Web3 Social: Opportunities and Mission

Recently, the Web3 industry has been filled with hostility and is seen as a breeding ground for exploiting investors. However, while Web3 social is not yet mature, its development achievements are noteworthy. This article will outline the development history of Web3 social over the past 8 years, summarize lessons learned, and explore potential opportunities.

The Underlying Needs of Web3 Social

Social interaction is a fundamental human need, including establishing connections, mental interpretation, and self-coordination. In the Web3 environment, tokens have become a new way of connecting, and open verifiable databases have expanded the dimensions of information, fostering new social relationships and interaction methods.

The unique advantages of Web3 social are:

1. Underlying information support across databases and organizations
2. Freely choose a front-end composable and pluggable social interface
3. Social scenarios centered around tokenized rights interaction

The Development Context of Web3 Social

Web3 social is presenting two development paths:

1. Develop decentralized social technology standards
2. Establishing Token Consensus through Social Engagement

Competition of Decentralized Social Technology Standards

Early projects such as STEEM and Mirror focused on content on-chain and assetization, but faced issues of insufficient scale and application scenarios. New generation projects like Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, and Farcaster propose decentralized social protocols, achieving technological progress, but still face challenges of economies of scale.

Token incentives have become a means for most projects to attract users, but they also face two major dilemmas:

1. The subjective value of social content is difficult to assess, and the effectiveness of token incentives is questionable.
2. Token incentives are facing witch attacks.

Content recommendation systems are also continuously evolving, from simple token-weighted voting to more complex algorithms. Projects like Yup and Wormhole3 are trying to leverage on-chain data to participate in recommendation decisions, but they still struggle to compete with Web2 intelligent algorithms.

Social Asset Tokenization

Another development route is to utilize social media for token issuance and value consensus building:

1. Tokenization of Attention: Creating tokenized attention through content, KOLs, communities, and wealth effects.
2. Tokenization of social relationships: injecting the value of social relationships into tokens, such as DAO and Friend.tech
3. Content Tokenization: Emphasizing the relationship between tokens and content ownership.

The innovation of bonding curves has solved the liquidity problem for small-scale projects and provided the possibility for individual token issuance.

Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social

Despite facing challenges, Web3 social has made progress in several areas:

• User experience optimization: Lowering the login threshold from PC to mobile.
• Infrastructure improvements: lower accounting costs, increased transaction speed
• Innovative Embedded Social Scenarios
• Middleware Development: Data Integration, Analysis, Tagging, etc.

Future opportunities may lie in:

1. Combine traffic passwords to create more attractive content.
2. Focused on content creators, freely choose suitable protocols and tools.
3. Exploring new types of fan economy models
4. Provide a more diversified and personalized social experience

Conclusion

The mission of Web3 social is to return power to the people and provide users with more choices. Although it still faces challenges such as immature technology and limitations in organizational forms, through continuous exploration and innovation, Web3 social is expected to achieve breakthroughs in the future, bringing users a brand new social experience.