Decentralized Blogging Infrastructure: We aim to create a robust and decentralized infrastructure for bloggers and content creators. Traditional blogging platforms often centralize content and revenue control, limiting the freedom of creators. Our goal is to provide an alternative that is fully decentralized.
Full Content Control: With “Thoughts,” content creators will have complete ownership and control over their content. They can publish, edit, and delete their posts at any time, ensuring that their voice remains unfiltered and uncensored.
Immutable and Tamper-Proof Content: We are using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for content storage. This technology ensures that all content published on “Thoughts” is immutable and tamper-proof. Once a piece of content is published, it cannot be altered or deleted, ensuring data integrity and reliability.
Direct Earnings: Our platform allows creators to set their own rules for monetizing their content. They can earn directly from their audience without intermediaries taking a significant cut. This empowers creators to maximize their earnings and build sustainable income streams.
Transparency: Blockchain technology, specifically the Tron blockchain, provides transparency in content distribution and earnings. All transactions and interactions are recorded on the blockchain, creating a transparent and trustworthy environment for creators and consumers.
Project Value: The integration of “Thoughts” with blockchain technology provides significant benefits and values to both creators and users:
Empowering Creators: “Thoughts” empowers content creators by giving them complete control over their work. They can express themselves freely without fear of censorship or content takedowns.
Content Integrity: Content stored on IPFS is immutable, ensuring that once published, it cannot be altered or deleted. This builds trust among readers that the content they access is genuine and unaltered.
Fair Earnings: Creators can earn directly from their content without middlemen taking a significant portion of their earnings. This promotes fair compensation for their efforts and encourages more creators to join the platform.
Reduced Dependence on Centralized Platforms: “Thoughts” offers an alternative to traditional blogging platforms that often impose restrictions and control over creators. This shift towards decentralization reduces dependence on centralized entities.
Project Test Instructions: Visit https://thoughts-ai.vercel.app/ and click on explore to read some existing articles.
You also connect your wallet and try to create your blogs with an easy to use block editor
Successfully implemented individual on-chain profiles for each thoughts.ai user, enhancing user uniqueness and privacy. [done]
Enabled creators to monetize their content immediately by offering support for paid posts.[done]
Developed a factory contract responsible for efficiently deploying edition implementation clones, optimizing scalability.[done]
Introduced a user-friendly feature that allows users to keep track of their claimed posts.[done]
Future Plans:
Improve UX & get smart contracts audited
Incorporate cutting-edge AI technologies to further enhance content creation and curation.
Launch On Mainnet [done]
Collaborate with decentralized applications (dApps) to encourage them to utilize thoughts as a platform for publishing and engaging their communities.
Introduce Feature Like Co-author support & author subsriptions
Expand the thought user profile to encompass not only blogs but also real-time updates on Tron network events and social interactions, creating a comprehensive user experience.
Thoughts - Tron’s Web3 Publishing Hub is a promising project with the potential to revolutionize the blogging and content creation landscape.
It addresses several key challenges faced by traditional blogging platforms, including centralization, lack of content control, and limited monetization options,and it also aims to empower content creators by giving them complete control over their work, ensuring fair earnings, and promoting transparency.
Welcome to Tron Hackathon season 5 wishing all the best of luck buddy.
I will like to start by welcoming you into the Tron hackathon season 5. Having a Decentralized Publishing Hub is one important thing we need in our ever growing society. I have felt the impact of this from a widespread demonstration in my country sometime 2020 and how helpful X (as at the time, Twitter, even though was and still is a centralized platform) was in helping the people of my country to pass information around. This is something both local radio and tv stations couldn’t do.
So, coming back to your project, can you tell me what inspired you into creating this project. Have you had any direct experience of content restriction/s that made you think of building this project?
Welcome to Season 5, a decentralize blogging and content creation hub, hmm
I see you provide content control, immutable storage, direct earnings, and transparency through blockchain integration. I’m more concerned about monetization, what’s the direct earnings model like?
Will it provide support for companies to create their blogs? Because I think that’s where real revenues for blogging platform lies.
By the way great project, we had some great blogging platforms on other chains, finally we have one on TRON as well. All the best team
Hi @manfred_jr, Thanks for showing interest in our project. Regarding the monetisation question, authors have the control to publish any article as paid or free article. Let me explain a bit more on it.
1. Here in the below screenshot, you can see any author has the control to publish their content as both paid or free content. If they want to make it a pay to read article, they can set some amount of trx that users will need to pay to read this article. This amount gets transferred to the authors wallet after every successfull purchase by any reader
2. Moving to the readers side, any reader can visit the thought profile of any author and can consume their paid/free content. Below we have shown the thought profile page of a sample author. On the profile page you can see all the paid/free content the author has published. Also for paid content you can see how many people have paid for ( claimed ) that content.
5. After successful login, the platform checks whether the reader have already claimed this article before or not. If yes, he can directly read the content, if not they will need to pay the required trx to read that article, as shown in the below screenshot.
Hi @Prince-Onscolo. Thanks for showing interest in our project. Here in this thread we have explained more on the monetisation part. Apart from paid articles, we also aim to add support for tips and monthly subscription plans moving forward. Looking forward to your feedback. Cheers !!
Hi @fabsltsa, thank you for bringing this up in the thread. We already have this in our mind and have plans to implement two crucial measures to ensure the safety of our platform:
We’re developing AI-based content filtering to proactively prevent any malicious content from being published by our writers.
Additionally, we’re implementing a REPORT section where verified community members can flag any harmful articles. After manual review, any problematic content will be blacklisted from our platform using our ThoughtEditionFactory Smart Contract.
Looking forward to more feedback and questions. Thanks !!
@rash2000 personally, I find it so embarrassing that after replying to other questions, you are yet to respond to the one I asked above. I will still take a chill pill though
Extremely sorry @Youngyuppie I just missed the comment by mistake. Although I have not faced this problem first hand yet, since I have only recently started writing content, this is a problem faced by many of my very close friends who have struggled to build audience on Medium due to its capping of number of free articles to user as well as to earn enough amount of money that could financially incentivise him to keep on writing content.
This is because Medium focuses on getting more subscribers for itself rather than giving the control to users on whether they want to provide free articles or only paid ones. Medium also tries to promote viral articles, so bigger creators keep getting more views, while those who are just getting started like me, keep getting demotivated.
Hi @richyrich, sorry for late reply. Yes we do have plans to have plans to provide more sophisticated features to onboard companies for getting their blogs on Thoughts. Apart from building the AI based editor for simplified writing, we also plan to add features like custom domains, seo optimizations etc to attract companies. We do think that onboarding companies gradually will help us gain more revenue quickly.
Just to temper a little bit, there is no total freedom of speech since people can flag posts + an AI will decide which content can be posted or not.
And it’s a good thing. I don’t really want to see a platform full of hateful speech, racism, fake news, pedocriminal content,…
But the question is how will the algo determine what’s publishable and what’s not. If I’m quoting a hateful speech to show how stupid it is, will it be flagged by the AI?
As an advice, I think @rash2000 you shouldn’t say « writers will have full control over their content and it will remain uncensored and unfiltered » since it’s simply not true. I would instead say « you won’t be censored for expressing your opinion, as long as it’s respecting the law/guidelines » then a list of forbidden content.
As I stated in one of the above comments, I have not faced this problem first hand yet since I am still a newbie in content creation, but have talked to a lot of friends and acquaintances who have failed to build audience on Medium
Medium is not very user friendly due to its capping of the number of free articles for users. Also it does not enable new creators to earn enough money that could financially incentivise him to keep on writing content.
This is because Medium focuses on getting more subscribers for itself rather than giving the control to users on whether they want to provide free articles or only paid ones. Medium also tries to promote viral articles, so bigger creators keep getting more views while newer ones usually struggle a lot. This is not specific to Medium, which I used as an example here, but with most of the platforms today.
Also coming to your second question, we are not behind Medium’s kind of model here where we serve as sellers to the customers. Rather we want to give complete control to users where they try to create content for their audiences and users can buy subscriptions to specific creators. So we would be serving as a SAAS for creators if they want to roll out paid content. For rest, there would be no fee to post free articles on the platform. Also, we have a pay per view model as well, where creators can create a single paid article instead of creating subscriptions.
