Twitter is willing to make you pay $8 for a blue mark on your profile, to prove that you are the real owner of the account. What a fucking joke! Elon Musk already stated that anyone trying to impersonate someone with a blue check will be banned, even if they paid. Cool story bro, but we are not in 2002 anymore.

If you are not aware of the situation, because you don’t use Twitter, or because you don’t have internet, genius, billionaire, playboy (hell nope), philanthropist Elon Musk bought Twitter for a modest sum of $44B. Long story short, the man was obliged to, simply because he made an offer earlier this year and was forced by the board member to buy the company (even if they refused to collaborate with him). *insert Benny Hill theme*

Since Elon is almighty god on Twitter, a large portion of its user base, politicians and media were starting to freak out. It’s been 14 years that Zuck is milking your data through all his social network’s, letting conspiracy and terrorists groups operate on Facebook, and no one bats an eye, but when Elon buys Twitter everyone loose his mind. 

One of the worst things on twitter besides people whining all the time is probably the unprecedented amount of bots spamming all day long about fake giveaways, shilling shitcoins and scammy projects or impersonating people. Bots are a real pain in the ass, and twitter never did much to halt this. 

In the meantime Elon admitted that employees were selling under the table Twitter blue marks around $15K. I’m not as shocked by this as CZ buying SBF’s ass but seriously, I’m not going to drop a tear when half of Twitter employees are going to be laid off. Congratulations, you played yourself. 

If we summarize, we have a shit ton of bots, verified fake accounts, and a level of misinformation at a high level, and the richest man on earth at this date, bought this crap. Fortunately Jack (Dorsey) is going to bring the next generation social app thanks to the Web5 (laugh in Web3) but I’m not going to discuss that. 

With the rise of Web3, an application like Twitter tends to be completely useless in the future. Who needs someone paid to verify that you are a real human being based on absolutely nothing? If Elon thinks I’m going to pay $8 per month to prove to the world that I’m a real shitposter behind my screen, it’s not going to happen. 

There’s this cool Chad original founder of ETHLand, most recently rebranded as Aave, who made web3 social app his new hobby horse. What are we really talking about? As Twitter got worse, Stani proposed to launch a new social media, based on Polygon’s blockchain. Here comes Lens Protocol. If you still don’t know where all of this is going, imagine Lens as the backbone or the roots for social media where they can plug-in and display information through the blockchain. To use Lens and all applications built on top of it you need a special NFT which will be used as a doorway badge to the ecosystem. If anyone can build an application on Lens, you can have access to it until you have this NFT in your wallet. All your data will be stored on it and represent who you are. Sell it, and you lose it.

Lens is a social graph representing an Individual user and their network of relations. The Social Graph is not dependent upon any platform to maintain. Users own their Profile and their interpersonal relations. Which is not the case with an application like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

To get verified it will only take a couple of information from you, using ZK badges, you’ll be able to store anything in it, the smart contract will only read what matters to define that you are made of flesh and bones (and brain). How cool is that? Who could have thought that it took less than a year to come up with a competitive application firstly designed for degens and which will be available for mass adoption in the future? 

I know, there’s plenty of stuff that needs to be clarified, like the economic model of the platform, scalability of the blockchain and technical jargon that give me a headache. Contrary to Twitter, when you shitpost on Lenster, a look a like application of Twitter, but built on Lens, you have to make a transaction on-chain to post your dumb message. So far, Lens is paying gas fees for you, because the protocol is still in beta, because Polygon is cheap, because there are only 100K profiles minted so far. But what will happen when we’ll be 1 million or 10 million? According to Dune, data revealed that Lens Protocol spent roughly 100K $MATIC in gas fees, or less than $100K. If I’m not questioning the social benefit for the plebs, I’m wondering how far a social good project like this one can be sustainable in the long run. It can’t only rely on Gitcoin and public funds to stay alive.

But you got the point, you won’t have to spend 8 bucks per month to prove to a billionaire that you are a real human. You need a wallet, an ENS, and you are mostly done with it. The end of autocratic social media platforms is near, for everyone’s sake. 

If you are still considering paying $8 per month for Twitter blue mark, you certainly don’t deserve it.