Motivation

The year 2020 was the year of deplatforming. Major social networks deprived millions of people of any information from the people they were following. On the other hand people are flooded with useless and unwelcome information.

Someone who would like to acquire a holistic view, has to combine different information sources in his mind, which is challenging because of context switching. Usually people choose the simplest way and stay attached to a single source of information that is usually biased.

The core of the issue is the fact that the owner of the communication channel has full control over the user’s attention. The decentralization proposed by the crypto community doesn’t solve this problem, because it operates on the infrastructure level, but the communication channel remains exclusively owned by a central party.

We believe that the real source of the intermediary’s power is not purely technical. It is the people’s attention that intermediaries own exclusively. The exclusive control of the user’s attention and the ability to block any undesired information is the real source of their power. It allows intermediaries to deliver both content and its interpretation to the audience. Technically, they achieve this by controlling exclusively the website visited by users.

This monopoly also has another side.

The platform owner completely determines which business processes are available to community members and which are not. This is also a kind of censorship, not in relation to opinions, but in relation to the services available to members of the community. In general, the owner of the platform owns not only his platform, but also the community on it.

We don’t like that.

Augmented Web fixes that.

It gives users a tool that's able to combine complementary sources of information seamlessly in one picture.

Users shape their global picture actively instead of being a Passive Bullshit Consumer (PBC).

Augmented Web can open any closed communities to tons of other outside services.