DFINITY Ecological Project Sharing: DSCVR — A Completely Decentralized Social Content Platform Running on the Internet Computer
Rick, the co-founder of DSCVR, which is developing very rapidly, was invited as a guest at DfinityClub to ask questions about DSCVR’s vision, team and governance mechanism in the form of an AMA，at 3 AM（UTC）on July 15th.
The following is the detailed content of the AMA.
Carl Xue：
We are honored to invite the team members from DSCVR to elaborate on the DSCVR-related content, including the basic information of the project, project progress, and future planning.
Hi, Rick！Before the interview, could you introduce yourself?
Rick：
Hey my name is Rick Porter and Im one of the founders of DSCVR, nice to meet everyone.
Carl Xue：
Question 1: What kind of vision was DSCVR based on and what problems were to be solved?
Rick：
DSCVR is a decentralized social content aggregator that belongs to its community. Currently, the major social networks are controlled by massive companies that often make questionable choices. Critical decisions that drive the platforms happen behind closed doors and there is widespread distrust around the use of user data. The user is often stuck choosing between the lesser of two evils or just turning a blind eye to the questionable parts of a social platform if they want to use it. We think that DSCVR can be a new kind of social network that provides a solution to these problems.
Carl Xue：
Next question: What is DSCVR going on, is there anything impressive?
Rick：
It’s important we build a system that builds with its community and top of mind has been governance and integrations. We expect to have all the standard functionality of a user-governed social platform by the end of year and that development is well underway, but we believe we will have some breakthroughs with new paradigms that we can introduce to the DSCVR users. We have been releasing details about an API, but I believe the technology we are going to begin to discuss is well beyond a simple API.
Carl Xue：
I believe the community is very curious about the DSCVR team. Can you introduce your team?
Rick：
We are a small team located on the west coast of the United States (Washington, Oregon, California). Our team is currently in stealth, but we’ll tell you more about us in the coming months. We are hoping to hire and grow relatively soon, so feel free to reach out if you think you might be a fit.
Carl Xue：
OK, Next question: Why does DSCVR choose DFINITY instead of Ethereum or any other blockchain network?
Rick：
Aspects of what we are doing is not possible with the transactional limits of the current state of Ethereum. From a decentralized perspective, the IC gives us an opportunity to build a full stack (frontend+backend) application that is completely decentralized. The IC also gives us the web speed you need to bridge the gap between users who are used to centralized product experiences yet on decentralized technology.
Carl Xue：
DSCVR was one of the earliest ecological applications based on DFINITY, so how did DSCVR combine with DFINITY at the technical level?Also, what do you learn from developers who also want to build apps on DFINITY?
Rick：
We worked closely with DFINITY and the IC Developer community to get where we are today. DFINITY forums, Discord, and Telegram have been great resources for sourcing ideas and concepts that have helped us solve a lot of the big issues we faced and we are forever thankful for the role they played in DSCVR and hopefully the role they continue to play as the platform grows. Check out the discord community here: https://discord.gg/mj476shW
Carl Xue：
DSCVR returned the power to the user, which fits the Web3.0 features perfectly.So what is the governance mechanism, and how do the users get the governance authority.
Rick：
We think we’re clever so we came up with this phrase: “upvotes gets you votes.” The idea is that users receive upvotes on their posts, comments, and in the portals they manage. The more upvotes you get, the more say you have. Therefore, DSCVR’s most dedicated community members will guide its future. However, we understand that while this may make sense at a high level, there will be a lot of nuance to the actual governance process. We think there will have to be a lot of experimentation before we get it exactly right. We’re going to be constantly trying out new ways for users to earn and exercise governance rights, carefully gauging the community reaction, and then ultimately sticking with what works the best.
Carl Xue：
DSCVR is a cool forum and we’ve seen community members share a lot of interesting content.But one thing that is worth worrying about, is how to solve the problem of content violations in the future?
Rick：
This is something we have talked a lot about as a team. If you think about how Reddit works now, there is a pretty interesting mod system. There are even some moderators who are essentially working full time jobs for free. We think there is an opportunity to build upon the system Reddit has created to further incentivize moderators or even reward them for their work. In that sense, we can envision a future in which content that violates the standards that the community deems is appropriate is fully moderated by the community itself. It may take some time to get to this future state, but we think it’s possible.
Carl Xue：
OK！Last question: DSCVR is still in testing. When is the product launch and what is the future roadmap?
Rick：
We’re hoping that DSCVR is ready for a more mass market product launch at some point in 2022. However, while by that time we may be out of this early testing phase, we think there are many years of experimentation ahead of us before DSCVR reaches the full potential of what we think it can be.
You can also read about whats coming up here: https://dscvr.one/post/99346/dscvr-update--july-5th-2021
Free questioning time
Question
Did you develop it in the Motoko language, and how do you experience it?
Rick：
Yeah, this is something we put a lot of thought into.
We use Rust, the goal is to move components into Motoko as we are identifying which components should be Motoko components and which are Rust components. I was not sure what I didn’t need when I started and having things like Regex and Validation libraries was handy. I believe large IC apps will be built in many languages (Rust, Motoko, C/C++, AssemblyScript) as each language can solve specific problems. We are currently exploring a mini CDK in C to attempt some wild stuff.
Question
What are your total tokens and how are they allocated?
Rick：
We are currently exploring different options for how to best allocate tokens. At a high level, we will have social tokens and service tokens. Social tokens are earned by participating on the platform and service tokens will be earned by funding the platform. We look at the social tokens almost like a game economy. We are asking ourselves questions like: How do users earn tokens in a way that we incentivize them to post high quality content? How might users want to spend their tokens or use them for governance? On the side you have service tokens, which you might look at as more of a traditional crypto. We’re still figuring out the total number of tokens and how they’re allocated, but we plan to allocate a significant portion of them to the community. If you consider yourself a token expert, please reach out – we would love to talk to you.
Question
what unique advantages DSCVR has，and why there are so many social projects in the Dfinity ecosystem
Rick:
DSCVR’s unique advantage will be our governance and integrations, our goal is to build a platform that allows others to build on top of. Currently we are developing Social Fabric, which is the protocol that powers DSCVR. You can read more about it on the site.
I believe there are a lot of social platforms on the IC because this is quite possibly the first time in history you can build an actual full 3-tier application on top of a decentralized system.
Question
If I post content on DSCVR, will there be rewards?((from the community member)
Rick:
Yes. We already mentioned that users earn social tokens by posting valuable content, but haven’t talked quite as much about the ideas we have for how users might want to spend them. We have a ton of ideas including user avatars, awards/gifts, and a few crazier concepts we don’t want to share quite yet. We are also currently implementing badges for more specific accomplishments or achievements.
Question
What are your activities recently?
Rick：
Coding + Anime + Vibing
Question
How is the platform’s data stored?How did you store all kinds of data like pics in your platform
Rick：
All data is stored in the IC, the master schema that exists on the IC looks like a traditional relationship database schema and the data returned is computed views, so you could say we are using a MVC design pattern.
We are setting up an integration now with Fleek to store images and videos directly on the IC.
The above is all the content of this AMA
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