Excessive Centralization and Secrecy

Governance, source code, surveillance and censorship policy are all dictated by an architecture of secrecy and centralization. Such an industry pattern is highly corrosive to user-rights and public accountability which are becoming increasingly essential as billions of humans rely on these services and utilities to communicate.

The market at large is under threat from Orwellian control of leading proprietary social networks. Fraud and a general lack of transparency are major problems facing the social networking, payments and digital ad spaces. Ads are served ubiquitously with little to no insight into who is paying for what or who is seeing them.

Monetization of content is difficult, and it is centrally governed. These services have the ultimate control over the value of content distributed on their platforms, and hold a dictatorial position on the fate and fortune of the people who are providing the most valuable component of their business: content. Moreover, there is little recourse to punish the service providers for abuse of powers, nor do they face many repercussions for their actions.

In addition, mainstream networks have started showing a double standard and are not treating all users equally under their policies. There is a glaring hole in the existing business model for social media advertising because the platforms are acting as gatekeepers to advertisers. YouTube could, at any time, decide to demonetize a video because it is not advertiser friendly, but in reality, there may be hundreds or thousands of brands and advertisers who may not object to running their promotion on the video in question because of the audience and level of engagement. Rather than having a corporation make these judgments, Gomezi solves this problem by allowing content creators, publishers and advertisers to handle their relationships independent of any centralized authority and directly between each other.

Blockchain technology and other tools for decentralized architectures are still young. Many centralized services remain beneficial for user experience and scalability, among other things. Gomezi has adopted a hybridized approach that incorporates both centralized and decentralized architectures to capture the benefits of each. Our criticism of mainstream networks revolves mostly around lack of transparency and commitment to decentralizing power. For this reason, Gomezi has taken the initial step towards decentralization with its monetization system.

Gomezi is one of the few social networking platforms that truly embodies the transparency movement by keeping the entire software stack free and open source (and not just the added blockchain or token layer). We hope that more companies will follow suit, allowing tech innovation to exponentially increase in speed and efficiency in the coming years.