But that same freedom has created a problem.
We now live in an environment where conflict isn’t a bug, it’s a business model.
The Problem: When Rivalry Becomes a Strategy
The decentralized media world looks, on the surface, like a vibrant marketplace of ideas. But underneath, it’s driven by algorithms and monetization systems that reward outrage and rivalry.
In the traditional media landscape, competition happened between networks. Today, it happens between individuals, every creator fighting for the same attention, donors, and subscriptions.
The recent Candace Owens saga, with public clashes involving Charlie Kirk, Tim Pool, and Alex Jones, illustrates this perfectly. These aren’t just ideological feuds; they’re economically induced rivalries.
Why?
Because current platforms reward engagement, not collaboration.
A feud brings in clicks, shares, and ad revenue. A calm, nuanced dialogue? Not so much.
It’s a textbook case of what economists call a tournament market — small differences in attention yield outsized rewards, making conflict the rational choice. In this system, cooperation feels like financial self-sabotage.
Where the Problem Comes From
At its core, the crisis is structural, not personal.
The architecture of social media is built to maximize engagement, measured in time, outrage, and virality, not in trust or collective value.
Let’s break it down:
| Economic Model | How It Works | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Ad-based Revenue (YouTube, X) | Pay per view or engagement | Encourages sensationalism |
| Membership / Subscription (Substack, Patreon) | Pay for ideological loyalty | Rewards tribalism |
| Donor or Ideological Funding | Compete for sponsor trust | Fosters in-group policing |
| Brand Sponsorships | Depend on predictable demographics | Discourages dissent or nuance |
Each model isolates creators into attention silos where collaboration dilutes income, and competition, even conflict, becomes the rational economic behavior.
So when independent creators feud, they aren’t just “arguing online.”
They’re participating in an attention economy Nash equilibrium: a self-reinforcing system where rivalry is profitable, and cooperation is costly.
The Solution: Commons-Based, Peer-to-Peer Media
But what if the structure itself changed?
What if cooperation became the more profitable strategy?
The answer lies in commons-based, peer-to-peer (p2p) models like Open Value Networks (OVNs) and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), frameworks that already exist and have proven viable across industries.
Imagine a Decentralized Media Commons, where:
- Creators share infrastructure, research, and audience data.
- Every contribution, reporting, editing, fact-checking, is tracked transparently.
- Benefits are distributed according to verified effort and collaborative success.
- Reputation is built through trust, not clicks.
This transforms competition into collaborative entrepreneurship, a system where cooperation generates shared wealth and rivalry depletes reputational value.
This Isn’t Sci-Fi, It’s Already Here
Skeptics might say: “Sounds utopian.”
But these models already exist and work.
- Wikipedia is the world’s largest collaborative knowledge commons — proof that large-scale, voluntary cooperation can outcompete profit-driven silos.
- Blockchain-based organizations already distribute ownership and decision-making through DAOs, self-governing systems where contributors share both power and profit.
- Sensorica, an open value network in Montreal, has spent over a decade proving that distributed collaboration can fund and manage real-world projects, transparently tracking every contribution.
These aren’t futuristic dreams. They’re functioning ecosystems that simply haven’t yet been adopted by the independent media sector.
The tools exist, what’s missing is cultural adoption.
The Cultural Shift We Need
We don’t need a revolution in technology.
We need a revolution in mindset.
Independent media can move from rivalry to reciprocity, from a system that weaponizes competition to one that rewards shared trust.
When creators begin to view audiences not as possessions but as communities, and peers not as threats but as collaborators, we’ll see the next leap in decentralized media:
A trust-based economy where transparency, cooperation, and shared ownership define success., giving birth to a new truth institution that can shed light onto corrupt governments and institutions.
The infrastructure is already waiting.
What’s left is for creators, and their audiences, to realize that the next era of media won’t be built by fighting for attention. It will be built by sharing it.
We can help!
We're sketching out these models, we bring 15 years of experience in peer production!
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