Earlier iterations of the Internet have been defined by centralized platforms controlling personal data. And Web2 has been plagued by repeated, large-scale instances of centralized platforms mishandling, compromising, and exploiting this data.
Centralized tech giants have complete control over our online value platforms. They decide which content creators deserve rewards or how much revenue generated by content should be kept for themselves.
Users themselves are, in many cases, effectively consumers with no say whatsoever about what we view and consume on Web2.
However, things are set to change with Web3. Web3 will be different because it aims to enhance users’ control over their identity and revenue generation from activities on the network – a key component of Web3’s decentralized nature.
Democracy forms the crux of decentralization, and Web3, in principle, will be the most democratic the Internet has ever been. Due to these fundamentals, Web3 could ensure that all value created through Web3 will be shared equally by creators, content-makers, and users without any discrimination or bias towards one party.
However, these changes from Web2 to Web3 give rise to new problems and attack vectors for bad actors in the system. Bot programs are constantly evolving, and as much as they could help human users, bots could also be a threat too.
Recently, we saw Elon Musk backing out of a deal to buy Twitter – a move he primarily justified by citing that at least 10% of monetizable accounts on the social media platform are bots or spam accounts.
In the near future, the most advanced bots will be indistinguishable from humans on Web3 and Metaverse platforms. By performing multiple actions (spamming) as if they were real people, it is possible that much of the value generated by Web3 platforms might also have to be unfairly shared with bots.
Recent internet history has shown that humans often cannot successfully compete with bots, as they are constantly active and evolving.
This doesn’t mean that bots are essentially a bad technological advancement. In fact, in most cases, it’s quite the opposite: bots are and will play a more active part in our digital life, performing countless functions that most humans would either be incapable or unwilling to perform. What matters is how some bad actors use bots to exploit systems.
Trying to ban or sideline bots is not a solution. The solution is to distinguish bots from humans so that humans can do human stuff and bots can do bot stuff. And this will require more sophisticated methods than a simple captcha filter asking users to click on random images.
A decentralized identity platform like the Metaproof Platform, which is owned by its users and run by active user participation, could effectively filter bots from humans through identity verifications.
A user who is verified through the Metaproof Platform is issued a credential that will be stored in their Web3 wallet (like the SelfKey Wallet). This user could connect to a Web3 platform using the same wallet, and the Web3 platform could verify that the user is human using the Metaproof credential. This can effectively filter out bots from connecting to the platforms.
As mentioned previously, this doesn’t have to result in the eradication of bots as the Web3 platforms could only restrict bots from a particular section of the platform – e.g., one that deals with content and value creation – and could allow bots on other sectors of the platform after recognizing them as bots.
Bots are evolving. As the creators of these technologies, what distinguishes us as humans is our identity, which we might as well use safely using projects like SelfKey and the Metaproof Platform, to distinguish ourselves from these bots or else scratch our heads a few years from now on thinking what went wrong with Web3, and how it could have been different.
Join SelfKey now and let the bots work for you – not the other way!
