Silent Places Awaiting Thunder: The Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social

Author: Armonio, AC Capital

Preface:

Recent discussions around Web3 have been filled with negativity. To both insiders and outsiders, it seems that Web3 is just a large field of speculators, where the relationships between exchanges, project teams, institutions, and ordinary investors are characterized by mutual exploitation. Some friends from Web2 have bluntly told me: "Web3 social is just a scam!"

In my view, Ponzi schemes are neutral; they are a financing technique that reduces project operational costs and a means to support projects on their path to success. Whether in DeFi, social, or other sectors, there have always been builders who continue to strive. As long as the pace of progress has not stopped, the Web3 revolution has not failed. All technological innovations emerge in waves. A short-term downturn in Web3 technology emergence is not enough to prove that the industry lacks prospects. We firmly believe in the power of crypto and look forward to a decentralized future.

In today's environment where the Web3 industry is under scrutiny, this article aims to outline the achievements of Web3 builders in the social domain over the past eight years, across two cycles, from the author's perspective, summarizing experiences and lessons learned while seeking potential opportunities and blueprints.

In my opinion, although Web3 social has not yet reached its full potential, the achievements in the industry's development are still noteworthy. Different people have different expectations for Web3; some seek better experiences and more enjoyable distractions, while others need to protect their personal data sovereignty more comprehensively. As Web3 technology continues to advance and the barriers and costs decrease, the emergence of genuine products may very well be happening right now.

The Underlying Demand Theory of Web3 Social

Any successful product is built on solid demand. One of the most criticized aspects of Web3 projects is their inability to integrate with the real economy. To break the stereotype that "Web3 is just about exploiting others," we need to fundamentally prove the demand for social interaction in Web3.

Humans are social animals with social needs. This conclusion has been repeatedly validated by social products.

People need to establish connections with others, perceive others' emotions, attitudes, and mental activities through these connections, and obtain feedback to adjust their own emotions and cognition. This need is as fundamental as eating, drinking, and breathing; it is ingrained in our genes through thousands of years of evolution. This is the basic demand for social interaction, which can be summarized as connection, mental interpretation, and self-coordination.

Holding tokens is a new way of connecting. Open and verifiable databases expand the dimensions of information we can gain from connections. A new information environment will foster new social relationships and interaction methods.

We see that most social behaviors on the internet can be attributed to psychological motivations such as the need for self-presentation, emotional release, and seeking validation. Compared to traditional offline socializing, the internet has created more social scenarios through multimedia. The internet has evolved from forums, BBS, and chat rooms to blogs, instant messaging (IM), social media, and gaming spaces. China's bilibili even creatively introduced bullet comments. New scenarios, encompassing different interpersonal networks, diverse content, and presentation styles, have led to the success of numerous projects.

Looking at the development of internet socialization, economies of scale are a significant feature. Historical experience tells us that social projects or products that cannot establish economies of scale in social activities among specific groups of people for specific purposes cannot survive.

Compared to the millions of concurrent users of global Web2 social giants, the scale of Web3 social is even less than a fraction of that. Economies of scale are a mountain; if they cannot be formed in a specific scenario, one cannot escape the fate of subsidizing to death. The scale of social networks and content determines whether social nature and motivations can be better realized. How can products without scale help users expand their social relationships? How can they achieve personal presentation and empathize with others?

The direction of Web3's development has been set since the concept was proposed: it is supported by a trustworthy open data environment and a financial environment backed by tokens. How can such an environment foster a new industrial landscape? With underlying information support across databases and organizations, the ability to freely choose front-end, composable, and pluggable social interfaces is a unique advantage of Web3 social. Tokens are a typical feature of Web3; using social interactions to support token issuance and quantifying rights interactions with tokens as the core content, organizing social relationships is a unique application scenario for Web3 social.

In recent years, the Web3 industry has indeed put in a lot of effort to gain scale advantages in the local social market.

The Development Context of Web3 Social

This chapter aims to demonstrate that Web3 social has been continuously progressing, and to illustrate that the accumulated experiences and lessons of the industry, along with ongoing technological advancements, are pushing us closer to the singularity of industry explosion.

Thanks to the advantages provided by the Web3 environment for entrepreneurs, the development of social projects has shown two parallel trends:

1. How to develop decentralized social technology standards.

2. How to establish token consensus through social interactions.

Competition for Decentralized Social Technology Standards

If we believe that humans are social animals, then our information input determines what kind of person we are. Therefore, the power of internet social platforms is immense. We cannot imagine the severe consequences of handing this power over to companies and governments. Losing sovereignty over social information means losing freedom of cognition and choice. The Cambridge Analytica scandal involving Facebook has shown us how easily our will can be manipulated. We and our descendants need to control our own data sovereignty. Thus, decentralized social technology solutions are a necessity for the future.

To achieve decentralized social, breakthroughs must be made in communication protocols, data, and applications. The communication technology used by blockchain to achieve global consensus may not be suitable for decentralized social communication. Therefore, based on the experiences of STEEM, new projects like Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, and Farcaster have proposed their own decentralized social protocols. By sacrificing some degree of data decentralization, all protocols have made significant progress. On any protocol, imitating Web2 social tools is no longer an issue; in fact, decentralization enhances user autonomy. Users have the power to maintain their intangible assets within the system. However, as mentioned earlier, Web3's business faces a significant scale disadvantage.

Technology is not the problem. The challenge for all solution-proposing projects is how to remove the mountain of economies of scale on the road to success. To penetrate this disadvantage, token incentives have become the most direct means for the vast majority of projects in the short term.

Token Incentive Revolution Faces Obstacles

The birth of tokens is like opening Pandora's box. From the moment all Web3 users enter the industry, they are forced to confront a complex financial environment. For project teams, using tokens allows them to leverage users' desires as subsidies, reducing operational costs.

The revolution of token incentives in social environments faces two major dilemmas:

1. The subjective value of social content is difficult to judge, raising doubts about the effectiveness of token incentives.

2. Token incentives face witch attacks.

These two issues have not been completely resolved to this day. Let's introduce a case to help us understand.

The STEEM blockchain can be considered a pioneer in the entire Web3 social industry. To this day, many of its proposed concepts and structural designs continue to be imitated and referenced by current projects, and it has nurtured a number of blockchain application teams and projects. In 2016, the STEEM blockchain initially made innovative attempts in multiple dimensions, including token-incentivized content, token-incentivized real-person curation, data availability layers, and account-layered security.

Applications built on the STEEM blockchain are social media platforms where the content quality is determined by users weighted by the amount of tokens staked. In the early stages of the project, the founding team had absolute advantages in both reputation and the amount of staked tokens. At that time, content production and filtering recommendations based on token staking weight were effective. Like the vast majority of projects using token incentives, the enormous wealth effect attracted a swarm of witches. However, the token staking of the STEEM blockchain included punitive powers, which could somewhat immunize against witch attacks.

This effectiveness was built on a foundation of asset and power centralization and strong consensus. When founder BM left, the founding team fell apart, and the project was sold to the infamous Justin Sun, consensus collapsed. Initially, the collapse of consensus led more individuals to choose witch attacks for profit: token holders liked each other's posts, and proxy mining ran rampant. Later, as algorithmic recommendation systems and AIGC technology matured, the content production and recommendation system based on token-weighted voting reached its moment of exit from the historical stage. Today's leading social media platforms have achieved user-generated content that is tailored to each individual, a level of refined content curation that cannot be matched by human resources and simple content tagging.

After STEEM, many projects have used token issuance to accelerate platform scale expansion, like Torum, BBS, and any project aiming for scale has adopted token incentives. Of course, there are also projects like Lens protocol that aim for expected free riding. These incentives violate the "non-monetary reward" element of social interaction. Experiments have shown that external material rewards diminish internal psychological rewards, leading to the mixing of non-social content in social interactions. Social connections are information channels, and the value of social platforms lies in aggregating information within these channels. However, this sand-mixing incentive has resulted in lower social efficiency, making it natural for decline to occur.

On platforms like Farcaster, Degen distributes a portion of tokens through rewards. This utilizes the unique financial functions of meme tokens in Web3 social projects (rather than content creation or recommendation) to create wealth effects and trigger ecological prosperity. A platform can only have one token, but it can have countless meme tokens. Meme tokens may fail, but platform tokens cannot. Using meme tokens to boost social projects will become a superior technique for token incentive platform projects. The wealth topics of Degen, combined with the innovative possibilities on Frames, have attracted more builders to participate in Farcaster, triggering ecological prosperity. So far, I personally believe this is a classic operational battle. The ecological emergence brought about by this operation cannot be ignored. To date, the ecosystem has produced tools including NFT piggy banks, various streaming media (voice chat rooms, short videos, GIFs), and launching platforms. Although I have not seen signs of Farcaster breaking through Lens's business boundaries (the current industry bottleneck), this emergence is worth paying close attention to.

Content Autonomy Revolution's Periodic Setbacks

Web3 advocates for decentralization, which in business terms means breaking monopolies.

The starting point for Web3 social should be around 2016-2017. At that time, Web2 social products were thriving. In the previous two cycles, social projects were narrating the autonomy of content. Various projects attempted to "put content on-chain," and based on this, they could work on content assetization.

Born in 2016, STEEM fell behind due to the disintegration of its project team and delays in development. Although it had already achieved content on-chain at the time of launch, it lacked an EVM environment and could not run smart contracts, gradually falling behind after the DeFi summer that began in 2020. The crown of content on-chain was handed over to Mirror. Mirror's selling point is that it provides a user-friendly text content editing environment. Users can publish their text content by signing with their wallets. Content is on-chain and cannot be tampered with. Other users can subscribe to and follow specific accounts. They can also mint content as NFTs and trade them in the NFT market. To date, this project continues to operate, though traffic has declined, but some Degen players still use the project to publish content and engage in NFT minting activities.

Mirror is an excellent Web3 product, embodying the spirit of minimalism and making great use of a trustworthy and open database. Anyone can assert rights over content data on the internet through wallet signatures. Rights-protected content can issue NFTs and be traded in the NFTfi environment under the EVM. The user attrition of Mirror is essentially due to the fact that, compared to traditional Web2 content operators, it not only lacks operational capability but also faces the inherent challenge that text content, especially lengthy articles, lacks traffic and is a discarded remnant of the era of junk culture. During the same period, there were also projects attempting to put audio and video content on-chain. Without discussing the ineffectiveness of content incentives, the sheer volume of data made it difficult for project operational costs to be sustainable. Doing content business is akin to running a media operation. Either you have good content to attract users, or you have a large user base to attract good content. Simply providing a technical solution cannot become a viable business.

At the end of 2013, another content-based project emerged. Bodhi was also a minimalist product. Inspired by Friend.tech, Bodhi no longer minted NFTs for related content at a uniform price but instead used bonding curve technology to sell at varying prices; the more sold, the higher the price. There were also projects like CloudBit that forcibly replicated Web2 content on the blockchain to generate NFT assets. There are many similar projects attempting to transform content into rights-protected assets. However, they cannot change the fact that in the internet age, while content can be rights-protected, the information it carries can easily be transferred. Even in cases of direct theft or infringement, putting content on-chain does little to increase the cost of violations. Therefore, directly issuing assets based on content as a value anchor has yet to yield good cases.

Another reason for the market's insensitivity to content assetization is simply timing. While rationality tells us that personal information is valuable, users do not seem to care much about their own content sovereignty.

The New Journey of Attention Sovereignty: The Development of Content Recommendation Systems

The emergence of STEEM has encouraged and inspired a number of blockchain projects. One of STEEM's main ideas is to rank content using votes weighted by the amount of tokens staked, establishing a list. This idea has been repeatedly referenced by different projects since then.

A project more inclined towards content recommendation is Yup, which exists as a social plugin. By issuing tokens, it incentivizes users to interact with content through this Web3 plugin. Using this interaction information, along with token staking weights, it repositions and reorganizes content from other Web2 platforms under its own list.

Wormhole3 is also a content recommendation type of plugin. Unlike Yup, it supports using multiple tokens as incentives for content recommendations. The entire incentive process is implemented in code. Different incentive tokens have independent label lists on Wormhole3's official website, achieving diversification in content recommendations. In Wormhole3's model, it is assumed that holders of different tokens belong to corresponding communities, and the amount of tokens staked determines their voice within the community channel. A portion of the token distribution power is also controlled by this voice.

Projects like Matters, Torum, BBS, and CoinHoo, which have all attempted token-incentivized content list recommendations, have faced failure. The essence of the issue lies in the inability of token-incentivized list recommendations to capture attention. In the attention market, the previous generation's simple sorting + tagging content recommendations have struggled to compete with intelligent algorithmic content recommendations. As an advertising system, Web3 projects, in pursuit of decentralization and programmability, find that immature algorithms for pricing ad placements are actually less precise than Web2's professional algorithms. The monopolistic nature of the advertising market is not as strong as that of centralized exchanges. Therefore, projects like QuestN and RSS3, which utilize data to influence content distribution, have ultimately shifted direction.

Experience and lessons tell us that even with low-cost token incentives, they must be advanced production methods. Phavor continues to rely on Web3's database to serve as a cross-database recommendation middleware; content recommendation systems are necessary components of any social media. Token incentives are not the key to Web3's recommendation systems, but the structure of token holdings 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 to airdrops, the cost of on-chain social interactions is extremely low, leading to witch arbitrage attacks.

Controlling content recommendations with tokens implies a power logic where attention is held by organizations rather than individuals. I personally believe that distributing content according to organizational needs resembles organizational communication platforms like DingTalk and Feishu. Rather than being social tools, they are tools for DAOs, where all voting reflects power. Trustlessly managing organizational power is undoubtedly an advantage of blockchain and Web3, as seen in the current market with content recommendation incentives based on organizations (platforms or communities).

The social tools favored by ordinary people have been replaced by attention schemes targeting individuals. Currently, any new generation of social media pushes content based on individual preferences, adjusting recommendations according to each person's likes and dislikes at every moment. If we advocate for 1V1 content delivery, then on-chain information should serve more as the original data for content and user tagging.

Here, we should mention the "subscription stream generator" created by BlueSky. It is a combination of recommendation algorithms and communication protocols. Anyone can provide their own self-developed recommendation algorithms for the permissive protocol. Users can subscribe to their favorite recommendation algorithms based on their needs.

Debank's social module has great potential. Although many people use Debank as a data tool, its introduction of badges and account displays combined with streams has reached heights that many projects focused solely on badges cannot achieve. Players who have long engaged with NFTs certainly have more valuable information about NFTs than others. How can a user who does not participate in DeFi provide guidance to others in DeFi? As on-chain activities increase, using accounts to correct user data and content data based on on-chain behavior will enhance the accuracy of the entire content recommendation system. Debank currently lacks an effective recommendation system, but its early accumulation will help it occupy a high ground in recommendation systems.

Overall, the current state of decentralized social development is:

1. The strategy of scaling token incentives has not been successful; there has yet to be a distinct user group that highlights scale advantages.

2. Content on-chain, allowing users to own their social assets, does not matter to users in the absence of scale.

3. The content recommendation system continues to develop, showing signs of hope after multiple iterations. If we can create a social product that better serves users with on-chain interactions, it will be the first step towards the realization of decentralized social projects.

Among Web3 users, I believe we can find unique scale advantages for Web3 social. The greatest advantage is the involvement of tokens, which not only introduces finance but, more importantly, allows for the formation of new relationships and interaction possibilities based on tokens.

In this context, I want to highlight two positive trends:

• TGbot: Directly integrating trading into social interactions. The seamless connection between social and trading is very suitable for users' impulsive buying habits. Actions speak louder than words. Previous online behaviors could not become social interactions, but now they can.

• Farcaster: Introducing asset issuance into social scenario platforms. Instead of searching for Alpha on Twitter, investors can communicate directly on Farcaster and form communities. More teams are willing to migrate their projects to Farcaster, and the emergence of projects is happening.

Tokenization of Social Assets

Another evolutionary path for Web3 social is to use social interactions for token issuance. For projects, tokens are a means of financing. For users, tokens can also be seen as a product. Tokens are a financial product. Issuing tokens is relatively easy; the challenge lies in how to establish a consensus on the value of tokens in the market and how to ensure token liquidity.

Establishing Value Consensus through Social Interaction:

How to get the market to recognize the value of tokens is a form of crypto alchemy that every project team wants to understand. Historical experience provides three formulas.

Tokenization of Attention:

Tokenization of attention is the secret to meme coins. How to create attention and the elements of token attention: content, KOLs, communities, and wealth effects. The first three points are all related to social interaction. Whether it is Farcaster's frames framework directly embedding social commerce (tokens) into the platform, ERC404's integration of content and tokens, or Donut's attempt to put recommendation relationships on-chain, all enhance the meme quality of token issuance from various technical perspectives.

The consensus around meme tokens is easy to establish but difficult to sustain. Without considering external environments, meme tokens lack consumers; they establish asset liquidity. Unless meme tokens are listed on centralized exchanges, transforming from ownerless tokens to owner tokens (centralized exchanges must have market makers), meme tokens will inevitably fall into an irretrievable spiral of value and liquidity collapse once the peak of attention passes.

Tokenization of Social Relationships:

If meme tokens, which link cultural value to token value, feel intangible to ordinary people, then injecting the value of social relationships into tokens is much more grounded. Even without discussing Web3 or the internet, in economics, "relationships" are also a form of capital. The tokenization of social relationship capital is a natural consideration.

The first time I became aware of the tokenization of social relationships was through DAOs. DAO projects have a broad definition of DAOs, and in the market's general perception, DAOs are often reduced to tiered organizations governed by token mechanisms. Holding my tokens means being part of my community; holding different tokens or varying amounts of tokens grants different rights. The rights attached to tokens are the permissions within this organization. Whether it is FWB, which sells high-end social connections (where obtaining identity relies on an application and approval process and requires a fee), or the Moonbird DAO, which revolves around quality investment information, both start from the permission of social relationships to establish token value. The recently emerged Friend.tech is also exploring along this line. Compared to traditional organizations that build large organizational bodies, Friend.tech specifically targets the small-scale organization market. From its bonding curve pricing, it is evident that once a group exceeds 200 members, the cost of adding each new member becomes very high. This is in stark contrast to the earlier model of establishing organizations of thousands through NFT minting and listing.

Tokenization of Content:

The essential difference between content tokenization and content-assisted attention tokenization lies in the emphasis on the relationship between tokens and content ownership. From earlier products like Mirror and Paragraph to the current Lens and Farcaster, there has never been a neglect of the assetization function of content ownership. From a technical perspective, this function is quite simple. Yet, in reality, no one applies it. Copyright is a real-world asset issue. This ownership transitions from off-chain to on-chain. When there is significant uncertainty regarding on-chain ownership, and when on-chain ownership only increases the cost of rights protection, these functions become mere decorations. Only when most rights protection activities migrate to the blockchain, the paths for rights protection mature, and economies of scale are realized will content tokenization demonstrate economic value.

Content tokenization also lacks wealth effects and cannot accelerate industry maturity through wealth effects. In a society flooded with AIGC, content is not scarce; rather, attention is. The lack of scarcity hinders wealth effects.

Bonding Curve Solving Liquidity:

While bonding curves are not an innovation based on social interaction, they solve the liquidity cost issues for small-scale projects. The steep version of the bonding curve proposed by Friend.tech not only creates wealth effects under small-scale funding but also significantly reduces the operational costs of providing liquidity for personal tokens. Therefore, we see many projects experimenting with new pricing curves in their respective fields. Some small-scale influential cases include Bodhi's bonding curve for content valuation and DeBox's bonding curve for community asset issuance.

Although the operational rhythm issues of Friend.tech led to its attention being overtaken by Farcaster later on, the impact of bonding curves is profound. The attempts made by FT have shown us that for different token application scenarios, there will always be more suitable bonding curves. Every bonding curve has its pros and cons, and it is essential to choose the appropriate curve based on the actual situation. The V2 of Friend.tech also aligns with this consensus, attempting to issue assets in multi-centered, networked communities while adding a steeper bonding curve.

Pump.fun has effectively invented a segmented bonding curve; when fundraising does not reach $20,000, it adopts a steep bonding curve, and once fundraising reaches $20,000, it directly transitions to a conventional decentralized exchange. This is also an innovation in liquidity provision.

In summary, over the course of two cycles, Web3 social has conducted rich experiments across multiple fields and perspectives.

Opportunities and Missions of Web3 Social

Throughout these two cycles, although Web3 social has continuously explored and faced failures on a rugged path, progress is still evident:

Our front end has transitioned from PC to mobile, from apps to progressive web applications. Wallet logins have evolved from mnemonic phrases to MPC and abstract accounts. The barriers for users to log into Web3 social are getting lower. Advances in blockchain infrastructure have not only geometrically reduced accounting costs but also enabled transactions to be completed almost instantly. Builders of social protocol layers, in pursuit of usable decentralized social, have even actively constructed layer3s suitable for their characteristics, determining the degree of decentralization of information based on its trusted importance. Network expansion has directly enhanced user experience, accommodating more concurrent information from text to multimedia.

Embedded social scenarios are also an innovative attempt by the industry. Being open-source projects and databases, they inherently possess a Lego-like combinability without the need for permission. We can now embed any interaction into social contexts (for example, we can directly buy and sell NFTs within social platforms) and also embed social interactions into any engagement (like integrating a social tool into a game).

We have also made significant achievements in middleware, integrating, analyzing, and tagging various on-chain data, managing token behaviors based on game theory, and providing diverse liquidity solutions.

Compared to the previous cycle, our infrastructure and tools are more refined, the number of Web3 natives is increasing, and meme tokens that are closer to user understanding are continuously educating potential users through various waves of NFTs.

Social innovation is not a dead end; every era always has challengers. For instance, the recently launched ReelShort focuses on attracting users with melodramatic short dramas, allowing a host, an MCN, or a media company to create their own social media platform at a low cost. With suitable recommendation algorithms to drive traffic, a federated network structure can be formed.

To put it plainly, this may sound dry and lacking in imagery, but let us combine it with the traffic password and the blueprint I envision.

Dopamine, the Opium of the Masses, the Antidote of Web3

The previous discussions have been conventionally based on the development of social interactions within the Web3 industry. Placing it within the overall competitive landscape of social products, including using social to issue meme coins, feels as simple as a novice. Let me showcase the social scenarios I have observed to the good kids.

Since the emergence of streaming media, we have basically seen no pure social platforms based on text and images.

Even within streaming media, fierce competition exists.

What content do we see on the most popular short video platforms? Dominant CEOs falling in love with me, late-night swings, and "I drink alone." Do you see any content that speaks human language on Farcaster, STEEM, or Mirror? If it were for leisure, not for some Web3 ideals or ridiculous airdrop profits, I wouldn't waste a second. Yes, the development of Web3 social has deviated, but it's not the technology's fault. The threshold for massive adoption of technology is being approached. To achieve massive adoption of Web3 social, we need to connect Web3 social with content.

What we originally thought was to introduce content was to airdrop to content creators, giving a bunch of creators who cannot generate traffic substantial incentives, under the guise of breaking platform monopolies. In reality, 1% of super KOLs create 90% of the traffic but do not receive the rewards they deserve.

In the social domain, some technical details are not that important. For example, if one day TikTok decides to use its self-developed wallet for login, whether it uses MPC or AA is not that crucial. Whoever has traffic is king. Whoever possesses content that can generate traffic owns the flow. Is there a possibility that the organizational structure of the industry is not operated by technology-driven protocols or projects like a "Web2" platform, but rather that each content creator occupies a central position in a small economic cycle, freely choosing protocols and tools suitable for their content business, and then organically combining all protocols and tools, allowing other social participants to engage in their economic cycle through tokens?

This typical fan economy has already taken shape in real life:

A high-end "heterosexual emotional masseuse" may simultaneously own a Twitter account, a TG group, an OnlyFans channel, and a Pornhub channel. Their product positioning in front of consumers is not simply as a hooker providing sexual needs but as a comprehensive SEX dream solution provider that addresses sexual fantasies. These workers establish their private traffic through social media, guiding payment habits by selling their limited short videos and live streaming hours, and then monetizing traffic through girlfriend experiences and role-playing services. Social media and content have provided these individuals with multiple times of labor value, while the traffic brought by self-media has helped them escape platform exploitation.

Another recent example is Zaiko, a live-streaming sales platform in Japan. The platform itself also employs decentralized technology, allowing artists to issue NFTs. The platform's founder was a successful entrepreneur who had established business relationships with many artists in Japan before this project, so Zaiko has no shortage of users. Today, a single live stream on Zaiko can generate millions of dollars in sales. Decentralized technology has already begun to change our social landscape from another end.

We have always talked about reclaiming the platform's monopoly over content value; the most direct method is to let content establish platforms, with links formed between platforms through third-party curation or recommendation tools. Let us envision a possible blueprint for Web3.

Blueprint for Web3 Social

A certain capital invests heavily to hire a sensational writer to create a melodramatic script titled "Back to 2010: I Stirred Waves in the Crypto World," incorporating these dopamine and hormone-driven traffic factors. Before the script is completed, they boldly claim that the screenwriter has gone bankrupt and fled. The project then continues to progress, starting filming. To evade regulation, the project adopts decentralized media solutions (like Farcaster + Livepeer) and airdrops content tokens to early viewers. Users holding a certain amount of tokens can influence the plot, participate in voting to decide new character actors, and get early access to new episodes and various merchandise. In certain regions, we can even sell customized products like the main character's outfits and real estate directly in the show through frames; the protagonists in the plot have their own fan tokens and communicate on Friend.tech or their self-built fan systems. If they need chat services, exclusive videos, or companionship services, they can negotiate separately. The passionate videos in the plot require corresponding fan tokens + content tokens to unlock. The new coins issued in the plot are simultaneously released in reality through pump.fun. The independent streaming media for this show sells or rents its overflow traffic through curation tools like Tako and Phavor. These short videos, after being edited for compliance, are simultaneously released on Web2 platforms.

As a Web3 user, we can imagine how great our social experience would be. We could earn tokens while watching the show, using these tokens to increase the exposure of the memes we hold in the plot, manipulating traffic for profit. We could support our favorite actors and communicate face-to-face with them. We might even insert ourselves into the production as insignificant extras, satisfying our cosplay desires. This experience is something that Web2, which lacks participatory elements, cannot achieve.

What we need are merely more convenient logins, lower content storage costs, and lower latency, supported by technology.

The Mission of Web3

Web3 is neither a savior nor a messiah. The foundation of the Web3 revolution is liberalism. Gambling is not wrong, and paying for friendship is certainly acceptable; watching addictive short clips is a common human behavior. God gives people choices, and we in Web3 aim to provide more choices. The wide door, the narrow door, hell, and heaven all lie within people's thoughts. Our mission in Web3 is to return the rights taken away by centralization to every individual, without embellishing ourselves or imposing our ideals on others.

Conclusion:

Web3 social is not a scam, but Web3 is also not a child's play experiment. (Even my Web3 social concept has been jokingly referred to by some friends as typical child's play, but the success of the industry emerges from these seemingly ridiculous failures.)

Currently, the dilemmas of Web3 social stem partly from technological immaturity; our costs have not yet dropped low enough. Compared to Web2, our recommendation mechanisms are still like infants. On the other hand, while we hold high the banner of respecting creators, we still center the organizational form of the industry around technological platforms. Social interaction must revolve around humanity; merely respecting humanity cannot generate cold-start traffic. Therefore, borrowing traffic from content has become a common means in the industry. I predict that future social media will center around content issuers, surrounding users and related service providers.

Moreover, we have yet to conclude how to use Web3 technology to enhance user social interactivity. Interactivity is an important attribute of Web3 social, alongside autonomy and resistance to censorship. How to effectively utilize interactivity to enhance users' social experiences will be key to the success or failure of future Web3 social. Finding ways for content and communities to better interact in the new environment built on decentralized technology will determine whether Web3 can gather traffic and truly take root.