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Social Blockchain
p/social-blockchainExplore what the world is sharing
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Imran Sheikh

Social Blockchain - Explore what the world is sharing

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Social Blockchain is a permanent archive of social activity on the internet, created by collecting and analyzing sharing events from millions of websites around the world. Come explore to discover trending topics and stories as the news breaks.

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Jeroen De Prest
What is the value in this case of using a blockchain?
Bryant Williams
Maker
@jeroendeprest The main value of storing the activity in an immutable, cryptographically verifiable transaction log is 1. to keep a reliable permanent history of the data that anybody could use in the future, and 2. to be able to verify the validity and accuracy of the analytics we generate for the content consumption service. We're generating a new block roughly once every hour. Then we generate insights and try to find interesting traits about that data as a snapshot of social activity around the world at that time. This time frequency gives a nice hourly, historical view of the data. It's fun to be able to jump back in time to a specific date at a specific time and see what was trending.
Jeroen De Prest
@bryant_williams How do you handle false data?
Jeroen De Prest
@bryant_williams are those points actual problems?
Jeroen De Prest
@bryant_williams I am always quite sceptical of blockchain projects because at my job we have a lot of people coming to us with project that don't even need blockchain.
Simeon
@bryant_williams @jeroendeprest This would be ok as a specific feature set but not an actual product and then marketing what should be invisible (blockchain) to the average consumer.
Elena Zhizhimontova
This is curious! Which blockchain do you guys use? Which social activity do you collect atm (from which sources I guess)?
James Drummond
@zelena Yes the idea and implementation are great but blockchains usually have technical limitations (i.e slow lookups) and cost money. How does this work from a technical / business point of view?
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hi @zelena ! We're using a homegrown solution. The blockchain node logic is quite simple at this point because we're only running a single node. Each transaction (a social sharing event) is stored in our own custom ledger database (storing raw historical data in S3 and storing metadata, hashes, and insights in MongoDB). It was very interesting to see AWS release their own ledger database recently. Currently the primary data source is publishers using ShareThis Sharing Buttons (https://www.sharethis.com/platfo...) which is roughly 3 million publishers. Publishers using AddThis, SumoMe, or AddToAny can also contribute their site's sharing activity to the ledger by installing the socialblockchain plugin: https://www.socialblockchain.co/... .
Bryant Williams
Maker
@zelena @desertedisland Great point James. Many blockchains suffer from being slow and expensive. We're avoiding the cost issue right now by using a single node on a private blockchain. Each hour we inspect and analyze the recent transactions (sharing activity), then we generate analytics and insights from that and store those in MongoDB indexed by topic, category, domain, and date. So the front-end at socialblockchain.co and the data pulled is all cacheable via CDN and quick to lookup in the database. In the future, we hope to give users control to view their entire sharing history. In that case we'll have to start indexing the raw data by the user's identifier which will increase our costs slightly, but it still won't be a technical blocker.
Colin Winhall
I was surprised just how interesting I found this project, it's really well made, congrats guys! I feel that there is a lot of value held in this data that is underutilized, do you have any plans to release an API at any point?
Bryant Williams
Maker
@colinwinhall Thanks Colin! We agree that there's a lot of value still left to be uncovered in the data. We would definitely be open to releasing an API to help other builders. Do you have any ideas about what you might do with the API or any particular content you'd want to use? Right now all stories are primarily indexed by domain, topic, category, and time. We'll get it on our roadmap to work on an API others can use :)
Colin Winhall
@bryant_williams Hi Bryant, I'm particularly interested in exploring the data in various ways. One way would be in terms of NLP for the title of the article and the body to uncover any specific patterns that might make an article more "shareable".
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hey Product Hunters! Google News, Apple News, and Facebook Feed do a decent job of surfacing quality content, but the largest publishers and the ones with a budget typically win the competition for attention on those platforms. A couple months ago we asked ourselves: "What would these services look like if they were completely powered by the reader, for the reader, outside of the Big-Tech walled gardens?" Our response: Social Blockchain. We take in sharing data from millions of websites and store them in a Permissioned Blockchain with a centralized system to determine transaction order and validity so we can always verify historical data has not been tampered with. We then build search and analytics on top of this data. The result is a consumer-focused, content-rich interface powered by the actions of 100m people across millions of websites. The stories are grouped into a wide range of topics and categories so you can always find something that fits your interests. Check it out at https://www.socialblockchain.co and leave us some feedback! 🙂
Lorenzo Bolognini
How are you going to monetize this?
Bryant Williams
Maker
@lorenzbolognini Hi Lorenzo. We are not currently monetizing the product. Our primary goal is to provide value to the readers through display interesting content, and provide value to publishers by getting their top content additional exposure. If the service grows into something substantial, we could potentially sell additional data/insights to marketers or advertisers looking to understand and take advantage of what's trending.
Pavel Peshkov
Is this something similar to Steemit?
Jun Gong
@paulehan Looks like it. Also, does it consider Social Blockchain as a "hybrid" dapp?
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hey @paulehan . This is not similar to Steemit. Steemit is an entire social network. Social Blockchain is collecting and analyzing social sharing activity in order to discover and surface trending content. From a product perspective, it's similar to Apple News or Google News + Google Trends
Ryan Hoover
The name "Social Blockchain" threw me off as the content itself isn't focused on blockchain at all. Curious to hear the thought process behind the name, @bryant_williams and @sheikhimran01.
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hey @rrhoover. Thanks for checking it out. The idea to store social sharing activity in a cryptographically verifiable ledger (in the same way that cryptocurrencies store transaction data) led us to the name. "Social Sharing Ledger" or "Trending Stories" would be a more accurate description of the current product, but they didn't feel as catchy as "Social Blockchain". That said, this is still very much an evolving product. We're hoping for feedback from the community (including alternative name suggestions) to help improve the service.
Ali Salah
Cool idea and website. Could be useful to many people. But I don't think that using blockchain in branding and domain would be meaningful to users, it's just the tech you use. It will alienate many people.
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hi @alollou . We did have a slight concern about that. As you use the service, if you come up with alternative names let us know. We're not against switching to something more fitting.
Paul Shuteyev
@sheikhimran01 @bryant_williams congrats on your PH listing, SocialBlockchain looks great! Would you like to have an interview about SB at https://startupradius.com/ ? please PM me at paul@startupradius.com if interested
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hi @paul_shuteyev . That would be great! I'll PM you
Max Lettenberger
Does each node store all the data?
Bryant Williams
Maker
Hi @lettemax . Currently the data is centralized and processed with a single node. Given the amount of data, when/if we add additional nodes, it's very possible that we would only store block hashes on the nodes themselves and keep the raw transaction data in a separate store. Similar to how a Blockchain-based video service might store the actual video content outside of their primary blockchain (in something like IPFS).