Proposal for Viben

[Viben]

Project Name: Viben

Abstract: A social network that does not collect information about its users or track them. Free of hate speech, fake news, bullying, and other forms of abuse. Using third-party cookies to target users based on interests and serve adverts on social media allows firms to identify you, jeopardizing your privacy directly; thus, we present an alternative solution. Third-party cookies that invade and intrude on your privacy are a thing of the past; enter interest-based advertising on the Viben network, which does not reveal your identity to advertisers and allows them to target you with adverts based on Interests without jeopardizing your privacy. To avoid interest-based targeted advertising, you can always turn off targeted adverts in the settings.

Viben token users can host events and sell their event slots with the help of the Viben token. However, in the future, Viben will have its own NFT platform with near-zero fees to empower creators across multiple industries.

Advertisements, as well as direct contributions from fans and followers, will incentivize publishers. Each user will be compensated for skippable and unskippable ads and when a Viben user interacts with ads. All ad payouts can also be withdrawn or loaned to other users within the Viben platform, making the Viben social media network function as a payment platform apart from being a social media and NFT marketplace platform. Aside from that, every user account with 15,000 followers will be able to activate monetization and Tip functionalities, where users can earn by creating engaging posts and videos and getting support from their followers.

Users’ content has collectively contributed billions of dollars in value to owners of social media platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. Because of Facebook and Twitter’s clickbait nature, people are increasingly annoyed with these platforms.

India is one of the most populated countries in the world. A recent revolution in the Indian telecom sector has made internet access affordable for all Indians. In India, about 518 million individuals use social media. By 2040, India will have 1.5 billion individuals actively using social media platforms. It is common to find Indians from all backgrounds using social media to express their emotions. This includes people who aren’t well-educated enough to comprehend the significance of social media.

There is a growing number of child abuse, cyberbullying, sexual abuse, and religious abuses on these social media platforms. India has seen a 36% growth in cyberbullying and women abuse, and Indian children are the most cyberbullied children globally. This makes us wonder: “Where are we going?”. “VIBEN” is our answer to this question.

The social media industry has monopolized the world, which indirectly results in several social and political problems. Today’s social media is no longer the past social media; instead of spreading peace, harmony, and love, it spreads bigotry, hatred, and bullying.
Viben is a social media network that seeks to prevent false news by providing explicit sources and references to evidence-based information. Viben users can modify or report misleading or deceptive links.

Social media platforms currently in existence face several critical challenges concerning content moderation. Since they are not developed with Indian culture, lifestyle, or different languages in mind, they fail to appropriately capture or appeal to the larger Indian audience.

The Solution

(i) The Viben community provides the following services to its people.

(ii) A source of trusted news verified by the community
An intelligent system where both the AI & Community can mark hate speech, bullying, & fake news with immediate action taken

(iii) A cryptocurrency that provides functional value to users and runs the entire platform

(iv) A monetization scheme for everyone that uses the platform using ads run by companies and brands
An Inbuilt NFT marketplace feature for content creators

(v) Monetization of accounts for more than 15,000 Followers

(vi) Anonymous and voluntary self-verification method using KYC to ensure more safety

(vii) Allowing users to promote their NFTs, Posts, and creations within our platform.

Trusted news verified by the community.

Viben will only take down any hate or misleading content from unverified sources. This will categorize the list of trusted news sources and references into two. One is state-owned, and the other is an independent news source. We will also coordinate with independent fact-checkers to get the content verified.

Smart social media moderation

Viben will have intelligent social media moderation that relies on groups managed by admins, fact-checkers, people, and the community; currently, social media platforms do not allow people and community members to moderate their content. This could be solved with an intelligent social media moderation involving their people.

Vibe token functional values

Viben Token exclusively serves advertisers like brands, companies, organizations, startups, and small and large businesses to promote on the Viben social media platform. Viben tokens can also be sent from one person to another within the Viben social media platform that can be redeemed for gifts, coupons, products, and services offered by Viben and partners. Viben tokens can be traded into crypto exchanges and sent from wallets to other wallets. Viben allows users to take loans with a small percentage interest.

Monetization scheme

Every user in Viben who directly or indirectly engages with both skippable and unskippable ads on the Viben platform is eligible for payouts and monetized with payouts in their inbuilt Viben wallet.

Revenue model:

1. Each wallet-to-wallet transaction has a negligible amount of fees collected by the Viben.

2. Viben collects crypto and Fiat to display ads and promotions on its platform

3. From the NFT marketplace, Viben collects negligible amounts as fees.

4. When users borrow and lend their tokens, we charge a nominal fee.

5. 30% of the advertising amount collected by the Viben directly goes to its users, 25% of the amount goes for buyback and distribution to users according to their engagement on the platform, and rest 5% is manually burned by the Viben Team to maintain a balance between supply and demand.

6. 70% directly goes to platform expenses, including salary for developers and community incentives.

Grant Ask: 50K

Metric of success: 10 Million app installs and 200K regular users.

Website and whitepaper: https://Viben.in (website)
Whitepaper: Introduction - Viben Whitepaper

( Please Note: Earlier we planned to go with BSC as its more centralised we thought to move for matic later, When we found we need more decentralised than matic and also near-zero gas we moved to harmony. Some of the content has not yet changed as we are working on it.)

Current progress:
All set to deploy contract on harmony chain.
UI design process started
Team formation completed

Current Milestone:
Completed the goal of having 300+ members in the telegram community.
Coded smart contract (EVM)

Future Milestone:

1. 1-3 Days to deploy contract
2. 15-30 Days complete App UI/UX design
3. 3-5 Months for backend
4. 3-5 Months for Frontend
5. 6-7 Months to Launch Alpha Version of App

Socials: @viben | Linktree

Team:

Nagaraj Bhat (CEO/Founder): Founder and CEO of Viben, He is a young entrepreneur who worked as founder and CEO of digiyogi technologies private limited an agency that serves in digital spaces such as web development, app development and digital marketing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nagaraj-balegadde

George Quinones (CTO/Co-Founder):
An experienced software engineer who has 30+ years of experience, George spent the last 15 years as the POC for Oracle E-Business Suite on Windows platforms.

Vijet Bhat (COO/Co-Founder): Vijet has tremendous knowledge of operations, Beside operations, he is also the legal advisor for Viben.

Mayur M Pattar (UI Designer): A UI/UX and Web Designer with over 2 years of experience and expertise in industry-standard design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Framer, and Adobe Illustrator.

Shreyas M (Jr Developer): A full-stack web developer who has a quest to create something new in the blockchain space.

Rakesh DL (Sr Dev/Co-Founder): A full-stack developer having more than 7 years of experience with MERN and Devops etc.

We are proudly supported by @harmonyIndiaDAO and we accept harmony conditions for receiving grant.

Thank you.

[Priyank_Gupta]

Hello Viben,

Good to see your proposal.

Hello @frwrdslosh @Mattyontap , Harmony India Team are in touch with Viben.

They are really a good people .

All the best @Viben . Hope it will be Approved

[Viben]

Thank you so much for your response!

Looking forward for further feedback on proposal.

[Vitruvius]

Congratulations on your application. Hope our cooperation together will bear fruitful. All the Best!!

[Viben]

Thank you so much for your support and response. We appreciate your guidance.

[essalacher]

Thank you for submitting a proposal to Harmony’s $300M Ecosystem Fund. We are in the process of reviewing your proposal and will assign a representative on behalf of the Grants Ops team.

We would also love to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedbacks.

If you have more details to add, please do so by replying to this thread.

[Viben]

Current progress: we are deploying smart contract on harmony chain on both testnet and main net by today.

On May first we are releasing sneak peak of product UI.

Thank you for your reply.

[Godiva]

Hi Viben, Love your proposal. We’re working on a similar structuring for education which would allow students/guardians to own their educational data based on a protocol we’re refining. I’d love to speak to you to hear more about your approach handling user data while allowing for privacy.

[Viben]

However, we planned before to keep everything in Blockchain. That causes gas fees for users. So we are moving towards encrypted database to store users data. We committed to not sell users data with any third parties. as we quoted above users allowed to control what they want to see, watch, and users can disable intrest based ads too.

Thank you

[Rakshit_Garg]

Heyy @Jacksteroo and @jbeltran ,kindly check this proposal.

Thanks

[Viben]

Whitepaper has been updated: Abstract - Viben Whitepaper

Other links:

1)Dextool: DEXTools.io

2. Audit Report: https://www.mechaudit.com/

3. Whitepaper: Abstract - Viben Whitepaper

4. Blog: Viben Team – Medium

5. Team: Team: - Viben Whitepaper

6)roadmap: Roadmap: - Viben Whitepaper

7. tokenomics: Tokenomics: - Viben Whitepaper
   8)features:Features: - Viben Whitepaper

Now we are in BSC, We are ready to migrate to Harmony with same contract code.

Thank you

[V_Bhat]

Very good idea …Waiting for launch of secured social media platform of viben … when will be the launch ???

[Safakaymelek]

Viben is coming guys let see how we will go to the moon

[sick_of_this]

I am a bit confused about what this platform is trying to be. Your Twitter account says- “People can upload photos or videos and share them with their followers”. But here you have also talked about news, posts, etc. Just to get a general grasp of what this platform is supposed to be like, could you compare it (in terms of type of content) to any other platform like Facebook, Twitter, Insta, etc.?

@Viben

Free of hate speech, fake news, bullying, and other forms of abuse

This seems to be a core focus here but this doesn’t seem viable or admirable. Especially when the current trend in social media is largely towards freedom of speech on social media platforms, for example- Elon Musk’s push for Twitter free speech, growing popularity of platforms like “Truth Social”. And with the current socio-political climate there is no way you can do both, i.e., be an unbiased free speech platform and curb hate speech, abuse, bullying, etc.

Regarding viability- So your Whitepaper mentions “Moderation” in the “Features” category. Here is one of the points mentioned-

once a post gets 10 reports it will be undergo a volunteer community moderator for review

Several issues here-

1. The moderators in question will bring their personal bias into this, so is there a certain set of unbiased guidelines you have that you would use to identify if the content should be removed?
2. If your platform gets adopted widely, community moderation won’t be able to cope
3. A large social media account getting thousands of impressions is more likely to hit this number than a small account which makes this unfair to them

Regarding news moderation your proposal here says-

prevent false news by providing explicit sources and references to evidence-based information

On what basis are you going to decide which sources and info are trustworthy? Several media outlets (big and small, of various political leanings) and independent fact-checkers have publicized wrong information so how do you (again, while setting your personal biases aside) select which ones to trust?

There’s mention of India here so is this Website specifically targeting the Indian population?

[Viben]

Yes, I agree that trend of social media is changing but freedom of speech doesn’t mean to hurt someone and most of constitutions doesn’t allow to do that.

Yes, we are mainly targeting India and building our base and atomic network here. Then trying to move globally, Indian government currently incubating new startup when it comes to social media they are pretty agrressive towords foreign built social media platforms. Recently they almost thought to ban twitter and already they banned tiktok too. We have plan to pitch them our platform too. Recently, they incubated Koo one of twitter competetor.

Every post that reported by users goes to moderators, review takes place. Once moderators push their views on perticuler post, we review and decide what to do.

Note: We simply don’t allow moderators to remove posts, we allow moderators (not one person) to share their views on post, in case its extreamly necessary to take down in this case abuse of religions, faiths, sexual comments then we dont hassitate to remove it.

We are basically social media, but we also allow to share links to users so there might be possibility that posts contain news links. however, recently we thought and revised our features and we allow only partnered news sites who are established themselves over the years as trustworthy. There will be a trust score for partnered news providers that voted by users itself!

Yes you can compare it to Instagram with some less features and simple compared to instagram.

And when comes to moderation we agree with reporting limit. we remove that limit.

[sick_of_this]

Edit- Deleted my above post as I accidentally posted a duplicate

@Viben

freedom of speech doesn’t mean to hurt someone and most of constitutions doesn’t allow to do that

I don’t think you have the correct idea at all. In today’s socio-political climate, one person’s expression of “peaceful speech” can be considered as offensive by another person. So, using “preventing hate, bullying, etc” as a USP just lands you in a needlessly complicated slippery slope where you absolutely can not keep everyone happy and on the same page.

@Viben

Recently they almost thought to ban twitter and already they banned tiktok too

Source on twitter ban? I don’t see anything in the news regarding this and the Prime Minister of India himself has a large presence on Twitter. The Tik Tok ban was because it is a Chinese company and there have been tensions in the India-China relationship (same reason the game PUBG got banned initially) so that’s not comparable.

@Viben

post that reported by users goes to moderators, review takes place. Once moderators push their views on perticuler post, we review and decide what to do

So… the moderators have… more moderators (admins?) above them? I’m not sure what issue that solves (in fact it complicates and centralizes the process, and increases the manpower needed).

@Viben

mainly targeting India and building our base and atomic network here

How would the monetization and tipping be affected by the new crypto laws in India (1% TDS and 30% on gains from crypto and NFTs if I remember right)?

Voluntary Anonymous self-verification (KYC)

Just noticed the above self-verification point mentioned in “Features” in the Whitepaper. If KYC is involved, how is this anonymous? Sure you can stay anonymous from public but the KYC data will still be with Viben correct?

I think you guys might actually have an interesting enough product looking at the blockchain features that you guys are trying to implement. That in itself can be a decent USP if you sort those out properly. This stopping “hate speech, bullying, etc” thing just won’t work in my opinion, regardless of how good your intentions might be.

[Viben]

India made revisions in IT law recently and instructed twitter and Facebook to follow orders you can check out YouTube or Any Indian news sources and later twitter not followed anything govt threatened to ban twitter hope you know this saga.

However there will be no more admins there will be a community manager. Recent IT law made that mandatory and Indian social media’s following it. (Like Koo App)

However, if you allow post anything in the name of freedom of speech then your social media platform becomes a hate space.

As our understanding with Indian diaspora and Indian culture and traditions and current social issues we proposed current USP.

Yes, KYC data will be protected with viben. It will not disclosed until it’s necessary and government ask us about the info on Extreme circumstances.

In this case: spreading of terrorism, violence.

Moderation process as follows:

1. User posts > Users get offended > report it> goes to moderators vote > Collected opinions to community manger > remove it/ keep it.

I don’t think it is complex process as our platform similar to Instagram and probably we get less work when it comes to moderating.

We are keeping tech only in India not crypto. Like what polygon is doing now.

Thank you

[Viben]

@sick_of_this

That in itself can be a decent USP if you sort those out properly. This stopping “hate speech, bullying, etc” thing just won’t work in my opinion, regardless of how good your intentions might be.

Well, We earlier planned to go completely blockchain based social media but there is gas fees issues and normal user can’t understand these things.

I think you are worried only about “hate speech… Etc” which we included in our idea.

We also have other features like “users can borrow and lend tokens”

There are lot of things we planned and linedup however everything not feasible for us at this situation. We also had idea of introducing metavers but how much we can do bootstrapping? That’s where our initial product idea is. We are building MVP right now 2-3 screen also developed but eagerly looking for some fund so we can showcase what we building hope you got my point.

BTW we are ready to work on USP to make it better. We love to here from you too!

[sick_of_this]

The only Twitter ban saga I see is over 10 months old.

@Viben

Yes, KYC data will be protected with viben. It will not disclosed until it’s necessary

So it’s like any other social media platform, unlike what’s mentioned in the proposal.

@Viben

We are keeping tech only in India not crypto

According to you, India is supposed to be the primary target market but you’re not implementing crypto features in India. So what is the benefit to Harmony if they fund this?

The approach to this (considering the replies to my other points as well) doesn’t make any sense to me so I’m out. Still, best of luck for your work.

[Viben]

We are implementing crypto in app, we are keeping our company away from India hope you understand.

Similar way how polygon is doing.