. There seems to be a huge opportunity for creating a user experience that is translatable to less technical people.
We are working on that, reducing the level of difficulty and improving the user experience. People are moving in. We often hear that this infrastructure is similar to the internet, is that how you feel? January 18, osterday. Tell us about yourself and Backfeed. How does a theoretical physicist become the leader of all of this?
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