According to Riziki Mbena, co-founder and General Manager of Jamaa,”Social networks have degraded from being places where people legitimately socialize, to being engineered feeds of advertisements and analytics. We built Jamaa around being all about the user, and showing them content that they truly care about – as opposed to simply trying to resell their attention for the highest possible price.” Mbena adds that Jamaa has re-engineered the business model of social networks in a way that is primarily about users getting paid, since they are the ones who create the value. Jamaa says the economics of the Internet have shifted; while it used to be that people would flock to free, ad-supported content online, there’s now too much of that out there- More specifically, there is far too much free content to view, and not enough human attention to view it all- This has revealed an interesting notion; human attention is a limited resource, but free content is an unlimited resource. For social networks, human attention is necessary to do things like filter good and bad content, through methods such as upvotes and downvotes- Jamaa has a central mission of delivering high-quality content with integrity. This isn’t just important to prevent users from wasting their time, it’s also important for the sake of catching and eliminating fake news- Platforms like Facebook have failed to screen news in this way, and terrorist groups have capitalized on this weakness to spread propaganda. Jamaa works exactly like any other social network; you log in, look at what people have posted, react in the form of votes or comments, and share your own content – whether that is original content you created yourself, or content that you found elsewhere. The two key differences are that most content on Jamaa has been vetted by the community (not by a biased algorithm), and more importantly… all users get paid for their attention. Whether they’re voting, commenting, posting, or sharing… everybody gets paid- As Jamaa increases in size, its cryptocurrency tokens stand to become more valuable. This is because for users who offer premium content or subscriptions, these can only be paid for using Jamaa’s tokens. That automatically creates an aftermarket for the tokens, giving Jamaa users the flexibility of using their tokens, or cashing them out. Riziki continued, “Now that advertising is everywhere, people are resisting it more and more. As an example, in 2016 it was reported that 26 percent of desktop computer users use an ad blocking tool of some kind. Further, more and more people are cancelling their cable TV subscriptions in favour of ad-free streaming services such as Netflix. Jamaa is catering to this trend, because nobody wants to see a sponsored posting every ten seconds when they’re on social media.” “By using the power of blockchain technology, Jamaa is able to filter high-quality, high-integrity content to ensure that is what shows up in your news feed. We believe that human attention is a precious resource, not a commodity to be bought and sold for advertising – which is why we have worked hard to build a social media experience that is all about delivering you quality content, and paying you for it.”
