Description:Armonio ,AC Capital
Twitter: @armonio_liang
The recent public opinion about Web3 is full of hostility. In the eyes of insiders and outsiders: Web3 seems to be a large-scale leek market, and the relationship between exchanges, project parties, institutions and ordinary investors is to cut each other. Even a friend of Web2 told me bluntly: "Web3 social networking is a scam!"
In my eyes, Ponzi is neutral. It is a financing technology that reduces the operating costs of projects and a means to protect the project's ultimate success. Whether it is DeFi, social or other tracks, there are always builders who continue to struggle. As long as the pace of progress has not stopped, the Web3 revolution has not failed. All technological innovations occur in an emergent manner. A short-term web3 technology trough is not enough to prove that the industry lacks prospects. We believe in the power of encryption and look forward to a decentralized future.
Today, when the web3 industry is under questioning, this article wants to sort out the achievements of Web3 builders in the social field in the past eight years and two cycles from the perspective of development, from the author's perspective, to sort out experiences and lessons, and to find potential opportunities and blueprints. In my opinion, although Web3 social networking has not yet matured, the achievements of the industry development are still remarkable. Different people have different expectations for Web3. Some people hope to have a better experience and get better spiritual opium, while others need to protect more complete personal data sovereignty. As Web3 technology continues to advance and barriers and costs continue to decrease, real products may emerge at this moment.
The underlying demand theory of Web3 social
Any successful product is built on solid demand. The most criticized point of Web3 projects is that they cannot be integrated with the real economy. In order to break the prejudice that "Web3 is just for profit", we need to prove the social demand for Web3 from the root.
Humans are social animals and have social needs. This conclusion has been repeatedly proven by social products.
People need to establish connections with others. They need to perceive other people's emotions, attitudes, and psychological activities through connections. They need to obtain information feedback through connections to correct their own emotions and cognition. This need is like eating, drinking water, and breathing. It is something that people cannot do without. It is engraved into our genes through thousands of years of evolution. This is the basic need of people for social interaction. In short, it is connection, mental interpretation, and self-coordination.
Holding tokens is a new way of linking. Open and verifiable databases expand the dimension of information we can obtain from links. A new information environment will give birth to new social relationships and new ways of interaction.
We see that the psychological motivations of most social behaviors on the Internet can be attributed to: the need for self-expression, the need for emotional catharsis, and the need to seek recognition. Compared with traditional offline social interaction, the Internet world has created more social scenarios through multimedia. The Internet has come a long way, from forums, BBS, chat rooms to blogs, instant messaging (IM), social media, and game spaces. China's bilibili even creatively created barrages. Brand-new scenarios, including different interpersonal networks, different content and presentation methods, have created a batch of successful projects.
Throughout the development of Internet social networking, economies of scale are its salient features. Historical experience tells us that social projects or products that cannot establish economies of scale in social activities for a specific purpose among a specific group of people will not survive.
Compared with the global web2 social giants with millions of concurrent users, the scale of Web3 social networking is not even a fraction of that. Economies of scale are a huge challenge. If economies of scale cannot be achieved in a certain scenario, there is no way to escape the fate of being subsidized to death. The scale of social networks and content determines whether social nature and social motivation can be better realized. How can products without scale help users expand their social relationships? How to achieve personal display and empathy with others?
The development direction of Web3 has been determined since the concept was proposed. In a nutshell, it is an industrial ecology supported by a trusted open data environment and a financial environment supported by tokens. How can such an environment give birth to a new industrial landscape? The unique advantage of Web3 social networking is the underlying information support across databases and organizations, the free choice of front-end, and the pluggable social interface. Tokens are a typical feature of web3. Using social support to issue tokens, with token-quantified rights interaction as the core content, and the scenario of organizing social relationships is a unique application scenario of web3 social networking.
In recent years, the Web3 industry has really worked hard to gain scale advantages in local social markets.
The development of Web3 social
This chapter only wants to prove that Web3 social is constantly improving, and further wants to explain that the industry’s accumulated experience and lessons as well as the continuously improving technology are pushing us closer to the singularity of industry explosion.
Due to the advantages that the Web3 environment provides to entrepreneurs, the development of social projects shows two parallel development trends:
1. How to develop decentralized social technology standards
2. How to use social media to build token consensus
Competition for decentralized social technology standards
If we believe that humans are social animals, and our information input determines what kind of person we are, then the power of Internet social platforms is enormous. We dare not imagine how serious the consequences will be if we hand over this power to companies and governments. If we lose the sovereignty of social information, we will also lose the freedom of cognition and choice. The Facebook personal information leak led by Cambridge Analytica tells us how easy it is for our will to be manipulated. How much we and our descendants need to master our own data sovereignty. Therefore, decentralized social technology solutions are a rigid demand in the future.
To achieve decentralized social networking, breakthroughs must be made in communication protocols, data, and applications. The communication technology used by blockchain to reach a global consensus may not be suitable for decentralized social communication. Therefore, based on the experience of STEEM, the new generation of projects such as Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, Farcaster, etc. have all given their own decentralized social protocols. By giving up the decentralized attributes of some data, all protocols have made great progress. For any protocol, imitating web2 social tools is no longer a problem, and even because of the realization of decentralization, users have greater autonomy. Users have the right to maintain their intangible assets within the system. However, as mentioned earlier, Web3's business faces a huge scale disadvantage.
Technology is not a problem. How to remove the mountain of economies of scale on the road to success is a challenge faced by all project parties who propose solutions. In order to overcome this disadvantage, token incentives have become the most direct means for most projects in the short term.
The token incentive revolution hits a snag
The birth of tokens is like opening Pandora's box. All web3 users are forced to face a complex financial environment from the moment they enter the industry. For project owners, the use of tokens can be used as subsidies to reduce the operating costs of the project by using user desires.
The token-incentive revolution faces two major dilemmas in a social environment:
1. The subjective value of social content is difficult to judge, and the effectiveness of token incentives is questionable.
2. Token incentives face witch attacks.
These two problems have not been completely solved to this day. We introduce a case to help us understand them.
STEEM blockchain can be regarded as a pioneer in the entire Web3 social industry. To this day, not only are many of its concepts and structural designs still being imitated and referenced by current projects, but it has also spawned a number of blockchain application teams and projects. In 2016, STEEM blockchain initially made innovative attempts in multiple dimensions, including token incentive content, token incentive real-person curation, data availability layer, and account layered security.
The application built on the STEEM blockchain is a social media, where the quality of the media content is determined by the users with the number of tokens staked as the weight. In the early stages of the project, the founding team had an absolute advantage in both reputation and the number of tokens staked. At that time, content production and filtering recommendations based on token staked weights were effective. Similar to most projects using token incentives, the huge wealth effect will attract a swarm of witches. However, the token stake of the STEEM blockchain includes the power of punishment, which can be immune to witch attacks to a certain extent.
This effectiveness is based on the centralization of assets and power and the solid foundation of consensus. When the founder BM left, the founding team fell apart, and the project was sold to the infamous Justin Sun, the consensus collapsed. In the early stage, the collapse of consensus led to more individuals choosing to profit by witch attacks: coin holders liked each other's posts, and proxy mining was rampant. In the later stage, when the algorithm recommendation system and AIGC technology matured, this content production and recommendation system based on token weighted voting was about to exit the stage of history. Today's top social media has achieved a thousand faces for each user's content. This refined content selection is beyond the reach of human resources + content sorting and push based solely on content tags.
After STEEM, many projects have used token issuance to accelerate the scale expansion of the platform, such as Torum, BBS, and all those who want to scale up use token incentives. Of course, there are also those who use expected freeloading like Lens protocol in the later period. These incentives violate the "non-monetary rewards" element of social interaction. Experiments have shown that external material rewards will reduce internal psychological rewards, which makes social content mixed with non-social content. Social links are information channels, and the value of social platforms lies in aggregating information within social channels. However, this kind of mixed incentive leads to lower social efficiency. It is natural for a channel that is already short of information to face more noise to decline.
Like Degen on Farcaster, part of the tokens are sent out through rewards. This is to use Meme tokens to incentivize the unique financial functions of social projects web3 (rather than content creation or recommendation), and to create a wealth effect and trigger ecological prosperity by introducing the financial attributes of encrypted social networking. A platform can only have one token, but it can have countless Meme tokens. Meme tokens can flop, but platform tokens cannot. Using Meme tokens to boost social projects will become a superior token incentive platform project technique. Degen's wealth topic combined with the innovative possibilities on Frames has allowed more and more builders to participate in farcaster, triggering the ecological prosperity of Farcaster. It can be said that so far, I personally think: This is a classic operational battle. The ecological emergence brought about by this operation cannot be ignored. So far, the ecology has produced tools including NFT piggy banks, various streaming media (voice chat rooms, short videos, animated pictures), and launch platforms. Although I have not found any signs that Farcaster has broken through the business boundaries of Lens (the current industry bottleneck), this emergence deserves special attention.
The Revolution of Content Autonomy Has Suffered a Setback
Web3 focuses on decentralization, which in business means anti-monopoly.
The starting point of Web3 social networking should be 2016-2017. At that time, Web2 social products were already developing in full swing. In the last two cycles, social projects were all playing the narrative of content autonomy. Various projects were trying to "chain" content, and on the basis of "chaining" content, they could do content assetization work.
STEEM, which was born in 2016, fell behind in development due to the disintegration of the project team. Although the content was put on the chain when the project was launched, it did not have an EVM environment and could not run smart contracts. After the DeFi summer that began in 2020, it gradually fell behind. The top spot in content on the chain was given to Mirror. The selling point of Mirror is that it provides a relatively friendly text content editing environment. Users can publish their own text content with wallet signatures. The content is on the chain and no one can tamper with it. Other users can subscribe to and follow an account. And the content can be cast into NFT and traded in the NFT market. So far, the project continues to operate and the traffic has declined, but some Degen players still use the project to publish some content and carry out some content NFT casting activities.
Mirror is an excellent web3 product. Its design implements the spirit of minimalism and makes excellent use of trusted and open databases. Anyone can confirm the ownership of content data on the Internet through wallet signatures. After the ownership is confirmed, NFTs can be issued and traded in the NFTfi environment under the EVM environment. Mirror's user loss is essentially certain. Compared with traditional Web2 content operators, not only is the operational capacity insufficient, but also the original text content, especially long articles, lacks traffic and is a discarded child in the era of garbage culture. At the same time, there are also projects that start with sound and video to put content on the chain. Not to mention the ineffectiveness of content incentives, the huge amount of data makes the project's operating costs unsustainable. Doing content business is like doing media. Either you have good content to attract users, or you have a large number of users to attract good content. Simply providing a set of technical solutions cannot become a business.
At the end of 2013, another content-based project emerged. Bodhi is also a minimalist product. Inspired by Friend tech, Bodhi no longer casts NFTs of related content at a unified price, but uses bonding curve technology to sell them at different prices. The more they sell, the more expensive they are. There are also CloudBit, which forcibly replicates web2 content on the blockchain to generate NFT assets. There are many similar projects, and they all try to transform content into assets that can be confirmed. But what they cannot change is that in the Internet age, content can be confirmed, but the information carried by the content can be easily transferred. Even in the case of direct theft of content and infringement, putting content on the chain does not help to increase the cost of illegality. Therefore, there is no good case for issuing assets directly with content as the value anchor.
Another reason why the market is insensitive to content assetization is because the timing is wrong. Although reason tells us that personal information is valuable, users don’t really care about their own content sovereignty.
The new journey of attention sovereignty: the development of content recommendation system
The emergence of STEEM has encouraged and inspired a number of blockchain projects. One of the main ideas of STEEM is to use voting weighted by the number of tokens staked to sort content and create lists. This idea has been repeatedly borrowed by different projects.
A project that is more inclined to content recommendation: Yup, which exists in the form of a social plug-in. By issuing tokens, it encourages users to interact with content through this web3 plug-in. Using this interactive information, plus the token staking weight, it replicates the content on other Web2 platforms and reorganizes it under its own list.
Wormhole3 is also a content recommendation plug-in. Unlike Yup, it supports the use of multiple tokens as incentives for content recommendation. The entire incentive process has been implemented in code. Different incentive tokens have independent tag lists on the official website of Wormhole3, which realizes the diversification of content recommendation. In the model of Wormhole3, it is assumed that people holding different tokens belong to corresponding communities, and the number of tokens pledged determines their voice in the community channel. The power to distribute some tokens is also controlled by voice.
A series of projects that use tokens to incentivize content list recommendations, including Matters, Torum, BBS, and Bihu, have all failed. The essence is that list recommendations incentivized by tokens cannot capture attention. In the attention market, the previous generation of simple sorting + label classification content recommendations have been difficult to compete with intelligent algorithm content recommendations. As an advertising system, Web3 projects pursue decentralization and programmatic, and the immature algorithms are not more accurate in pricing advertising space than the professional algorithms of web2. The monopoly of the advertising market is not as strong as that of centralized exchanges. Therefore, projects such as QuestN and RSS3 that use data to influence content distribution have eventually turned to it.
Experience and lessons have taught us that even if low-cost token incentives are used, they must be used to incentivize advanced production methods. Phavor still relies on the web3 database to serve as a cross-database recommendation middleware, but the process and solution are more abstract. Content recommendation systems are essential components for any social media. Token incentives are not the key to the web3 recommendation system, but the coin holding structure and on-chain behavior are. The participation of on-chain data in system decision-making is the essential difference between Web3 and Web2 recommendation systems. Compared with airdrops, the cost of on-chain social interactions is extremely low, so witch arbitrage attacks were born.
The power logic behind using tokens to control content recommendations is that attention is controlled by organizations rather than individuals. I personally think that distributing content according to organizational needs is an organizational work communication platform like DingTalk and Feishu. Rather than a social tool, it is a DAO tool, and all votes reflect power. The power to manage organizations without trust is undoubtedly the advantage of blockchain and even web3. The content recommendation incentives based on organizations (platforms or communities) that we see on the market now
The social tools that ordinary people love to use have been replaced by attention programs for individuals. Currently, any new generation of social media pushes content to individuals, adjusting recommended content based on their likes and dislikes of the content at every moment. If we advocate 1V1 content push, then the information on the chain should be more of a raw data of content and user labels.
Here we need to mention the "Subscription Stream Generator" created by BlueSky. It is a combination of recommendation algorithm and communication protocol. Anyone can provide self-developed recommendation algorithm for communication protocol. Users can subscribe to their favorite recommendation algorithm according to their needs.
Debank's social module has great potential. Although many people use Debank as a data tool, the badge it launched, account display combined with stream has reached an industry height that many badge projects cannot reach. The information about NFTs said by those who have been playing NFTs for a long time is definitely more important than others. How can a user who does not participate in DeFi at all give others DeFi guidance? When there are more and more activities on the chain, the accuracy of the entire content recommendation system will be improved by using the on-chain behavior as a data source to correct user data and content data through accounts. Debank currently lacks an effective recommendation system, and its early accumulation will help it occupy the high ground of the recommendation system.
In general, the current status of decentralized social development is:
1. The strategy of token incentive scale is not going smoothly, and no independent user group that can highlight the scale advantage has been found.
2. Content is put on the chain, and users are independent in their own social assets. In the absence of scale, users do not care.
3. The content recommendation system continues to develop, and after multiple rounds of iterations, there is a glimmer of hope. If we can make a social product that better serves users who interact on the chain, it will be the first step in the implementation of decentralized social projects.
I think it is possible to find the unique scale advantage of our web3 social network among Web3 users. The biggest advantage is the involvement of tokens, which not only introduces finance, but more importantly, it can form new relationships and interactive possibilities based on tokens.
Here are two positive signs:
TGbot: Introducing transactions directly into social media. Social media and transactions are seamlessly connected, which is very suitable for users' trading habits of buying coins by the head. It is better to do more than to say more. In the past, online behaviors could not become social interactions, but now they can.
Farcaster: Introducing asset issuance into social scene platforms, paying attention to investors on Farcaster, instead of looking for Alpha on Twitter, it is better to communicate directly on Farcaster and form a community. More teams are willing to migrate their projects to Farcaster, and the emergence of projects is happening.
Social asset tokenization
Another evolutionary path for Web3 social networking is to use social networking to issue coins. For projects, coins are a means of financing. For users, coins may not be a product. Coins are a financial product. Issuing coins is easy, but the difficulty lies in how to make the market establish a consensus on the value of tokens and how to make tokens liquid.
Social networking builds value consensus:
How to make the market recognize the value of tokens is the crypto alchemy that every project owner wants to understand. Historical experience provides three formulas.
1) Tokenization of Attention
The tokenization of attention is the secret recipe of Meme coin. How to create attention and the elements of token attention: content, KOL, community and wealth effect. The first three points are all related to social interaction. Whether it is Farcaster's frames framework that directly implants social goods (tokens) into the platform, ERC404's integration of pictures and coins (direct integration of content and tokens), or Donut's attempt to put inscription recommendation relationships on the chain, they all enhance the Meme content of the coin from a technical level.
The consensus of Meme tokens is easy to establish, but difficult to sustain. Regardless of the external environment, Meme tokens do not have consumers. Meme tokens establish the liquidity of assets. Unless Meme tokens are listed on centralized exchanges and become ownerless tokens (centralized exchanges must have market makers), once the peak of attention has passed, Meme tokens will fall into an irreversible two-way spiral collapse of value and liquidity.
2) Tokenization of social relationships
If the value of Meme, a cultural trend, is linked to the value of tokens, which makes ordinary people feel illusory, then injecting the value of social relationships into tokens is down-to-earth. Even without talking about web3 and the Internet, in economics, "relationships" are also a kind of capital. The tokenization of social relationship capital is a natural consideration.
The first thing that caught my attention about the tokenization of social relationships was DAO. The DAO project has a relatively broad definition of DAO. In the general market perception, DAO is reduced to a circle organization governed by a token mechanism. Holding my tokens means I am my person. Holding different tokens and different numbers of tokens will give different rights. The token is attached to the authority in this organization. Whether it is FWB, which sells value links for high-end people (obtaining identity requires an application approval system and spending money), or Yueniao DAO, which focuses on high-quality investment information, both start with the permission of social relationships to establish the value of tokens. Friend.tech, which has risen in this cycle, is also exploring along this vein. Compared with traditional organizations that build huge organizational volumes, Friend.tech specializes in the small-scale organization market. From the quotation of its bonding curve, it can be seen that after a group exceeds 200 people, the cost of adding each member is very high. This is much smaller than the organization of thousands of people established in the early stage through the NFT casting + hanging order model.
3) Content Tokenization
The essential difference between content tokenization and content-assisted attention tokenization is that content tokens emphasize the relationship between tokens and content property rights. From the previous generation of products such as Mirror and Paragraph to the current Lens and Farcaster, the assetization function of content property rights has never been abandoned. From a technical point of view, this function is very simple. But no one uses it in reality. Copyright is a RWA matter. This property right is transferred from the off-chain to the on-chain. When there is a lot of uncertainty in the on-chain property rights, when the on-chain property rights will only increase the cost of rights protection, these functions are just decoration. Only when most of the property rights confirmation business migrates to the blockchain, the rights protection path matures, and the scale effect is exerted, will content tokenization show economic value.
Content tokenization also has no wealth effect, and cannot use the wealth effect to accelerate industry maturity. In a society where AIGC is rampant, content is not scarce, but attention is scarce. Lack of scarcity hinders the wealth effect.
BONDING CURVE solves liquidity:
Although it is not a social innovation, the Bonding curve solves the liquidity cost problem of small-scale projects. The steeper version of the bonding curve proposed by Friend.tech, apart from creating a wealth effect under small-scale funds, has indeed greatly reduced the operating costs of providing liquidity for individual tokens. Therefore, we can see that many projects are trying new price curves in their respective fields. There are some cases with small influence: for example, Bodhi has done a Bonding curve for content valuation, and DeBox has done a Bonding curve for community-based assets.
Although the problem of Friend.tech (FT)'s operation rhythm caused the attention of the later period to be taken away by farcaster. But the impact of the Bonding curve is far-reaching. FT's attempt let us know that for different token application scenarios, there will always be a more suitable Bonding curve. Any bonding curve has its pros and cons, and it is necessary to choose the appropriate curve based on the actual situation. Friend.tech's V2 also complies with this consensus. On the one hand, it attempts to issue assets (club) to multi-center, mesh-like communities, and on the other hand, it adds a steeper Bonding curve.
Pump.fun invented a segmented bonding curve. When the amount of funds raised is less than 20,000 U, a steep bonding curve is used. When the amount of funds raised reaches 20,000, it directly jumps to a conventional decentralized exchange. This is also an innovation in liquidity supply.
In summary, over the past two cycles, Web3 social has carried out rich experiments in multiple fields and from multiple angles.
The opportunities and mission of Web3 social networking
Throughout the two cycles, although Web3 social networking has been constantly exploring and failing on a bumpy road, its progress is still obvious to all:
Our front-end has jumped from PC to mobile, and from APP to progressive web application. Wallet login has moved from mnemonics to MPC and abstract accounts. The threshold for users to log in to web3 social networking is getting lower and lower. The progress of blockchain infrastructure has not only reduced the cost of bookkeeping by geometric multiples, but also made the time for transactions to be completed almost immediately. In order to achieve decentralized social availability, the builders of the social protocol layer even actively built layer3 suitable for their own characteristics, and determined the degree of decentralization of information according to the credibility of the information. The expansion of the network directly improves the user experience. From text to multimedia, the network can also accept more concurrent information from users.
Embedded social scenarios are also an innovation that the industry is trying. Because it is an open source project and an open source database, it comes with Lego-like compatibility without permission. We can already embed any interaction into social (for example, we can directly trade NFTs and social data in social), and we can also embed social into any interaction (implant another social tool in a game)
We have also made a lot of achievements in middleware, including the integration, analysis, and labeling of various on-chain data, token behavior management based on game theory, and a variety of liquidity provision solutions.
Compared with the previous cycle, our infrastructure and tools are more complete, the natives of Web3 are increasing, and Meme tokens are closer to the understanding of users. NFT has been continuously educating potential users in one wave after another.
Social innovation is not a dead end. There are always challengers in every era. For example, the recently launched ReelShort mainly attracts users with short dramas with melodramatic plots. It allows a host, an MCN, or a media company to build their own social media platform at a low cost. With the appropriate recommendation algorithm, it can guide traffic and form a federal network structure.
Put it this way, it's dry and there's no visual sense. Let's combine the traffic password with the blueprint in my mind.
Dopamine, the opium of the masses, the antidote for Web3
The above discussion is based on the social development of Web3 industry. Putting it into the overall competition pattern of social products, including issuing Meme coins through social networking, is as pure as a virgin. Let me show you the social scenes I have seen.
Since the emergence of streaming media, we basically no longer see social platforms based on text and pictures.
Even in streaming, there is fierce competition.
What kind of content do we see on the top short video platforms? The domineering president falls in love with me, the pendulum swings late at night, and I get drunk alone. Look at Farcaster, STEEM, and Mirror. Is there any content that speaks human language? If it is for entertainment, not for the ideals of Web3 and the bullshit airdrop income, I don’t want to waste a second. Yes, the development tree of Web3 social is off, but it is not the fault of technology. The threshold of massive adoption of technology is approaching. If you want to achieve massive adoption of web3 social, you must connect web3 social with the thigh of content.
We thought that introducing content meant airdropping to content creators, giving a lot of incentives to a group of creators who could not generate traffic, under the euphemism of breaking the platform monopoly. In reality, 1% of super KOLs generated 90% of the traffic but did not get the due rewards.
In the social field, some detailed technologies are not that important. For example, if Tiktok says one day that it will use its own wallet to log in, it doesn’t matter whether it uses MPC or AA. Whoever has traffic is the king. Whoever has content that can create traffic has traffic. Is it possible that the industry is not organized by technology-oriented protocols and projects to operate a platform similar to "web2", but that each content creator is at the core of a small economic cycle, freely choosing protocols and tools suitable for its own content format, and then combining all protocols and tools more organically, allowing other social participants to participate in their own economic cycle through tokens.
This typical fan economy has already taken shape in real life:
A high-level "heterosexual emotional masseur" may have a Twitter account, a TG group, and channels on Onlyfans and Pornhub. Their product positioning in front of consumers is not simply to provide hookers for sexual needs, but to provide a complete set of SEX dream solution providers to solve sexual fantasies. These workers build their own private domain traffic through social media, guide payment habits by selling their own restricted short videos and live broadcast time, and then monetize traffic in girlfriend experience and role-playing services. These practitioners who deal with customers every day have a deeper understanding of human needs than web3 social entrepreneurs. Social media provides these people with several times the labor return. At the same time, the traffic brought by self-media helps them get rid of platform exploitation.
Let's take a more recent example. There is a live streaming platform in Japan called Zaiko, which allows artists to sell goods. The platform itself also uses decentralized technology, and artists can issue NFTs through the platform. The platform is also fully prepared to issue platform tokens. The founder of the platform was a successful entrepreneur before the project, and he established business relationships with many Japanese artists in his previous career, so Zaiko has no shortage of users. Today, Zaiko can sell goods worth millions of dollars in a live broadcast. Decentralized technology has long begun to change our social industry from the other end.
We have always talked about regaining the platform's monopoly on content value. The most direct way is to let the content build the platform, and the platforms form links through third-party curation or recommendation tools. Let's imagine a possible blueprint for web3.
Web3 Social Blueprint
A certain capital spent a lot of money to hire a writer to write a bloody script "Back to 2010: I'm Making Waves in the Cryptocurrency Circle", adding these dopamine and hormone traffic factors. Before the script was finished, it was announced that the screenwriter had gone bankrupt and ran away. Then the project continued to move forward and began filming. In order to circumvent regulation, the project adopted a decentralized media solution (such as farcaster+livepeer) and airdropped content tokens to early viewers. Users who hold a certain number of tokens can influence the plot trend, participate in voting to decide new role actors, see new episodes earlier and get various peripherals. For some regions, we can even sell customized products such as the same fashion and real estate of the protagonist directly in the play through frames. The protagonists in the plot have their own fan tokens, and communicate in friend.tech or its self-built fan system. If any chat services, exclusive videos, companion services, etc. are needed, they will be discussed separately. The passionate videos in the play need to be unlocked with the corresponding fan tokens + content tokens. In the plot, the new currency issued is simultaneously sold in reality as pump.fun. Independent streaming media belonging to this drama sells and rents out its own overflow traffic through curation tools such as Tako and Phavor. These short videos are edited and released simultaneously on the Web2 platform.
As a Web3 user, we can imagine how good our social experience will be. We can get tokens by watching dramas, and use these tokens to increase the exposure of our memes in the plot, manipulate traffic to gain revenue. We can support our favorite actors and communicate with them face to face and at a negative distance. We can even insert ourselves into the crew as an insignificant extra to satisfy our cosplay desire. This kind of experience cannot be achieved by Web2 without a sense of participation.
All we need is technical support such as more convenient login, lower content storage costs, and lower latency.
The mission of Web3
Web3 is not the Guanyin who saves people from suffering, nor is it the Messiah who saves the world. The bottom line of the Web3 revolution is liberalism. There is nothing wrong with gambling, and there is nothing wrong with paying for friends. It is human nature to watch addictive short videos. God gave people choices, and we at Web3 are also here to provide more choices. The wide gate, the narrow gate, hell and heaven, are all in people's minds. Our mission at Web3 is to return the rights taken away by centralization to every natural person.
Conclusion
Web3 social networking is not a scam, but Web3 is not a childish experiment. (Even my Web3 social networking concept was laughed at by some friends as a typical childish experiment, but the success of the industry is crawling out of these ridiculous failures.)
At present, the dilemma of web3 social networking comes from the immaturity of technology, and our costs have not been reduced to a low enough level. Compared with web2, our recommendation mechanism is still like a baby. On the other hand, we hold high the banner of respecting creators, but in the organizational form of the industry, the technology platform is still the core. Social networking must be centered on human nature, and respecting human nature alone cannot generate cold start traffic. Therefore, borrowing traffic from content has become a common means in the industry. I predict that the future social media will be centered on content publishers, users and related service providers.
In addition, we have not yet concluded how to use Web3 technology to enhance the interactivity of user social interaction. Interactivity is an important attribute of Web3 social networking in addition to autonomy and anti-censorship. How to make good use of interactivity and enhance the user's social experience will be the key to the success or failure of Web3 social networking in the future. Finding how content and communities can better interact in the new environment built by decentralized technology will determine whether Web3 can gather traffic and be truly implemented.
references:
Social Nature: The Three Driving Forces of Human Socialization
https://www.amazon.com/Social Nature: The Three Driving Forces of Human Socialization-Chinese-Matthew Lieberman-ebook/dp/B01GDYPZVA
The Social Nature: Mark Zuckerberg's Business Secrets
https://www.amazon.com/The Essence of Social: Zuckerberg's Business Secrets - Randy Zuckerberg/dp/B01F2VKI6C
Analysis of individual behavior of social network users from a psychological perspective
https://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/CN/10.3724/SP.J.1042.2014.01647
How to break social fatigue? Exploring the current status and future of Web3.0 social products
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hf9ethw72RAdP3CAewZ_VA
From "content mining" to building an open social data layer using "social inscriptions"
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/y8MK36HWJdti26qGgFj8OA
Social Economy
https://annas-archive.org/md5/c42b6c5eab48808e87d3ebcd9eec151e
"How does the decentralized social network Bluesky work?"
https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_16432.html
Overview of Web3 social protocol Lens Protocol: operation mode, ecology and prospects
https://cn.cointelegraph.com/news/lens-protocol-overview
Crypto Pop: The Birth of Meme Wealth
https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_16831.html
The Rise of Decentralized Social Networks
https://outlierventures.io/article/the-rise-of-decentralised-social-networks-why-web3-founders-are-paying-attention-to-the-new-wave-of-decentralised-social-networks/
