Have you heard of the social network, “Voice”? Yep, neither had I until a week ago. Whilst industry-leading giants such as Facebook continue you to see numbers of 2.41 Billion active monthly users¹, a question presents, is there really space for a new social media platform?

Who is Voice? Directly from the Voice.com website, “Voice is a transparent, rewards-based social network for creating, distributing, and discovering content. It aims to foster a new and trusted experience through identity authentication and transparent database infrastructure. Voice is built by and for its users. Most value is returned back to its community through Voice Tokens, a utility token that can be earned and consumed to acquire the attention of other users on the network.”

Investment into the network (including the acquirement of a $30 million domain²) from leading high-performance blockchain solutions provider Block.one³ has allowed the social media platform to share similar technology as used in the Cryptocurrency world. The voice tokens live on a blockchain ledger which, according to Voice.com, enables unprecedented levels of transparency into the databases in which they are stored, including promotion and advertising throughout the platform.

In summary, Voice is a content creation platform that will only allow real human people onto the network. It’s not a social network to share holiday photos or friends and family updates, but article style content on an interesting topic that you wish to share. When users like your post, you earn Voice Tokens, the more popular your post, the more tokens you earn.

So, you post an article and people begin to like it, you gain Voice Tokens, but what do you do with them? Well, here’s where Voice is different from others. Voice Tokens are used to put your opinion on top, allowing more people to access your content. Everyone gets Voice Tokens just for showing up, which potentially means everyone has an opportunity to be heard.

Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one (investors of Voice.com), spoke at a company event in Washington, D.C. about existing social media networks. “But right now, it’s the platform, not the user, that reaps the reward. By design, they run by auctioning our information to advertisers, pocketing the profit, and flooding our feeds with hidden agendas dictated by the highest bidder.“, I guess he’s not wrong.

So, Voice may just have found a gap in the market. I certainly think that the platform will be a place for interesting new content and I do like the approach on removing advertisers, allowing for the creator to get their voice heard. With the social network still currently in beta development, we won’t know just yet whether it’ll be able to contend and grow to the scale of existing social networks. But, it’s certainly one to keep an eye on.

Well, that’s it for this weeks introduction into a new social platform. If you’ve got a story to tell, or wish to learn how you can use social media to increase your businesses potential, get in touch.

Sources:

https://voice.com/
https://block.one/

1 – “Facebook – Hootsuite Blog.” https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/.
2- “Record breaker: Voice.com domain name sells for staggering ….” https://domainnamewire.com/2019/06/18/record-breaker-voice-com-domain-name-sells-for-staggering-30-million/.
3 – “Block.one Introduces “Voice” to Bring Alignment and ….” https://block.one/news/block-one-introduces-social-media-application-voice/.