Behold: the 90s favorite social trend is coming back, packaged in a futuristic app
After a decade of conformity, social media is becoming individualistic again. And thousands of people ar here for it.
It’s 4:02AM and I am tapping the phone screen so fast, one of my press-on nails is going to pop off. I am determined to collect the new batch of stickers creator MazeMari just dropped on the Orb app. Why?
Because they have the cute Lens Protocol mascot (Lenny) holding a supple red heart and I really want to have that in my expression toolkit when I comment on friends’ posts. As I swipe right to purchase the sticker pack for about $1.05 USDC tokens (a.k.a a form of digital currency), I pause for a moment and think to myself… “I haven’t had this much fun since the 90s!”
The future of social media draws inspiration from the past
If you’re a 90s kid, you might remember the “lexicon.” It was a paper notebook you passed around to your friends where you’d ask them questions and give them creative freedom to draw, slap on some stickers, and plaster their personalities all over the pages.
I loved it. It felt like a genuine way to connect with someone and to open up a special door that leads you to their innermost thoughts and feelings. But just like most wonderfully analog trends of this bygone era, the lexicon faded away.
Social connections became digital and distant. We chose curation over creation, building up glossy profiles of our lives, often containing little to no truth or substance. This has been the cult of Instagram for the last decade. Until now.
The secret social media club you don’t know about
Orb is an app you can download on any iPhone or Android that’s powered by Lens Protocol — a decentralized social media platform where you own all of your content and where people can send you cryptocurrency if they like your stuff.
Over the last few years, Orb alone has drawn thousands of creators and collectors — from musicians to painters, photographers, and people who just like to post unfiltered photos of their filtered coffee.
There’s nothing pretentious about Orb. You show up as you are, photo-vomit all over the feed if you feel like it (guilty!), or just sit back and see what other people are up to around the world.
For a long time, Orb had only one way of reacting to posts —with a basic emoji laughing, crying, or heart-ing things. Until yesterday, October 18 when they dropped a massive new update the significance of which is going to change the entire game.
Create, collect, and get paid in an instant
Anyone is now able to launch a “sticker pack” on Orb and put it up for sale (also referred to as a “mint”). Stickers are implemented as NFTs (yes, those are very much still alive). Prices start at about $1 USDC in various digital currencies and go up with each next purchase.
So if a sticker pack was launched at a dollar but a few dozen people bought it, the price is now $6. There’s a solid economic plan behind proceeds attribution — the creator of the sticker pack gets 40%, the NFT holder gets 40%, 8% to the club to which the collection belongs, 4% to the person who referred a friend to buy this pack, and 8% to Orb itself. (you can read all the nuts and bolts directly from Orb here).
Essentially, if you buy a sticker pack just as it drops, you start accumulating crypto every next time people buy. You can then cash in and use the money inside Orb to buy more stickers, mint other people’s content and so on.
It feels immediate, exciting, and entertaining AF. People are out there rooting for their friends, and setting alarms at ungodly hours to be the first to snag a pack.
A cult of individuality
In Web3, we often joke that we’re in “cults.” But if you really look past the creepiness of a cult, what does that really stand for? A group of people strongly believing in the same thing, coexisting in the same space, and using their skills to feed their own ecosystem.
By allowing expression through a different medium, Orb has just given permission to all of its users, a.k.a Orbians (damn, that really did make it sound like a cult lol), to stand out, speak up, and surround themselves with like-minded friends.
And on the flip side, Creators are finally getting paid for their ideas. They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And I am very heart-warmed to see self-expression take center stage once again and recreate that nostalgic feeling of togetherness through creativity.
If you got excited reading this, I hope to see you on Orb. As for me — gotta run! Tinyrainboot’s sticker pack drops in 2 minutes and I gotta collect it all!
(If you want to be friends on Orb, find me right here!)
