Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz: My2cents reinvents social media with BSV

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Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roommates launched The Facebook (as it was called in 2004) with a new idea. It wasn’t to let people post messages to each other online—because messageboards had been doing that for years, long before the World Wide Web was invented.

What was new was the way Facebook wanted to tie the user’s online identity to that of the real person who was posting on the site. At first, they did that by only allowing people with Harvard emails to join—since Harvard required your email address to contain a version of your real name. Today anyone can register for Facebook but the intention, at least, remains to tie your Facebook presence to your real persona. And that, as it turned out, was exactly what advertisers wanted, making Facebook one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

But arguably something was lost in Facebook’s ideas about identity online and off. Almost 30 years later, a new social media business, my2cents, is rediscovering the virtues of those old messageboards which Facebook helped consign to history. And it brings something completely new to the model thanks to the powers of Bitcoin SV.

On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, I spoke to Dr. Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz, the founder of my2cents, about his project, which was launched earlier this year.

To register with my2cents, all you do is invent a username and a password. That’s it. Then you can start posting. It changes the emphasis from most social media sites, BSV or otherwise, from the person posting (because on my2cents, they could be anyone) to what they have to say. That creates a whole new dynamic, in which celebrities have no more clout than nobodies and a first post gets as much traction as one from someone who’s been posting on the site for years. There are no “followers” or “following” of people—only of topics.

The service is powered by Bitcoin SV, and in the world of BSV social media it is revolutionary in a different way. Far from using BSV to escape from business models that rely on advertising, my2cents will take ads and it invites you to view them, although you can choose not to, in return for sharing the ad revenue that my2cents generates.

Each user’s ad share is calculated by a subtle measure of that person’s contribution to the site in which various metrics are combined to create their “user score” made up from things like how much they have posted or commented.

Finally, when you sign up, you are given a BSV wallet. But you don’t need to transfer money into it in order to start using the site. You can simply start posting and when someone likes (which my2cents calls “pluses”) your contribution, a small BSV transfer will be made to your wallet.

So what about the perennial problem of BSV social media sites—that everyone is happy to be paid for their contributions but, except for purely altruistic reasons, why would anyone want to pay other people? Well here, as mentioned above, your “pluses” count towards an improved “user score.” So if my2cents prospers, and its ad revenue grows, even though you’re paying out in the short term, you’re investing in your share of future profits.

My own brief experience on my2cents was positive. I found people talking about much more than Bitcoin SV (an inescapable subject on many BSV-powered social media apps) and I earned an impressive $0.25 or so from two or three posts. I even proved to myself that it was real money by sending it to my Centbee wallet. I was impressed.

So that’s my two cents about my2cents.

Hear the whole of Dr. Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes:

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