Author: Armonio, AC Capital
Twitter: @armonio_liang
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Recently, the public opinion on Web3 has been filled with hostility. In the eyes of insiders and outsiders, it seems that Web3 is just a large-scale "leek field," and the relationship between exchanges, project parties, institutions, and ordinary investors is one of mutual exploitation. There are even friends from Web2 who bluntly told me, "Web3 social is just a scam!"
However, in my view, Ponzi is neutral, a financing technology that reduces project operating costs, and a means of safeguarding the ultimate success of the project. Whether it's DeFi, social, or other tracks, there have always been builders who continue to strive. As long as the forward momentum has not stopped, the Web3 revolution has not failed. All technological innovations occur emergently. A short-term low point in Web3 technology emergence is not enough to prove that the industry lacks prospects. We firmly believe in the power of encryption and look forward to a decentralized future.
In today's questioning of the Web3 industry, this article aims to, from a developmental perspective and from the author's point of view, sort out the achievements of Web3 builders in the social field over the past eight years and two cycles, organize experiences and lessons, and seek potential opportunities and blueprints. In my opinion, although Web3 social has not yet matured, the industry's development achievements are still commendable. For Web3, different people have different expectations; some hope for a better experience, to obtain better spiritual opiates, while others need to protect more complete personal data sovereignty. As Web3 technology continues to advance and the threshold and costs continue to decrease, truly innovative products may emerge at this moment.
The underlying demand theory of Web3 social
Any successful product is built on a solid foundation of needs. One of the most criticized aspects of Web3 projects is the inability to integrate with the real economy. To break the bias that "Web3 is just a leek field," we need to fundamentally prove the demand for social interaction in Web3.
Humans are social animals with social needs. This conclusion has been repeatedly demonstrated by social products.
People need to establish connections with others, perceive others' emotions, attitudes, and psychological activities through these connections, and obtain feedback to adjust their own emotions and cognition. This need, like eating, drinking, and breathing, is something that people cannot do without, something that has been ingrained in our genes over thousands of years. This is the basic need for social interaction, in short, it is about connections, mental interpretation, and self-coordination.
Holding tokens is a new way of connecting. An open and verifiable database expands the dimensions of information we can obtain from connections. A completely new information environment will nurture completely new social relationships and interactions.
We see that the psychological motivations behind most social behaviors on the Internet can be attributed to the need for self-presentation, emotional release, and seeking recognition. Compared to traditional offline social interactions, the online world has created more social scenarios through multimedia. As the Internet has evolved, from forums, BBS, chat rooms to blogs, instant messaging (IM), social media, and gaming spaces. China's Bilibili even creatively introduced bullet comments. These new scenarios, with different interpersonal networks, different content, and presentation methods, have created a batch of successful projects.
Looking at the development of Internet social interactions, economies of scale are a significant feature. Historical experience tells us that it is impossible to survive in social projects or products within a specific group of people and for a specific purpose without establishing economies of scale.
Compared to the millions of concurrent users of global Web2 social giants, the scale of Web3 social interactions is not even a fraction of that. Economies of scale are a huge obstacle, and without achieving economies of scale in social networks and content, the natural social tendencies and motivations cannot be better realized. How can products without scale help users expand their social relationships? How can they showcase themselves and empathize with others?
The development direction of Web3 has been set since the concept was proposed. In short, it is an industry ecosystem supported by a trusted open data environment and a financial environment supported by tokens. How does such an environment nurture a completely new industrial structure? With underlying information support across databases and organizations, a freely selectable, composable, and pluggable social interface is the unique advantage of Web3 social interactions. Tokens are a typical feature of Web3, and using social support for token issuance, with token-quantified interactive rights as the core of content, organizing social relationships is a unique application scenario for Web3 social interactions.
In recent years, the Web3 industry has spared no effort to gain scale advantages in the local social market.
The development context of Web3 social
This chapter aims to prove that Web3 social interactions have always been progressing, and to illustrate that the industry's accumulated experience and lessons, along with continuous technological advancements, are pushing us closer to the industry's tipping point.
Driven by the advantages provided by the Web3 environment for entrepreneurs, the development of social projects has presented two parallel trends:
- How to develop decentralized social technology standards
- How to establish token consensus through social interactions
Competition in decentralized social technology standards
If we consider humans as social animals, our information input determines the kind of person we are. Therefore, the power of Internet social platforms is immensely significant. We dare not imagine the serious consequences of handing over this power to companies and governments. If we lose sovereignty over social information, we also lose the freedom of cognition and choice. The personal data leak scandal led by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook tells us how easily our will can be manipulated. We and our descendants need to control our own data sovereignty. Therefore, in the future, decentralized social technology solutions are a necessity.
To achieve decentralized social interactions, breakthroughs must be made in communication protocols, data, and applications. The communication technology used by blockchain to achieve global consensus may not necessarily be suitable for decentralized social communication. Therefore, based on the experience of STEEM, the new generation of projects such as Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, and Farcaster have each proposed their own decentralized social protocols. By relinquishing some of the decentralized attributes of the data, all protocols have made significant progress. On any protocol, imitating web2 social tools is no longer a problem, and because of the decentralization achieved, users have greater autonomy. Users have the power to maintain their intangible assets within the system. However, as mentioned earlier, the business of Web3 faces a huge scale disadvantage.
Technology is not the problem. The challenge faced by all projects proposing solutions is how to move 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.
Obstacles encountered in the token incentive revolution
The birth of tokens is like opening Pandora's box. From the moment all Web3 users enter the industry, they are forced to face a complex financial environment. For project parties, using tokens can subsidize user desires and reduce project operating costs.
The token incentive revolution in the social environment faces two major challenges:
- The subjective value of social content makes the effectiveness of token incentives questionable.
- Token incentives face the threat of sybil attacks.
These two problems have not been completely resolved to this day. Introducing a case study can help us understand.
The STEEM blockchain can be considered a pioneer in the entire Web3 social industry. To this day, not only have many of its concepts and structural designs continued to be imitated and borrowed by current projects, it has also nurtured a group of teams and projects for blockchain applications. In 2016, the STEEM blockchain made innovative attempts in token-incentivized content, token-incentivized human curation, data availability layers, and account-layered security across multiple dimensions.
Applications built on the STEEM blockchain are social media platforms where the quality of media content is determined by users' token staking amounts. In the early stages of the project, the founding team had an absolute advantage in both reputation and the amount of staked tokens. At that time, content production and filtered recommendations based on token staking weights were effective. Similar to most token-incentivized projects, the huge wealth effect attracted a swarm of sybil attacks. However, the token staking on the STEEM blockchain included punitive powers, which to some extent made it immune to sybil attacks.
This effectiveness was based on centralized assets and power, as well as a strong consensus. When founder BM left and the founding team disintegrated, and the project was sold to the notorious Sun Yuchen, a consensus collapse occurred. In the early stages, the consensus collapse led to more individuals choosing the method of sybil attacks to profit: token holders mutually upvoted each other, and proxy mining ran rampant. Later, when the algorithm recommendation system and AIGC technology matured, the time came for the token-weighted voting-based content production and recommendation system to exit the historical stage. Top-tier social media platforms now offer personalized content for users, a level of content curation that cannot be achieved by human resources alone or by relying solely on content tags for sorting and recommendations.
After STEEM, many projects used token issuance to accelerate platform expansion, such as Torum, BBS, and others aiming for scale, all adopting token incentives. Of course, later there were projects like Lens protocol that aimed for anticipated free-riding. These incentives violated the "non-monetary return" element of social interactions. Experiments have shown that external material rewards reduce intrinsic psychological rewards, resulting in social content being mixed with non-social content. Social connections are information channels, and the value of social platforms lies in aggregating information within these channels. However, these mixed incentives have led to reduced social efficiency, burdening an already information-scarce channel with more noise, leading to its decline.
Projects like Degen on Farcaster distribute a portion of tokens through rewards. This uses Meme tokens to incentivize social projects with unique financial functions in Web3 (rather than content creation or recommendation), creating wealth effects and triggering ecosystem prosperity by introducing the financial attributes of encrypted social interactions. While a platform can only have one token, it can have countless Meme tokens. Meme tokens may fail, but platform tokens cannot. Using Meme tokens to boost social projects may become a superior token incentive platform project technique. Degen's wealth topics, combined with the innovative possibilities on Frames, have attracted more and more builders to Farcaster, leading to the prosperity of its ecosystem. So far, I personally believe that this is a classic operational battle. The ecosystem emergence brought about by this operation cannot be ignored. So far, the ecosystem has produced tools including NFT savings jars, various media (voice chat rooms, short videos, animated images), and launch platforms. Although I have not found any signs of Farcaster breaking through the business boundaries of Lens (the current industry bottleneck), this emergence is worth paying attention to.
Setbacks in the Autonomous Content Revolution
Web3 emphasizes decentralization, which translates to anti-monopoly in business.
The starting point of Web3 social interactions should be around 2016-2017. At that time, Web2 social products were already thriving. Over the past two cycles, social projects have been advocating for autonomous content. Various projects have been attempting to put content "on-chain" and work on content assetization based on on-chain content.
STEEM, born in 2016, fell behind due to the disintegration of the project team and slow development progress. Although it had achieved on-chain content at the time of its launch, it did not have an EVM environment to run smart contracts, and it gradually fell behind after the DeFi summer in 2020. The head seat of on-chain content was then taken over by Mirror. The selling point of Mirror is that it provides a user-friendly text content editing environment. Users can sign and publish their own text content with a wallet. The content is on-chain and cannot be tampered with. Other users can subscribe to and follow a specific account, and the content can be minted into NFTs for trading in the NFT market. So far, the project is still operational, and while traffic has decreased, some Degen players still use the platform to publish content and engage in NFT minting activities.
Mirror is an excellent Web3 product that embodies the spirit of minimalism and makes excellent use of a trusted and open database. Anyone can assert ownership of content data on the Internet through wallet signatures. After asserting ownership, the content can be minted as NFTs and traded in the NFTfi environment under the EVM. The user attrition of Mirror is inherent, and compared to traditional Web2 content operators, not only is its operational capability insufficient, but textual content, especially long-form content, lacks traffic and is an abandoned child of the era of junk culture. At the same time, there were projects focusing on on-chain content from the perspective of audio and video. Aside from the ineffective content incentives, the massive data volume made it difficult to sustain project operating costs. Doing content business is essentially doing media. Either you have good content to attract users, or you have a large user base to attract good content. Simply providing a technical solution set is not enough to run a business.
At the end of 2013, another content-based project emerged. Bodhi, also a minimalist product, was inspired by Friend tech and used bonding curve technology to sell related content NFTs at varying prices based on the number of sales. There were also projects like CloudBit that forcibly replicated Web2 content on the blockchain to generate NFT assets. There are many similar projects that attempt to transform content into assertable assets. However, what they cannot change is that in the Internet age, while content can be asserted, the information carried by the content is easily transferable. Even in cases of direct content theft and infringement, on-chain content does not effectively increase the cost of illegal activities. Therefore, there are currently no good examples of directly issuing assets based on content value anchoring.
Another reason the market is not sensitive to content assetization is that the timing is not right. Although rationality tells us that personal information is valuable, users are not actually concerned about their own content sovereignty.
New Journey of Attention Sovereignty: Development of Content Recommendation Systems
The emergence of STEEM encouraged and inspired a batch of blockchain projects. One of STEEM's main ideas was to use token-weighted voting to rank content and create lists. This idea was subsequently repeatedly borrowed by different projects.
One project more inclined towards content recommendation is Yup, which exists in the form of a social plugin. By issuing tokens, it incentivizes users to interact with content through this Web3 plugin. Using this interaction information, combined with token staking weights, it repositions content from other Web2 platforms and reorganizes it under its own list.
Wormhole3 is also a content recommendation type of plugin. Unlike Yup, it supports using various tokens as incentives for content recommendation. The entire incentive process has been implemented in code. Different incentive tokens have independent tag lists on the Wormhole3 official website, achieving diversification in content recommendation. In Wormhole3's model, it is assumed that people holding different tokens belong to corresponding communities, and the amount of token staking determines their voice within the community channel. The allocation of power for some tokens is also controlled by voice.
A series of projects that use token incentives for content list-based recommendations, such as Matters, Torum, BBS, andbihu, have all moved towards failure. Essentially, token-incentivized list-based recommendations failed to capture attention. In the attention market, the previous generation's simple sorting and tag-based content recommendations are no longer able to compete with intelligent algorithm content recommendations. As an advertising system, Web3 projects, in pursuit of decentralization and programmability, have immature algorithms for pricing ad space, which are not as accurate as the professional algorithms of Web2. The monopolistic nature of the advertising market is not as strong as centralized exchanges. Therefore, projects like QuestN and RSS3, which use data to influence content distribution, have ultimately also shifted their focus.
Experience and lessons tell us that even with low-cost token incentives, it must be an incentive for advanced production methods. Phavor still relies on Web3 databases to create cross-database recommendation middleware, but the process and solution are more abstract. A content recommendation system is a necessary component of any social media platform. Token incentives are not the key to Web3 recommendation systems, but token holding structures and on-chain behavior are. The participation of on-chain data in system decisions is the essential difference between Web3 and Web2 recommendation systems. Compared to airdrops, the low cost of on-chain social interactions has led to sybil arbitrage attacks.
Using tokens to control content recommendations is based on the logic of power: attention is controlled by organizations rather than individuals. In my opinion, allocating content based on organizational needs is more like organizational work communication platforms such as DingTalk and Feishu. It's more of a tool for DAO than a social tool, and all voting reflects power. Managing organizational power without trust is undoubtedly the advantage of blockchain and even Web3. The current content recommendation incentives based on organizations (platforms or communities) seen in the market.
The social tools loved by ordinary people have been replaced by personalized attention solutions. Any new generation of social media is tailored for individual content delivery, adjusting recommended content based on individual preferences at any given moment. If we advocate for 1V1 content delivery, then on-chain information should serve as raw data for content and user tags.
Here, I want to mention the "Subscription Stream Generator" created by BlueSky. It is a combination of recommendation algorithms and communication protocols. Anyone can provide their own recommendation algorithm for the communication protocol. Users can subscribe to their favorite recommendation algorithms as needed.
Debank's social module has great potential. Although many people use Debank as a data tool, its introduction of badges and account display combined with streaming has reached a level that many projects solely focused on badges cannot achieve. Information about NFTs from long-term NFT players is definitely more important than others. A user who does not participate in DeFi cannot guide others in DeFi. As on-chain activities increase, correcting user data and content data through account-based on-chain behavior as a data source will improve the accuracy of the entire content recommendation system. Debank currently lacks an effective recommendation system, but its early accumulation will help it occupy the high ground of recommendation systems.
Overall, the current development status of decentralized social interactions is as follows:
- The strategy of token incentive scale has not been smooth, and there is currently no independent user group that stands out for its scale advantage.
- On-chain content, users autonomously owning their social assets, is not a concern for users in the absence of scale.
- Content recommendation systems continue to develop and show a glimmer 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 in the landing of decentralized social projects.
In the Web3 user community, finding the unique scale advantage of our Web3 social interactions seems promising. The biggest advantage is the involvement of tokens, which not only introduces finance but more importantly creates new possibilities for relationships and interactions based on tokens.
Two positive signs are worth mentioning:
TGbot: Integrating trading directly into social interactions. Seamlessly connecting social interactions with trading is very suitable for users who are used to buying coins based on information. Actions taken online in the past could not be part of social interactions, but now they can.
Farcaster: Introducing asset issuance into the social platform scene. Instead of looking for Alpha on Twitter, it's better to communicate and build communities directly on Farcaster. 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 interactions is to issue coins through social interactions. For projects, coins are a means of financing. For users, coins may not necessarily be a product. Coins are a financial product. Issuing coins is easy, but the difficulty lies in establishing market consensus on the value of tokens and providing liquidity to tokens.
Establishing Consensus on Token Value through Social Interactions:
Establishing the value of tokens in the market is the alchemy that every project wants to understand. Historical experience has provided three formulas.
1) Tokenization of Attention
Tokenization of attention is the secret of Meme coins. Creating attention and token attention involves elements such as content, KOL, community, and wealth effects. The first three points are all related to social interactions. Whether it's Farcaster's frames framework directly integrating social commerce (tokens) into the platform, ERC404's use of graph coins (direct fusion of content and tokens), or Donut's attempt to recommend relationships on-chain, they all enhance the meme content of token issuance from a technical perspective.
Consensus on Meme tokens is easy to establish but difficult to sustain. Regardless of the external environment, Meme tokens do not have consumers. Meme tokens create liquidity for assets, and unless Meme tokens are listed on centralized exchanges and transition from ownerless tokens to owned tokens (centralized exchanges must have market makers), after the peak of attention, Meme tokens will spiral into irreversible value and liquidity collapse.
2) Tokenization of Social Relationships
If Meme, the value of cultural popularity tied to token value, makes ordinary people feel elusive, then injecting the value of social relationships into tokens is down-to-earth. Even without discussing Web3 or the Internet, "relationships" are a form of capital in economics. Tokenizing social relationship capital is a natural consideration.
The first time I became interested in tokenizing social relationships was through DAO. DAO projects have a broad definition of DAO, but in the market's general understanding, DAO is reduced to a circle organization governed by token mechanisms. Holding my tokens means owning me, and holding different tokens or different quantities of tokens confers different rights. Tokens represent the permissions within this organization. Whether it's FWB, which sells high-end value links (obtaining identity requires an application approval system and costs money), or Moonbird DAO, which revolves around high-quality investment information, both start with permission from social relationships to establish token value. [The rise of Friend.tech](http://The rise of Friend.tech) in this cycle also explores along this line. Compared to establishing a large organizational volume, Friend.tech focuses on small-scale organizational markets. From its bonding curve pricing, it is evident that the cost of adding a member is very high once a group exceeds 200 people. This is much smaller compared to the large organizations formed by minting NFTs and placing orders in the early stages.
3) Tokenization of Content
The essential difference between tokenizing content and assisting in tokenizing attention is that tokenizing content emphasizes the relationship between tokens and content ownership. From the previous generation of products like Mirror and Paragraph to the current Lens and Farcaster, they have never abandoned the assetization function of content ownership. From a technical perspective, this function is very simple, but it is not applied in reality. Copyright is a real-world asset. This property is transferred from off-chain to on-chain. When there is a lot of uncertainty about on-chain property rights, and when on-chain property rights only increase the cost of rights protection, these functions are just for show. Only when most of the rights confirmation business migrates to the blockchain, the rights protection path matures, and the scale effect takes effect, will the tokenization of content demonstrate economic value.
Tokenization of content also lacks wealth effects and cannot accelerate the maturity of the industry through wealth effects. In a society flooded with AIGC, content is not scarce; attention is scarce. The lack of scarcity hinders wealth effects.
Bonding Curve Solves Liquidity:
Although bonding curves are not an innovation based on social interactions, they solve the liquidity cost problem for small-scale projects. The steep version of the bonding curve proposed by Friend.tech not only creates wealth effects for small-scale funds but also significantly reduces the operational cost of providing liquidity for individual tokens. Therefore, we can see many projects in their respective fields attempting new price curves. Some cases with small impact include Bodhi's bonding curve for content valuation and DeBox's bonding curve for community asset issuance.
Although the operational rhythm of Friend.tech (FT) led to its later attention being taken over by Farcaster, the impact of the bonding curve is far-reaching. FT's attempt has shown us that there will always be a more suitable bonding curve for different token application scenarios. Any bonding curve has its pros and cons, and the appropriate curve should be chosen based on the actual situation. Friend.tech's V2 also follows this consensus, attempting to issue assets for multi-center, mesh-style communities (clubs) while adding a steeper bonding curve.
Pump.fun is equivalent to inventing a segmented Bonding curve. When the fundraising is less than 20,000 U, a steep bonding curve is used. When the fundraising reaches 20,000, it directly transitions to a conventional decentralized exchange. This is also an innovation in liquidity supply.
In summary, over the two cycles, Web3 social interactions have conducted rich experiments in multiple fields and from multiple perspectives.
Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social Interactions
Over the two cycles, although Web3 social interactions have been exploring on a rugged path and experiencing continuous failures, progress is still evident:
Our front end has transitioned from PC to mobile, from apps to progressive web applications. Wallet login has shifted from mnemonic phrases to MPC and abstract accounts. The barrier for users to enter Web3 social interactions is getting lower. The advancement of blockchain infrastructure not only reduces the cost of accounting exponentially but also enables almost immediate transaction completion. Builders of social protocol layers are actively constructing Layer 3 suitable for their own characteristics to achieve decentralized social usability, even building protocols based on the importance of information trust to determine the decentralization level of information. Network expansion directly improves user experience, allowing for more concurrent information from text to multimedia.
Embedded social scenes are also an innovative attempt in the industry. Because it is an open-source project with an open database, it comes with Lego-like composability without the need for permission. We can embed any interaction into social interactions (such as directly buying and selling NFTs in social interactions, social data), and we can also embed social interactions into any interaction (embedding another social tool in a game).
We have also made significant achievements in middleware, including the integration, analysis, and labeling of various on-chain data, token behavior management based on game theory, and diverse liquidity provision solutions.
Compared to the previous cycle, our infrastructure and tools are more complete, and the indigenous population of Web3 is increasing, closer to the Meme tokens understood by users, and NFTs are continuously educating potential users through various waves.
Social innovation is not a dead end, and there are always challengers in every era. For example, the recent launch of ReelShort, which focuses on attracting users with melodramatic short dramas. This allows a host, an MCN, or a media company to create their own social media platform at a low cost. With suitable recommendation algorithms to guide traffic, a federated network structure is formed.
Dryly speaking, without much visual appeal, let's combine the flow cipher and envision the blueprint in my mind.
Dopamine, the Opiate of the Masses, the Antidote of Web3
The previous discussion is based on the development of Web3 social interactions within the industry. Placed within the overall competitive landscape of social products, including the issuance of Meme coins through social interactions, it seems as naive as a virgin. Let me show you the social scene as I see it.
Since the emergence of streaming media, we have basically not seen social platforms based on text and images.
Even within the top short video platforms, what kind of content do we see? Overbearing CEOs falling in love with me, late-night sledgehammers, and individuals drinking alone. Do we see any content on Farcaster, STEEM, or Mirror that speaks to people in a human way? I wouldn't waste a second for leisure, not for the ideals of Web3 or the dog's breath of airdrop returns. Yes, the development of Web3 social interactions has deviated, but it's not the fault of the technology. The threshold for massive adoption of technology is being approached. To achieve massive adoption of Web3 social interactions, content must be integrated into the equation.
Our idea of introducing content is to airdrop to content creators, providing a large incentive to creators who cannot create traffic content, under the guise of breaking the platform's monopoly. In reality, 1% of super KOLs create 90% of the traffic but do not receive the rewards they deserve.
In the field of social interactions, some technical details are not so important. For example, if one day TikTok says it wants to use its own developed wallet for login, or whether it uses MPC or AA is not so important. Whoever has the traffic is the king. Whoever has content that can create traffic is the one who has the traffic. Is it possible that the organization of the industry is not driven by technology-oriented protocols and projects to operate a "web2" platform, but rather each content creator occupies a central position in a small economic cycle, freely choosing protocols and tools suitable for their content format, and then organically combining all protocols and tools, allowing other social participants to participate in their economic cycle through tokens.
This typical fan economy already has a rudimentary form in real life:
A high-end "emotional massage therapist" may have a Twitter account, a Telegram group, and channels on Onlyfans and Pornhub. Their product positioning in front of consumers is not simply to provide sexual needs like a hooker, but to provide a complete solution for sexual fantasies as a SEX dream solution provider. These workers establish their own private traffic through social media, guide payment habits through the sale of their restricted short videos and live broadcasts, and then monetize the traffic in girlfriend experiences and role-playing services. These practitioners who deal with clients every day have a much deeper understanding of human needs than Web3 social entrepreneurs. Social media provides them with multiple times the labor return, and due to the traffic brought by self-media, it helps them escape platform exploitation.
Another more recent example is Zaiko, a live streaming e-commerce platform for artists in Japan. The platform itself also uses decentralized technology, and artists can issue NFTs through the platform. The platform is also well-prepared to issue platform tokens. The founder of the platform was a successful entrepreneur before this project and had established business relationships with many artists in Japan, so Zaiko is not lacking in users. Today, a live streaming e-commerce event on Zaiko can reach millions of dollars. Decentralized technology has long begun to change our social business models from the other end.
We have always talked about reclaiming the platform's monopoly on the value of content, and the most direct way is to let content establish platforms and form connections between platforms through third-party curation or recommendation tools. Let's imagine a possible blueprint for Web3.
Blueprint for Web3 Social Interactions
A capital firm pays a high price to hire a popular writer to write a melodramatic script "Back to 2010: I Stirred up Waves in the Coin Circle," adding these dopamine and hormonal traffic factors. Before the script is completed, it is publicly announced that the screenwriter has gone bankrupt and fled. The project then continues and begins filming. To avoid regulation, the project uses a decentralized media solution (such as 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 cast members, and get early access to new episodes and various peripherals. In some regions, we can even directly sell customized products such as the protagonist's fashion and real estate in the drama through frames. The protagonists in the drama have their own fan tokens, communicate on Friend.tech or their self-built fan system, and if they need chat services, exclusive videos, or companion services, they can negotiate separately. Passionate videos in the drama require unlocking with the corresponding fan tokens + content tokens. The new coins issued in the drama are also sold in the real world through Pump.fun. Independent streaming media for this drama sells and rents its overflow traffic through curation tools such as Tako and phavor. These short videos, after being edited and compliant, are simultaneously released on Web2 platforms.
As a Web3 user, we can imagine how great our social experience will be. We can earn tokens by watching the drama, use these tokens to increase the exposure of the Meme we hold in the drama, manipulate traffic, and earn profits. We can support our favorite actors, communicate face-to-face with them, and even fulfill our cosplay desires by becoming an insignificant extra in the drama. This experience is something that Web2, without a sense of participation, cannot achieve.
All we need is more convenient login, lower content storage costs, and technical support for lower latency.
The Mission of Web3
Web3 is not the Guanyin Bodhisattva who saves the suffering, nor is it the Messiah who saves the world. The underlying foundation of the Web3 revolution is liberalism. Gambling is not wrong, and paid dating is of course not unreasonable. It's only natural to be addicted to short videos. God gives people choices, and Web3 is also here to provide more choices. The wide gate, the narrow gate, hell, and heaven are all within the thoughts of people. The mission of Web3 is to return the rights taken away from every natural person by centralization.
Conclusion
Web3 social interactions are not a scam, but Web3 is also not a child's playhouse experiment (even my Web3 social interaction concept has been jokingly referred to as typical child's play by some friends, but industry success is achieved through these laughable failures).
Currently, the dilemma of Web3 social interactions comes partly from the immaturity of the technology, as our costs have not yet been reduced enough. Compared to Web2, our recommendation mechanism is still like a baby. On the other hand, while we hold high the banner of respecting creators, the industry's organizational form still revolves around technological platforms. Social interactions must revolve around human nature, and simply respecting human nature cannot generate cold-start traffic. Therefore, borrowing traffic from content has become a common industry practice. I predict that the future of social media will revolve around content issuers, users, and associated service providers.
In addition, we have not yet reached a conclusion on how to use Web3 technology to enhance the interactivity of user social interactions. Interactivity is an important attribute of Web3 social interactions, in addition to autonomy and resistance to censorship. How to use interactivity well and improve the user's social experience will be the key to the success or failure of Web3 social interactions in the future. Finding out how content and communities can better interact in the new environment built by decentralized technology will determine whether Web3 can gather traffic and truly land.
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