Okay, let's address the elephant in the digital room: a Facebook group, "What's Going on Quad Cities," is now more than just a Facebook group. It’s a new website publishing local news through the power of NFTs. And the question everyone's whispering is: Is this brilliant, or bonkers?

NFTs and News: A Tangled Web?

Harold DeFrieze and Ryan Segura, the creative minds behind this endeavor, are going all-in on NFTs with Dig-a-Hash. To them it seems like a cheaper, more efficient way of hosting their content compared to all the traditional approaches. In fact, Segura goes as far to denounce Ethereum and other blockchains as being too expensive. Now, I’m a big fan of innovation, particularly when it leads to greater local control and community benefit. Let’s pump the brakes on that for a second.

Here's the thing that immediately jumps out at me: they're using Polygon, a layer-2 solution, and storing the actual article content on Amazon S3. So again, how much is the blockchain actually accomplishing here besides serving as a fancy timestamp? It’s as ridiculous as buying an expensive, automatic watch to know the time when your phone already does that perfectly. We’ll admit the smart watch sounds awesome, but is it really that practical?

The sincerity of this endeavor to change the course of local news. Or is it more like a clever marketing ploy to ride the NFT wave? Are they addressing a real problem, or are they just problem finding to fit their solution?

Local News, Global Tech, Real Impact?

What’s Going on Quad Cities has four times the Facebook following of the local daily newspaper. That's a huge deal. That’s a testament to the power of community-driven news—and to the changing ways that people consume information. People believe what they see from their neighbors, their friends, people they know. With that power comes responsibility.

Decentralization is fantastic in theory. By doing so, it can give priority to local voices and go over or around the old-school gatekeepers. It has opened the door to disinformation campaigns, digital echo chambers, and a buffet of other social ills.

AI can be a helpful supplement for fact checking, a step in the right direction—but AI is not perfect. But it’s only as good as the data it’s trained on, and biases can slip in with devilish ease. Who's auditing the AI? What are the checks in place to ensure it doesn’t exacerbate societal biases already baked into the dataset, or be exploited by bad actors? These are questions that need answers.

NFTs are still quite intimidating for the average joe. Are they foolishly deepening a new digital divide, separating the tech-savvy who can grasp and contextualize the news from everyone else?

Shiny Objects and Folklore Warnings

As a person of Irish mystical inclination, I must note the glaring similarity. Fairy fae fables Plenty of lore exists with cautionary tales of people lured by faerie gold. They look like jewels at first, but on close examination, these treasures dissolve into smoke or foliage. NFTs may turn out to be the faerie gold of the digital age. A new, shiny, alluring technology magic bullet that’s going to bring us all this prosperity and disruption but instead brings what exactly?

Segura’s other project, turning dogs into NFTs at The Dog Plex, brings a whole new level of…ugh… interest. I’m not here to disparage the hustle, that kind of vision and priorities is worth questioning. The intention to make a positive impact on local news should not be undermined by poorly thought through experiments with the latest crypto Ponzi scheme.

All the NFTs from “What’s Going on QC” are held within one address, 0x18582f2CA048ac5f22E5a64F92E8a7d7b1F806a4. This concentration at the least raises some red flags for me. NFTs are a step backward. It serves to centralize more control, which defeats the entire concept of what decentralization NFTs should provide.

At the end of the day, the success of this experiment will come down to whether it truly meets the needs of the Quad Cities community. Or most importantly, will it deliver news that is accurate, reliable, and easily accessible to them? Or will it be another massive POC that goes away once the NFT craze runs its course? Only time will tell.

For now, I'm cautiously optimistic. This is a big shift, so I love seeing the ambition, and love seeing the willingness to experiment. I want to challenge DeFrieze and Segura to be on the lookout for their own blind spots. It’s inarguable that they need to do what’s best for their community first and foremost. After all, what’s worth more than crypto? Trust. That’s something you can’t mint on a blockchain.