TOK uses DAO, a blockchain-based technology, to solve one of the major problems faced by social media companies, which spends millions of dollars on content review every year.

Take Facebook as an example, it has a 8000-people content review team to deal with inappropriate contents that are uploaded and distributed in its platform. Unlike traditional social media, TOK builds a community where members are governed by DAO and fully engaged to participate in the image review, thus removing the need for a centralized review team. This innovative approach aligns the users’ interests, reduces the waste of community resources and keeps the cost minimal.

Nowadays, the concepts of Web3 and DAO are gaining popularity. Large corporations worldwide play with these abstract concepts, while in reality, few have the vision to put these concepts into ideas, and even fewer to materialize them to solve practical problems.

TOK is such a product that applies DAO to solve problems faced by social media, the first of its kind to explore the cooperation in the TOK community via this blockchain technology. Its exquisite design is an example of how a simple yet effective solution can work to reduce cost and maximize welfare in the community.

1. The Problem with Social Media Platforms

One of the trickiest aspects of all social media is handling inappropriate content. TOK proposed a simple yet effective solution to get around this by applying blockchain technology. Presumably, Tok’s approach is more advanced and cheaper without the need for editorial process and human intervention commonly seen in social media giants. A rough estimate suggests that if Facebook adopted Tok’s approach, it could cut its content review team by 8,000 people and save the company $500 million in labor cost every year.

What is inappropriate content? 

Inappropriate content may be an image, video, or text that can be upsetting and offensive, notably Adult material images, violence, and hateful material. Social media companies are increasingly held accountable for the content shared on platforms and failure to reduce the spread of inappropriate content may have legal ramifications.

At the center of the problem is Adult material material, the distribution of which is illegal in any country.

In Germany, for example, it is an offense to have one of these Adult material pictures, one can be sent to jail if prosecuted, not to mention spread them on social media.

For this reason, social media companies are heavily investing in content review systems, developing new technology, and hiring security and safety staff to help deal with the matter more effectively.

As much advanced AI or machine learning they use, these tech companies are still bound to invest heavily in human capital to reduce misjudgment.

Social media Facebook, Tencent, Twitter spend a staggering amount on image review, each of which involves hiring review teams consisting of thousands of employees, contractors, or partners located around the world.

However, TOK bypasses this problem by integrating DAO, blockchain-based technology, into its platform.

2. TOK’s Solution for the big problem

When I carefully studied TOK’s solution, I couldn’t help admiring its exquisite, simple yet effective design. The governance by its own rights involves the integration of various systems and tools.

This is a great innovation, greatly improving efficiency and reducing cost compared to the traditional centralized identify-report-review approach, and a compelling solution that is worth studying.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of how TOK’s solution works, its designers should be proficient in the American judicial system and Uber’s dispatch algorithm. TOK’s crypto social network encourages large-scale cooperation and creates value for users, fair and square. Users are prompted to participate without the intervention of a centralized organization.

To achieve this, they create a TOK Token, granting users access to voting and making decisions on governance issues.

This is a near-perfect manifestation of DAO!

3. TOK’s Schematic

Let’s take a look at how members unfamiliar with each other cooperate, in TOK’s public 100,000-member group, and how the system works to deal with violence, Adult material pictures in violation of the community rules:

Step 1: Alice posts a disturbing picture involving Adult material

Alice sends a disturbing image to TOK’s public 100,000-member chat group (a tiered open group where only tier 1 or above (V1 or above, in TOK community) members are allowed to send images. To acquire V1 or above tier, members are required to pledge at least 300 TOK Tokens)

Application of Tok coin 1: Pledge Tok coin to raise tiers and obtain the right to send pictures in large open group

Alice must pledge TOK 300 Tokens so that she is allowed to send the picture in a 100,000-member chat group. Without the tier system, TOK will be exposed to spam since anyone can create free accounts rather easily.

Step 2: Bob reports the issue

Bob happens to be in the group. He was also a level V1 user. When he saw the offending image, he immediately clicked on it, selected “Report this image”, and then clicked “Report this image as Adult material”.

Bob is the first whistleblower, and there can be up to 4 whistleblowers in total to encourage early detection of offending images.

Tok Coin app 2: To report others, people must pledge TOK coins first

To report others, Bob must pledge 300 TOK Tokens before he is granted access to report others, as a way to avoid malicious reporting and waste of community resources.

Step 3: The issue is reported to the Jury

The information was immediately reported to a group called TOK Jury Group (There are more than 100 jury members in this group, and all of them are high-tiered volunteers of the TOK community. They are active in voicing their opinions in various public communities and enjoy high prestige and creditworthiness, so they are commonly recommended by the community to be administrators or Jury members. They are mainly responsible for reviewing the reported pictures)

Application of Tok coins 3: Jury members must be high-tiered users, meaning they also need to pledge more TOK coins

All the members of the Jury are at least V3 level or above, in most cases V5 level or above. This either implies they have made substantial contributions to the community to earn Tokens, or that they have paid for a lot of Tokens, which is also a contribution.

Their willingness to maintain the system and improve the governance must be much higher than that of V0 level users and thus enjoying high community prestige. Members are inclined to trust them, give them the rights to review, and publish the results to be overseen by the Jury.

Step 4: Members of the Jury review the pictures in exchange for Tokens of the perpetrators

Any member of the Jury is allowed to participate in the review, with the first 5 designated as the responsible juror per case on a first-come-first-serve basis. Each reviewer will not be able to see the results of others in advance to afford independent judgment.

Other Jury members are able to see the review results of each of the responsible jurors to ensure that they are also supervised and do not make biased decisions.

Any juror who sees the picture has three options:

A. If the picture violates the rules, the sender shall be penalized

B. Malicious reporting shall be penalized

C. Pictures with blurred boundaries, none is penalized

The final decision will be determined by majority votes after all 5 jurors have decided independently. (The system works in a way so that the decision made by more than half of the reviewers is correct)

For example, if 3-5 jurors all choose A, the Tokens pledged by Alice are confiscated, and Alice’s Tokens are distributed to everyone who maintains the community.

1) Whistleblowers earn rewards. The first whistleblower Bob gets 20% of the confiscated Tokens, and the second, third, and fourth whistleblowers each gets 10%;

2) Those who participate in the Jury review will get the remaining 50% Tokens;

The juror who makes the wrong decision will not be rewarded. If the record shows that one particular juror member is involved in many wrongful reviews, he/she will be voted out of the Jury

3) If the whistleblower is penalized for wrongful/malicious reporting, the beneficiary will be the reported and reviewers

Application of Tok coin 4: Wrongdoer loses Token, while contributor earns rewards. This system where the ultimate value, rights, and benefits are embodied in Tokens, works in favor of the community because it aligns the interests of members and drives collaboration.

4. Analytical Summary of TOK-DAO

To recap, Tok proposed a blockchain-based solution to problems commonly seen in internet-based communities/social media platforms and established itself as a community that is cooperative and with little involvement of centralized organizations such as customer service/ content review team and AI robot/machine learning technology.

It has created a DAO governed by native TOK Token, the application of which brings together members’ resources, skills, knowledge, and experiences. Above all, its reward and punishment mechanism bonds the interests of users, encourages engagement on all levels to accomplish and advance all kinds of goals.

This is a community that has truly realized decentralized governance. TOK designed this model in 2019 when the concept of DAO was still in its infancy.

Since the concept of DAO becomes popular and is increasingly adopted as a solution to community governance, TOK’s attempts at establishing a functional DAO have proved to be a success and have been repeatedly studied by countless people. It is considered to be the pioneer of DAO application.

TOK smartly integrates the jury system of common law and Uber’s Dispatch algorithm to achieve decentralized governance of Token.

TOK’s jury review is the epitome of the jury system in the American legal system. The jury system keeps the criminal justice system within the community. Jurors, professional or not, are not given authority over each other based on their educational background, social status, and wealth. The members of the group are given one task: to render an impartial verdict of an offense, while the courts reserve the right to overrule it.

Likewise, TOK’s jury members are given one task: to decide whether content posted is in violation of the community rules, which are transparent and open for everyone in the community to see.

To determine evidently inappropriate content, i.e. Adult material, violence,requires judgment expected of a reasonably prudent person with normal IQ (The accuracy rate of a jury is typically as high as 99%).

TOK also adopts Uber’s dispatch system to participate in the jury review, a setup that maximizes efficiency. Facebook has to put its customer service on three shifts while TOK uses Token to motivate everyone to engage at all times. The community runs on itself and there is a reward for participation and a price for “evildoing”.

With the growth of the product, TOK Token holders will find themselves more and more enjoying the benefits of this Utility Token, a rare combination of rights and utility that represents a self-served and fully functional Token economy in the community (except maybe the Ethereum public chain). TOK is probably by far the most reliable and useful decentralized application.

TOK is by far the only successful application of DAO to achieve a certain community goal among all current DAO projects, especially Social Fi projects.

Its approach in community governance has proved to be sustainable and verifiable since the product was first rolled out three years ago. Had centralized products such as Facebook adopted this approach, it could have saved millions of costs spent on customer service/content review every year.

5. Foreseeable future of TOK-DAO mechanism

Going forward, TOK Token is the only social media product whereby users have the opportunity to become shareholders and be involved in its rapid growth. The Token Economy in its own rights implies that holders of TOK Token are also TOK’s shareholders, as a result, share the benefits brought by product development/growing user base /market expansion.

How awesome would it be if users of Facebook and Tencent are also company shareholders? It is unfathomable that a company has over a billion shareholders. Will they be worth tenfold more than they are now?

The market is huge when people think about the prospect of Web3.

TOK may be small at the moment, but it is amazing to see the thoughts and efforts they have put into the project, one step at a time.

If TOK’s Token model is adopted, Facebook will undoubtedly be many times larger than what it is now. And TOK is such an enterprise with an ambitious yet realizable vision, leaving people with a huge imaginary space of what they will be able to achieve in the future!

A fully decentralized community that respects privacy and runs on a self-served economy, Who wouldn’t want to see that?

Media Contact
Company Name: Onionet Technology
Contact Person: Onoin Woods
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Country: United States
Website: http://www.onionet.org