This week SocialX announced that its membership base surpassed 2 billion users. While still a considerably lower number compared to the other social media giants, the news that SocialX has the largest following of people under the age of 30 has no doubt sent the likes of Facebook and Twitter into panic. The same panic they themselves inflicted on magazines and television networks over 20 years ago, who helplessly watched their share of the finite advertising pool steadily evaporate. SocialX has not only found a niche, it seems to be reshaping the social media market.
Like Facebook and other social networking platforms, SocialX consists of what Kenney and Zysman describe as the “digitization of human activity”. People swarm social networking platforms, forming digital communities where they can share media and socialise with family and friends. Where SocialX is different however, is that all profits are shared by the self-governed community of contributors.
At its heart, SocialX manages a decentralised blockchain where users earn cryptocurrency tokens known as ‘SOCX’. Users earn SOCX from ’Superlikes‘ funded by platform advertising, which is also self-governed. Community members can share SOCX with each another or use them as currency to purchase content on the platform, such as digital art. Where it gets interesting is that tokens can be applied to an integrated SocialX credit card that can be used with any merchant that accepts regular electronic payments. In addition to real monetary rewards, the platform also boasts supreme data control, where users own their own data which is distributed over the IPFS hypermedia protocol.
Noah saved his SocialX credit to purchase the iPhone 21. (Photo by cottonbrofrom, Pexels)
Australia has been widely praised for leading the shift to SocialX. The movement was shaped during Year 1 of the Coronavirus era. With the sudden closure of many businesses, Australia’s youth unemployment rate shot to nearly 14% within weeks. While remarkably low compared to today’s figures, this was double the national employment rate at the time. News of the spike in youth unemployment coincided with Facebook publishing a profit of over USD$ 21 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. This not only sparked national debate, but started a social media movement (on Facebook) for users to collaborate with a platform that shares revenue with its contributors. On the back of this, social media morphed into a remunerated prosumer domain, which Ritzer and Jurgenson describe as a model where users generate the content and build the communities that serve themselves.
Over the next 10 years, SocialX exploded. Like its competitors, the platform is essentially a ‘free good’, which Dynand and Sheiner define as a “service provided by the Internet for which consumers do not explicitly pay”, and it relies predominantly on advertising for revenue. However, all advertising decisions, including how advertisements function, are decided by a community voting system; meaning users are essentially working for themselves. This is a blunt contrast to other social networking platform models like Twitter, a corporation governed to serve shareholders.
Prosumerism has been around for decades and has become a part of daily life, like when we design our own pizza and pay online or pick the furniture ourselves from the warehouse shelf at Ikea. Researchers had previously argued that prosumer versions of capitalism will work better if the participants are adequately rewarded, but the concept had until this decade failed to yield a better deal for social networking platform users.
Looking ahead, it is predicted that new social media and broader media sharing platforms will continue to move towards a more collaborative-consumption approach, which Belk defines as people organising the exchange of resources for things other than monetary compensation. SocialX’s token system marks a transition towards this theory. Corporations who may be looking to implement aspects of this model, however, will need to come up with creative schemes to avoid labour regulation breaches; making it difficult to compete in a collaborative-consumption market.
SocialX has uncovered a new economic path for social media organisations and users alike, providing a compelling vision for the current state and future of social networking. People have been spurred to take a proactive approach to prosumerism and now the major players are being forced to take notice.
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