Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Sydney Campos, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Ascend Now, Inc.:
Q: Ascend Now, Inc. recently launched a decentralized social community called ASCEND, can you tell us more?
A: The network is based on personal development and community value in which people’s knowledge, skills and talents are the community’s currency. Using data and artificial intelligence to inspire people to learn about themselves, ASCEND curates content to help people be their best selves and live their best lives.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Ascend was founded with a built-in solution that prevents hate speech and disinformation without centralized censorship with its unique feature called community self-moderation. Each new piece of content goes through a scaled review with a random assortment of Ascend users who rate the content based on its relevance and helpfulness. The rating scale is from (-1 to 5) wherein (5) denotes the most helpful content approved for circulation. Any content with an average review score below (2) flags and returns the content to the original creator for revision.
ASCEND is designed to showcase the most helpful and entertaining content to the people who desire to see it, while inspiring personal growth and expansion. There is no centralized censorship: all content and comments are reviewed and scored within community tiers to deter low value content, misinformation and hateful commentary. No longer is credibility measured by followers or following. Instead, category expert scores create a new paradigm in influencer marketing, driven by expertise and quality, not popularity that’s often artificial. With ASCEND, the colors, symbols, language, rating systems, and scoring based on the value contributed to the community and prioritization of the highest scoring content are all designed to establish and perpetuate this more positive and purpose-driven community.
The platform will enable anyone with a specialized expertise, talent, product or service to find their niche and make a living. App users don’t have to learn “marketing”, pay to amplify their content or buy followers like they do on other platforms. The best feature on ASCEND is that all users are invited to become creators and easily monetize their content in a multitude of ways from earning credits for views on posts, to hosting paid groups and even receiving patronage via tips from their beloved fans and collaborators.
The inspiration behind the ASCEND app started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, we realized that nearly every aspect of life would change as a result of this planetary pause – education, work, economics, relationships, etc. Every aspect of life needed to adapt and evolve. This thinking led to the creation of a Treatise for the New World which attempted to map out all the requirements for a thriving planet in every sector of society. In the discovery process for all the requirements, the thought arose – why not put everything into an app where the behavioral and consciousness shifts required for a thriving planet can be practiced first and then actualized into offline life?
While the first manifestation of this new way of life is the app, it is also expressed through the brand, our values, our principles, and the connections, communication and collaboration between people that we inspire. In the same way that current social media platforms are having a negative impact on the world (in the form of divisiveness, manipulation, addiction, negativity, depression, and self-harm among other effects), ASCEND is designed to heal the planet and the humans that live on it. This is not an understatement. It is our goal to create the connections and tools to do so. ASCEND 1.0 is just the beginning – building a more positive community with higher values, purpose and mission.
ASCEND will be a platform for greater human achievement, inspirational creative expression, and collaboration in projects that will help to build a better world, on and off of the app. The platform will enable anyone with a specialized expertise, talent, product or service to find their niche and make a living at their special divinely-inspired talent. They don’t have to learn “marketing”, pay to amplify their content or buy followers like they do on other platforms, because ASCEND is designed to showcase the most helpful and entertaining content to the people who desire to see it.
On ASCEND, content is designed to inspire personal growth and expansion. There is no centralized censorship: all content and comments are reviewed and scored within community tiers to deter low value content, misinformation and hateful commentary. No longer is credibility measured by followers or following. Instead, category expert scores create a new paradigm in influencer marketing, driven by expertise and quality, not popularity that’s often artificial. Our favorite feature of all – all users are invited to become creators and easily monetize their content in a multitude of ways from earning credits for views on posts, to hosting paid groups and even receiving patronage via tips from their beloved fans and collaborators.
We have a world-class logo and brand that is also designed to inspire those who wish to support the better world that we are creating. And there are MILLIONS of us around the world. Whilte ASCEND 1.0 is a first-generation app that solves the problems of current social media, we are much more than that. We will be a Web3 platform in the future, but that isn’t what will differentiate us. What will forever set us apart from the rest is the vision and values at the company’s core.
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Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: In the next 6 months we will be releasing new optimizations and features in the app as well as supporting community growth with more concerted marketing efforts.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Enter ASCEND and first complete your personality profile asking what you want to learn, how you want to grow and what you have to contribute or even teach. Content will be curated now according to what will be most helpful and supportive for embodying your desired intentions. You’ll even be encouraged to create and contribute meaningful content that helps others.
Everyone is a creator. And an entirely new model for influencers and even brand advertisers is born wherein those highlighted on ASCEND stand out according to helpfulness and resonance – only those who are really adding value are rewarded by the community. Brands are likewise incentivized to create content that is truly helpful, instead of otherwise selling any meaningless product meant to target mere unconscious consumers.
Anchored in trust and transparency, all content within ASCEND is moderated through the community itself with no centralized censoring authority. Content added to the platform first goes through a round of reviews and is scored according to helpfulness and eventually by individual creators according to overall resonance. Only content scored at a certain level is approved to be shared in the community whereas low value or irrelevant content isn’t permitted at all.
Like a new collective nervous system designed with coherence and connection in mind, the ASCEND ecosystem is naturally self regulating as all creators are trusted to share in our community values with incentivizing structures built in at all levels. Everyone is held to a high standard of excellence, truth, transparency and authenticity.
With no newsfeed or glaring notifications and minimal directives and labels, ASCEND presents a new design template for the next generation of leaders and contributors who are autonomous, intuitive and highly creative – when given space and permission to curate their experience in the ways that feel best for them, new ways to play on our platform naturally emerge and continue to evolve. Imagine a content discovery platform that learns with you through your behaviors and choices and becomes tailored to your preferences and intuitive inspiration for how you feel best engaging.
All creators can earn credit for their contributions, and even comments are considered content that can also be rewarded with a tip credit. Teachers who share their expertise effectively are celebrated as the new influencer – authentically scored according to true relevance and helpfulness, suddenly a new model emerges away from the old paradigm of superficiality in which anyone with money could buy a following regardless of their actual expertise or relevance.
Version one is built with version twenty in mind – within ASCEND’s diverse ecosystem emerges numerous subsidiary platforms including loans, crowdfunding, media production, a kids platform, white label for enterprise solutions to support cultivating company coherence and cultural values, smart ways to organize groups, classes and community, and so much more.
