🔍Overview
Pluralism is the existence of different types of people, who have different beliefs and opinions, within the same society. ~ Cambridge Dictionary
Internet, a global revolution
Internet, now also known as web2, was one of the most revolutionary inventions of mankind, connecting humans in all parts of the world and making them part of a global network.
Today, an average person spends 7 hours online on 7 different platforms daily, and each interaction leaves a small residue of their personality. These residual artifacts constituting your online activity make up your reputation and interests.
Your reputation shows who you are and what you can do. Whereas, your interests show what you want to see on the internet.
Profiles, a core artifact of web2
As web2 progressed and more platforms started being built on it, the concept of profiles came into being. Profiles had three distinct functions:
Identify: Profiles identify a user within a platform
Contextualize: Profiles contextualize a person’s interactions and attach meaning to every like, post, follow, share etc.
Personalize: Profiles reduce noise and curate experiences according to a specific person using their interests.
However, there is one big drawback to profiles: they are siloed to a particular platform.
No user truly owns their profile, no matter how much effort they have put into creating a decent following, or how long they have been using it.
Profiles are a rental space where you keep filling in your data and in return you get to use that platform’s services.
Web2 platforms use profiles to provide an experience catered to user’s tastes and personality and this is one of the most important techniques that enhances user retention.
For example, you see the content you are interested in on social networks. Or you get job offers on LinkedIn relevant to your area of expertise. Overall, web2 platforms have successfully gained and retained users due to the personalized experiences that they provide.
The advent of web3
Blockchain networks, also known as web3, were created as a more user-oriented version of web2. The blockchain technology has been hailed repeatedly as the successor to web2 and has numerous advantages like decentralization, censorship resistance, and most importantly, the focus on user sovereignty.
However, despite its notable advantages, web3 platforms have until now largely been unable to retain users and provide them with an experience comparable to web2.
Web3's weak spot: User Experience
Today, when a user lands on a certain dApp, they must first go through complicated wallet creation processes and even after this hassle, the experience they get on the dApp is full of noise. Users have to make an active effort to discover content they want as there is no personalization in user experience.
This is because user experience is directly tied to the concept of a profile, which is currently missing from the web3 world.
Did you know that the current user yearly retention rate across web3 dApps is merely 7%?
The difficulty in onboarding, managing multiple wallets and seed phrases, and lack of personalization leads to a bad user experience, ultimately leading to a high user churn rate and cold start problem for dApps.
Enter Plurality’s Smart Profiles built atop the Open Social Context Layer
Plurality aims to push the boundaries of web3 experience by creating an open social context layer atop which users can create their smart profiles by linking data from their existing web2 and web3 profiles with their blockchain wallets, all while maintaining and respecting user’s privacy.
Smart profiles are self-custodial, contextual, and interoperable amongst platforms across the web.
Plurality’s Smart Profiles tech will not only benefit dApps by enabling them to provide a better user experience, but it will also benefit users by giving them easy onboarding, personalized experience, and sovereignty over where their profiles are connected containing which data.
Plurality’s tech stack is the first of its kind, and it inverts the data storage and usage triangle, by moving the state from the server-side to the client-side. This inversion will bring users back in control by letting them control when and how their data is shared.
Plurality inverts the triangle where data is stored and used.
We need people, not addresses on chain.
Once "people" exist on chain rather than just wallets the whole ecosystem will grow leading to a new era of blockchain adoption.
Plurality is the representation of your plural personalities that you utilize in different contexts as you travel through the internet.
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