Vitalik Buterin Discusses Social Media Dilemma: Decentralized Clients Are the Solution

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: What’s Wrong With Social Media? Vitalik Buterin Responds to Former Reddit CEO Original Link:

Counteractive Interoperability: Solutions Needed for Social Media

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that alternative client implementations for popular social media platforms can address the “AI dystopia” problem. In a discussion with former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, Vitalik stated that these alternative clients could even become profitable due to high demand.

The only issue with creating AI-free, human-only social media is the overall lack of proper competition in the field. Vitalik suggests adopting “counteractive interoperability”—that is, launching alternative client implementations with strict anti-bot policies.

Given the high demand for this, it seems like each social media platform could do it without any agreements, right?

The problem is the lack of competition in social media.

So the real systemic issue is… — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 25, 2025

Yishan Wong is an American engineer and the founder of Terraformation, who served as Reddit CEO from 2012 to 2014. He emphasizes that the entire social media platform should abandon AI and similar technologies because humans are gathering there. Any violations of the “human-only” rule should be met with strict enforcement.

Buterin proposes that alternative, community-centered clients should continue to operate under the original platform’s restrictions. Technically, they can leverage existing social media APIs—such as Twitter API or Meta API—and even use LLMs to avoid being blocked from accessing data at API endpoints.

The Decentralized Social Media Era Is Yet to Come

This will not be an easy task, as the terms of service of modern social media platforms may even encourage the platforms behind such alternative clients to seek “better jurisdictions.”

Meanwhile, the demand for “human-only” media platforms is actually very high, and their owners might charge around $30/month for this experience.

Vitalik Buterin has long been an advocate of decentralized social media concepts. He has emphasized that Farcaster is approaching the ease of use of Twitter.

At the same time, viable profit models for such services remain to be discovered. In November 2025, Farcaster’s Dan Romero announced that the protocol was shifting towards a “wallet-first” experience rather than a social media model.