Wednesday, April 18, 2018

My Initial Experience with Peepeth - "A Blockchain app to replace Twitter" -- 3 cents charge for every post



Peepeth is an Ethereum-based, dapp for microblogging that I tried today.  I'm not a Twitter or Blockchain expert, so I'm sure I've made some mistakes and may have some info wrong.   Kudos for the early experimentation by so many startups.

My initial reactions are mixed.  In exchange for avoiding a central company from censoring my posts, I must pay 3-8 cents for every action (create a profile, change profile background, post a comment, repost, etc.).   It is an early version, but the blockchain benefits are at the data layer and I'm currently skeptical that the required payments and slowness at the UX level is enough to get millions of existing Twitter users to switch.

I'm curious what others think.  I'll monitor and hopefully do an update in 3-4 months.

Screenshots below.

The desktop interface looks like Twitter


When I created my Peepeth profile, it cost me 8 cents to update and took 2.5 minutes



Updating the background picture in my profile cost me 3 cents and took 2.1 min

Understandably, this is an early version, but over time it language about "gas", "ethereum" etc. needs to be hidden or simplified if the average Joe is to be comfortable with this

Message after posting and paying for a post:

Here is one post displayed in Peepeth's proprietary web front end

Here is my data on immutably on public blockchain (accessible without going through Peepeth's proprietary front end, but I think one would need to know my UID)

Transaction on Ethereum


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