How to reward the Web: The social dApp Yup

Abstract

With the advent of blockchain technology, new Online Social Networks (OSNs) were proposed under the name of Blockchain Online Social Media (BOSM). Among the most well-known BOSMs, the introduction of blockchain is geared towards providing a decentralised social platform, together with an auditable and transparent rewarding system. While some current BOSMs have gathered a large set of dedicated users, they can hardly fight against the hegemony of the most well known centralised platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook. Yup tries to overcome this issue by proposing a rewarding system that can integrate with existing platforms. Its rewarding system keeps track of any piece of content uniquely identified by an URL, so its usage is not restricted to OSNs only. Given its unique approach, its rewarding system represents an important case study that, to the best of our knowledge, is not covered in the literature. In this paper, we close this gap by presenting the rewarding system provided by Yup and understanding its implications on the social activity of the users. Our analyses uncover that the voting activity favours the creation of echo chambers, and that the rewarding system is unfair. Additionally, we identify some limitations that can help design new rewarding systems.