Deep Dive: Taki
We are a generation who have accepted and welcomed social media with wide arms in our lives. That said, the average user spends 2 hours and 27 minutes (January 2022).
If that doesn’t appeal to you, 58.4% of the world population uses social media! 🤯
To put it in comparison, only 56.2% of people live in urban areas.
We spend less time brushing, bathing, and sometimes even working than spending time on social media. It’s an open secret that we all are addicted to at least one of the major social media platforms, be it Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
But before talking more about our habits, let’s see what this deep dive covers:
- The Growth of Social Media 🚀
- The Business of Social Media 💸
- Problems In The Current Social Media Model ?
- Decentralized Social Media 🧩
- Taki: Product Teardown 🧭
- More Platforms like Taki 📱
- Wrapping Up 🥽
The Growth of Social Media 🚀
Internet & Smartphones didn’t really boom in the world until Facebook came along. It started as a way to stay connected virtually no matter the great physical distances between you and your best friend. It was a cool place to stay in touch with your family and friends and share snippets of your lives.
With time, more and more types of social media emerged. From messaging to photo sharing to community-based chatting and communications.
There was even an App called Yo! Which allowed users to send each other “Yo!” and nothing more. At one point, the app raised 1 Million dollars! 😭
Moving on, we can bifurcate all social media into 5 Types namely with their examples:
- Social Networking Sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
- Image Sharing and Messaging: Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
- Video-Sharing: Youtube, Tiktok, and Vimeo.
- Social Blogging: Medium and Substack.
- Online Forum: Reddit and Quora.
This enabled people to spend time on a website where they can stay in touch with their friends and allowed them to get away from their boredom. Slowly as the tech evolved and new forms of social media appeared, it became more addictive and even more interesting to spend time on. But, as the demand and popularity grew for a platform, it became harder for users to grow on the platform.
54% of the world’s population spends 2 hours and 27 min on social media. That is a lot of people spending a lot of time on a specific product!
Certainly, with so many customers who are willing to spend time on your website and app, entrepreneurs smell an opportunity to make billions of dollars.
The Business of Social Media💸
There is a famous quote used in economics,
“If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”.
This pretty much sums up how major social media platforms operate on their business model. You are never charged for signing up and staying active on social media. Then why would someone do such a charity by maintaining massive servers and databases of photos and videos you post online. How does Instagram make money by letting me spend time on their product?
It’s an open secret, they run ads and basically generate revenue by selling the user’s attention span. At first, this seems like a fair deal. But, as time passed and billions of users started spending time on these platforms. The platforms basically became a conglomerate by selling more and more attention.
You might be wondering, but what is the problem with this? 😕
I am getting to use this amazing product for free and I don’t mind if I’ll have to see some ads during that time.
Wait for it…
Let’s look at the problems the current model presents.
Problems In The Current Social Media Model ?
As time passed and various social platforms came into being, the users then decided which creator to follow and which is an easier platform to use.
Different platforms which were market leaders at once started closing down because they couldn’t update themselves to modern trends as fast as the others.
Now it didn’t feel like a fair tradeoff where users would be forced to watch ads and creators were not paid by the platform.
The major problems that arose are —
- Data mining for improving and targeting ad campaigns:
As these platforms grew, they constantly needed to keep their paying customers(folks who run ads) to get that amazing conversion rate so they moved towards data mining and processing this data. AI and ML are used to monitor everything you do to predict what kind of products you would end up buying.
This is a growing concern as the platforms are trying to stay market leaders, they spend a lot of money in researching and implementing ML algorithms to optimize the ads and increase revenue. It’s really creepy if you read more about it.
2. No benefit for creating and growing an audience on a platform(From platform):
With time, many creators onboarded social platforms to showcase their work. They in turn grew the total time spent by an average user on the platform.
This helped the platform as they maintained high MAU(Monthly Active Users) and profited off the creators. I’ve written extensively on this here.
3. Censorship by platform:
Platforms are obliged to follow government rules and maintain a certain level of censorship on what kind of content is posted. But, sometimes platforms can take away your access to connect with your audience for no good reason.
This is dangerous because these platforms also represent a degree of Freedom of Speech, and censorship is not usually a good sign for Freedom of speech.
All of these resulted in people finding new ways that would help people to experience social media without a central authority looking over and taking away digital privacy.
Decentralized Social Media 🧩
As the name suggests, there would be no central authority/ business trying to make profits from users. Instead, it would be more of a community-oriented model where users and creators are rewarded for engagement on the platform.
This also solves the current data privacy and censorship problems as the community guidelines would be defined by the people and not the government or a central company.
Sounds too good to be true?😉
Enter Taki: A Token-powered Social networking site.
The Product Teardown 🧭
Let’s understand the various parts of the product one by one:
- On-boarding
- The App
On-boarding: A Seamless Experience 🌊
While Taki is a social network based on blockchain, it cannot function with an exclusive web3 wallet login. A variety of reasons contribute to this.
The most important being: the network is not anonymous. Since wallets ingrain anonymity within themselves, they can’t work well as logins to a social network, even if it’s on the blockchain.
With Taki, it’s a standard login procedure that a user needs to follow.
Access: Taki is currently an invite-only platform. So ask friends who use Taki to invite you. If you don’t have someone like that, join their waitlist :)
- Log in with Google or your phone number.
2. Pick a username that you like. You might get your first-name-only usernames here, grab them quick.
3. And, You’re in!
As expected from any social network, the onboarding is simple to get most users to sign-up from the landing page/website.
The App 📱
Interface
The interface is clean and intuitive. You know what to do when looking at the screen elements here.
On the left panel, there are three tabs:
- Feed
- Wallet
- Explore
Feed 📑
Since the platform is new, your feed will be filled with posts from a lot of people,
The feed like other social media apps will be a mix of recommended content and followed content.
You can follow users to see their content on the feed.
Does the follow button on Taki work the same as Twitter or Instagram?
No.
To follow someone in Taki, you need to BUY their user coin.
What are User Coins?💲
According to Taki,
User coins represent the influence and contribution a user makes to the Taki community. In the Taki App, user coins will be tradable for $TAKI. The price of user coins will rise as more are purchased, and vice-versa.
That highlights the core web3 tenet: invest in people.
Now, anyone that creates content on Taki or for that matter anyone who signs up for Taki has a user coin.
For example, look at Kevin Chou, founder of Taki.
He has almost 19k user coins in circulation.
Each coin is valued at $0.78. And as prices of stocks and tokens work in the real world, the value of a user coin will change over supply and demand.
Why are User Coins needed? 🎗️
- User coins are needed to reward users for their contributions to the platform.
- User coins are needed to incentivize users to keep using the platform.
- User coins are needed to pay for platform costs.
With the help of user coins, platforms can provide incentives for users to contribute to the network and help it grow.
By awarding users coins for their contributions, the network can reward those who help make it better and more valuable.
With this mechanism, Taki is building trustworthy governance and an economic model that we all know works so well — Capitalism.
Inceventizing every stakeholder on the platform — Creators, Consumers, Investors.
Creators can earn by virtue of creating good content in forms of Gold Taki and their own user coins.
Consumers can earn by engaging on the platform — liking posts, commenting on posts, completing daily tasks, and so on. We’ll talk about this in detail ahead.
Investors can simply invest in people who have the potential to grow asymmetrically via their user coins.
Now, that we’ve understood what user coins are, let’s get back to how following someone in Taki works.
As I mentioned above, to follow someone you need to buy their coin.
To buy a user coin, you need to pay $TAKI which is the native currency of the platform. $TAKI is converted into the equivalent user coins and transferred to your wallet.
Buying a User’s Coin will:
- Add their content to your feed
- Enable you to receive a portion of their Gold Taki earnings
Now, What is a Gold Taki?🟡
Gold Taki is how users can show appreciation for content on Taki. It is very similar to “Likes” on other social platforms.
Giving a Gold Taki requires the giver to pay 2 $TAKI.
That $TAKI is then split amongst the person who posted the content as well as all users that hold the creator’s User Coin.
The Creator always receives 50% of the Gold Taki, and the remainder is distributed proportionally to everyone who owned the Creator’s User Coin at the beginning of the day.
$TAKI from Gold Taki is paid out the next day after the reset time (i.e., midnight UTC).
You’ll receive a percentage of the rewards that a creator receives.
Ain’t that awesome!
You invested in the creator by buying his user coins. Now, you reap rewards for doing that.
An example of sending Gold Taki to a piece of content by Kevin Chou:
Apart from liking a post using Gold Taki and following a user by buying their User Coin, you can also comment on posts.
The creator can choose if:
- Everyone can reply
- Only Coin Holders can reply
- No one can reply
2. Wallet👛
The wallet is where your User Coins and $TAKI tokens reside.
You can look at all your transactions here.
Whether you bought a User Coin or sent over some Gold Taki, it is recorded here.
Since the platform works on the native token $TAKI, it’s important to HAVE it.
There are two ways in which you can earn $TAKI:
- Engage and earn on the platform — The rewards a user may earn on Taki are based on their user level. The user level is determined based on the user’s contribution level to the Taki economy.
Refer to this table — https://wiki.taki.app/key-concepts/rewards
2. Buy $TAKI — It is listed on Gate.io exchange and Orca.so DEX. Check the below image for the marketplaces where $TAKI is listed.
3. Explore🗺️
Any social network is incomplete without a discovery feature. A feature that allows users to discover more users and connect with them.
The Explore tab is the discovery tool on Taki.
You can discover users and also search for specific users.
Now, let’s talk about how you can engage-and-earn on Taki.
Engage-to-Earn 💵
Engage-to-earn rewards come in three categories:
- Engagement
- User Growth
- User Coin Rewards
Engagement
Daily tasks will reward basic user activity, such as posts, comments, and Gold Taki gifts.
Complete the daily tasks as shown here and you’ll keep earning $TAKI for it.
User Growth
To accelerate user growth, signup completion and invites will be incentivized with rewards.
User Coin Rewards
Buying user coins of your favorite creators is a key aspect of Taki and enables you to share in their digital economy via Gold Takis and user coin ownership. Staking rewards will encourage active user communities and coin holding.
Okay, but who decides all these Economic Aspects of the platform? 🤔
The Governance DAO 👨👨👧👧
Any blockchain-powered platform is incomplete without a governance mechanism. The best mechanism we know now is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).
Taki aims to increase participation in governance by asking the community for its opinions.
Topics that can be voted upon are:
- New issuance of $TAKI
- Engage-to-Earn reward allocation amount and distribution
- Liquidity Reward allocation amount and distribution
- UserCoin on-chain support and initiatives
- Community Treasury and Grants.
Currently, votes take place democratically in the Taki App. Each user is allowed one vote on all proposals.
That’s all for the product of Taki.
Platforms like Taki
Minds
Minds is a decentralized social networking site with more than 6 Million Users. You earn tokens for your contributions that can be traded with USDT. Minds have opensource code and you can upgrade to Minds+ for premium content and to earn a part of the Minds revenue.
Minds’ content policy is based on the first First Amendment and governed by a community jury to deal with matters of censorship which helps to maintain minimum bias, a truly decentralized platform!
Minds is a fairly successful platform that is constantly evolving keeping the community aspect intact. If you love Taki, you must also check out Minds!
Diaspora
Diaspora is not a token-powered platform but it is an open-source platform that is free for all and has no ads or other problems associated with it. It runs similar to Wikipedia, i.e by donations from the community.
There is absolute data privacy along with an amazing structure to maintain decentralization.
This is the earliest decentralized social network created in 2010. It was supposed to replace Facebook, but then due to lack of innovation and limited developmental core, it got confined to some niche members.
Wrapping Up 🥽
Social media is becoming an integral part of society and we believe at the end it should be dictated by a decentralized organization rather than a central authority controlling it. With this said, users and creators should be awarded for their time spent on the platform rather than making these platforms an outlet for the money-making industry. We love what Taki is trying to achieve and would love to post about it on Taki!
Current issues with Taki 🦯
Taki is difficult to navigate and not many people would grasp the concept of Coins. But we feel with proper design changes and an easy interface they could just become the next big platform that everyone is a part of.
While the interface looks clean, it is intuitive. People need to know about things like tokens, user coins, and their utility. The Taki economy will only sustain if people remain in it.
A good content strategy will do great wonders to educate people about the potential of a platform like this. An informative blog with value-driven articles along with a video-based focus on social channels like Twitter and YouTube will be the ultimate growth hack.
To sum it up, we believe in Taki and the platform they’re building.
A big thank you to them for giving us early beta access!
Also, there are various great pieces we encountered while researching for this article, but we would like to leave you with one must-watch documentary, “The Social Dilemma”.
If you have any other thoughts on this topic and would love to discuss more on this, drop a hi to Lokesh Gaikwad or Yash Chandak.
See you at the next one!