Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social

Recently, the Web3 industry has been filled with negativity in public opinion, as if it has become a large field for harvesting retail investors. However, in my opinion, the Ponzi model is a neutral financing technique that reduces project operational costs. Whether in DeFi, social, or other sectors, there are builders who continue to strive. As long as the pace of progress does not stop, the Web3 revolution has not failed. All technological innovations occur in an emergent manner, and short-term lows are insufficient to deny the industry's prospects.

Although Web3 social has not yet fully matured, its development achievements are noteworthy. Different people have different expectations for Web3; some hope for a better experience, while others need protection of personal data sovereignty. With technological advancements, lower barriers and costs, the emergence of real products may be happening right now.

The Underlying Demand Theory of Web3 Social

Successful products are built on solid demand. As social animals, humans have social needs; they need to establish connections, perceive others, and receive feedback. Holding tokens is a brand new way of linking, and an open and verifiable database expands the dimensions of available information. This will nurture entirely new social relationships and modes of interaction.

Motivations for Internet social behavior: self-presentation, emotional expression, seeking recognition. The Internet has created more social scenarios, such as forums, instant messaging, social media, etc. Economies of scale are a significant feature of Internet socialization; projects that cannot establish economies of scale find it difficult to survive.

The scale of Web3 social interactions is far less than that of Web2 giants. How to gain scale advantages in localized markets is a challenge for the industry. The unique advantages of Web3 lie in cross-database, composable social interfaces, and interactive scenarios that quantify rights with tokens.

The Development Context of Web3 Social

Web3 social shows two development trends: decentralized social technology standards and establishing token consensus through social interactions.

Competition of Decentralized Social Technology Standards

Losing control over social information sovereignty means losing cognitive and choice freedom. Decentralized social technology solutions are a necessity. Next-generation projects like Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, and Farcaster propose their own protocols, making significant progress by sacrificing some decentralized attributes.

Technology is not the problem; overcoming the disadvantage of scale is the challenge. Token incentives have become a direct means, but face two major dilemmas: the subjective value of social content is difficult to assess, and the effectiveness of incentives is questionable; they are also vulnerable to witch attacks.

STEEM is a pioneer in Web3 social media, and its concepts and design are still referenced today. However, after the collapse of consensus, it faced witch attacks, and the token-weighted content production and recommendation system gradually became ineffective.

Content self-revolution stage setbacks

Various projects attempted to put content "on-chain", but the work on content assetization has not seen any results. Projects like Mirror have achieved content on-chain and NFT minting, but traffic continues to decline. Content rights confirmation can be realized, but the information carried by the content is easily transferable, and the cost of infringement has not increased.

The New Journey of Attention Sovereignty

Content recommendation systems are continuously evolving. Projects like Yup and Wormhole3 are attempting to incentivize content list recommendations using tokens, but struggle to compete with intelligent algorithms. Experience shows that it is essential to incentivize advanced production methods, and the participation of on-chain data in system decision-making is the essential difference between Web3 and Web2 recommendation systems.

BlueSky's "Subscription Stream Generator" combines recommendation algorithms and communication protocols, allowing users to subscribe to self-developed algorithms. The Debank social module, combined with on-chain behavior data, helps enhance the accuracy of recommendations.

Social Asset Tokenization

Using social networks for token issuance is another evolutionary path. Attention tokenization, social relationship tokenization, and content tokenization are the three main methods. Bonding curves address the liquidity issues of small-scale projects, and projects like Friend.tech innovate based on this.

Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social

After two cycles of exploration, Web3 social has made progress in many areas: lowering user thresholds, reducing transaction costs, improving social protocol layers, and innovating embedded social scenarios. However, to achieve mass adoption, more content innovation is needed.

The future of Web3 social networks may be an ecosystem centered around content publishers, built around users and related service providers. How to effectively utilize interactivity and enhance user experience will be the key to the success or failure of Web3 social.

The mission of Web3 is to return the rights taken away by centralization to everyone, providing more choices for people. We should not impose our ideals on others, but rather respect everyone's choices.