The purpose of writing this write-up is for me to record my current thoughts so that, say five years from now, I can look at this and remember what was my thought at this point. In short, I am thinking out loud in this write-up.
It would be great to hear counterpoints to anything am saying here as it would be great to read those also say five years from now.
Being business minded me and my cousin Ajay have always looked at opportunities in the internet world, even though we did not follow up on a lot of them, we have had our lucky ones too.
We did have our share of Social media ideas that we never did or that never worked.
However, seeing ideas similar to what we have had at the same time working out to be successful has always made me wonder what would be the next evolution.
In my opinion, the internet in itself represents decentralisation and the power of collaboration. It has always been evolving in the direction of collaborative power, the media as we know it has been replaced to a large extent by collaborative social media.
The issues or flaw at the current stage of evolution of human communication and collaboration.
The internet, traditional media, books, social media, the governing systems and structures and all the systems that we see around us has evolved in the natural process of fixing flaws in the way the Human Swarm communicates and exists as a singular entity.
I believe the natural evolution of technology(or anything that enables the human swarm to exist as a singular entity) follows the path that is needed to fix the flaws in any given system.
At this current stage, the popular systems or what we could call traditional social media enables the collaborative mass communication between the individual entities and groups of entities within the Human Swarm better than older or previous stages, enabling it to work as a singular entity in a more efficient manner.
This current stage of the evolution of the "Human Swarm" represents the collaborative nature of the "Human Swarm" better than the previous stages. However, the next natural progression would be to fix the least resistance flaw in the current system.
A property of the individual autonomous entity in the Human Swarm ( i.e., you and me) is to ensure its own longevity.
The current situation or stage of the evolution of the Human Swarm is flawed in this aspect, traditionally the individual autonomous entities in their interaction between each other exchange various tokens of longevity. These tokens include money( a quantitative representation of attributed contribution to longevity from various interactions), family friendship or social cohesion ( an emotional representation of attributed longevity to various interactions).
However, the current stage of evolution of the Human Swarm does not enable a completely decentralised and total exchange between the autonomous entities of the Swarm. As the interaction enablers are still centralised and they control and concentrate the quantitative representation of contribution towards longevity of various interactions(money) while allowing the free flow of the emotional representation of contribution towards longevity of various interactions(through methods like Liking, sharing,commenting and so on) .
I am taking the liberty to ignore the smaller picture of the technological limitations that have to lead the evolution in this direction. What I mean is that the technologies we have had have been centralised in nature.
The natural evolution to fix the least resistant flaw is leading us to a more decentralised technology framework that represents the collaborative nature of the Human Swarm better.
The evolution ( it can be called a development from an individual entity's point of view) of blockchain and its related ecosystems are part of this natural evolution of the Human Swarm.
In my point of view, the next least resistant evolution of the Human Swarm would be a system that would enable total enabler for interactions between the autonomous entities of the Human Swarm.
This might not be reached in one iteration, that is it might not necessarily be steemit.com that achieves this. However, it would be a system or group of systems that represent the interactions between autonomous entities of the Human Swarm better.
I also feel at this point that the next evolution of the Human Swarm that is after the current ongoing change that would enable a better representation of the interaction would be for the interactions to be decentralised and have an existence of their own. This could also happen as part of the current change.
So, in short, I feel that we are going to see a shift in the very nature of what social media is. However, it is too early to say if the current system is going to be replaced entirely or if the existing systems would adapt to represent the interactions of the autonomous entities better.