Assessment of Wealth Distribution in Blockchain Online Social Media

【Author】 Guidi, Barbara; Michienzi, Andrea; Ricci, Laura

【Source】IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS

【影响因子】4.747

【Abstract】Online social networks (OSNs) revolutionized how people interact with each other, and nowadays, thanks to blockchain technology, new solutions are being considered, giving birth to blockchain online social media (BOSMs). BOSMs use the blockchain to redistribute with their users the wealth generated by the platform through a rewarding system, assigning better rewards to socially impactful users. Thus, these new systems are characterized by highly intertwined economical and social aspects and constitute a new scenario in the world of social networks. Many scenarios, economic and social alike, show a phenomenon known as "the rich-get-richer ", which states that the richest actors of a system tend to become richer over time. To the best of our knowledge, in the scenario of BOSMs, where users can acquire cryptocurrency through their social actions, this type of phenomenon was not yet studied. In this article, we propose a methodological framework composed of three hypotheses that can help study the rich-get-richer phenomenon through a set of measures and indices. In addition, we apply the proposed framework to the Steem case study, showing how unevenly wealth is distributed on its blockchain and comparing our results to other scenarios.

【Keywords】Blockchain; Gini coefficient; online social media; Pareto principle; rich-get-richer

【发表时间】

【收录时间】2023-01-15

【文献类型】理论模型

【主题类别】

区块链治理-市场治理-社会网络