U3 | Devpost

Inspiration

Users hate social media platforms, but they use them because they have no option. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube are how people communicate today. These platforms derive all of their power from the data and attention they harvest from users. Individually, every user is disposable, but collectively they are the true source of value. Leveraging this value would enable users to take collective action and bargain with social media platforms to push for changes to these align these platforms with the goals and values of the users.

What it does

U3 is a proof-of-concept that enables users of Facebook to go on strike by voting to collectively block their access to Facebook via a Chrome extension.

How we built it

We used solidity to develop the smart contract and standard chrome extension languages to build the extension.

Challenges we ran into

Learning solidity. There was no single member on our team that had any significant experience with solidity or blockchain development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working smart contract and browser extension.

What we learned

Blockchain development can be extremely intricate but even more rewarding. The capacity for distributed consensus networks to change the world is essentially limitless from our vantage point.

What's next for U3

Working with buytwitter.com as a community.

Extending the actionability of the smart contracts beyond simple boycotting of websites to include more sophisticated actions like selective mirroring of sites and selective adblocking. Developing web3 connections to automate actionability more predictably. More rigorous security surrounding smart contracts to ensure that voting mechanisms are difficult to abuse.