I don’t post on Facebook, but eventually I realized more than 90 percent of the content I was seeing there either were ads or came from suggested content. I was still following that people, but I saw their posts infrequently. And when I did share anything, only a few people ever responded. The more I dug, the more I discovered that Facebook was designed for engagement that benefited the platform, not for the people who are using it. Posts that did not attract immediate attention weren’t shown much. Ads appeared everywhere. There was a further impression that content could be hidden or deleted arbitrarily. I wanted something more open.

Blurt. blog are displayed as published, without an algorithm to show them in a different order. It is constructed using a blockchain, which records and issues posts and rewards according to user votes. Users who post or vote receive in return a token called BLURT. There are no ads. There is no way to downvote. You get to keep what you write, and if people like what you’ve written, you get a portion of the rewards.

I wrote a song about this turn. It’s name is Blurt Over Likes. I created it through a tool I wrote called Suno. The song describes selecting a platform where posts aren’t hidden and creators are paid directly.