A First Look at User-Controlled Moderation on Web3 Social Media: The Case of Memo.cash

Web3 social media strives to eliminate the need for centralized management by building upon on technologies such public ledgers and smart contracts. This has generated significant hype, but creates many notable challenges, many of which remain unaddressed. One such challenge is content moderation. Specifically, the immutable nature of blockchain means that it becomes impossible to retrospectively delete posts. This means that illegal content posts cannot be moderated or removed. In an attempt to overcome this, Web3 platforms, such as memo.cash, allow users to filter out posts from their personal timelines. Taking memo.cash as a use case, the goal of this work is to study the efficacy of the approach, and identify associated challenges. A particularly unique feature of memo.cash is that users must pay money (satoshi) for each social action (e.g., posting and blocking other users). We conjecture that this may impact the nature of moderation, particularly among poorer users. To explore this, we gather data from memo.cash covering 24K users, 317K posts, and 2.57M user actions. We investigate how the need to pay may impact the moderation system and propose potential solutions to address the challenges that arise.