Author: Armonio, AC Capital
The recent public opinion on Web3 is full of hostility. In the eyes of insiders and outsiders: it seems that web3 is a large-scale leek field, and the relationship between exchanges, project parties, institutions and ordinary investors is to cut each other. Even some friends in Web2 told me bluntly: "Web3 social 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 have always been 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 emergence 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, the web3 industry is questioned. From the perspective of development, this article wants to sort out the achievements of Web3 builders in the social field in the past eight years and two cycles, sort out experiences and lessons, and look for potential opportunities and blueprints.
In my opinion, although Web3 social networking has not matured, the achievements of the industry development are still remarkable. Different people have different expectations for Web3. Some people hope for a better experience and better spiritual opium, while others need to protect more complete personal data sovereignty. As Web3 technology continues to advance and the threshold and cost continue to decrease, real products may emerge at this moment.
Any successful product is built on solid demand. The most criticized point of Web3 projects is that they cannot be combined with the real economy. In order to break the prejudice that "Web3 is just cutting leeks", we need to prove the demand for Web3 from the foundation.
Humans are social animals and have social needs. This conclusion has been repeatedly demonstrated by social products.
Humans need to establish links with others, need to perceive other people's emotions, attitudes, and psychological activities through links, need to obtain information feedback through links, and 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 connection. Open and verifiable databases expand the dimension of information we can obtain from links. A new information environment will breed new social interpersonal 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-display, the need for emotional catharsis and the need to find 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.
Looking at the development of Internet social interaction, economies of scale are its prominent feature. 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 cannot survive.
Compared with the global web2 social giants with millions of concurrent users, the scale of Web3 social interaction is not even a fraction of it. Economies of scale are a huge mountain. If economies of scale cannot be formed in a certain scenario, there is no way to escape the end 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 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 breed a new industrial landscape? With the underlying information support across databases and organizations, the free choice of front-end, and the plug-in social interface are the unique advantages of Web3 social networking. Tokens are the typical characteristics of web3. Using social support to issue tokens, with token-quantified rights interaction as the core content, and organizing social relationships are the unique application scenarios of web3 social networking. In recent years, the Web3 industry has really worked hard to gain scale advantages in the local social market.
This chapter only wants to prove that Web3 social is always improving, and then to explain that the industry’s accumulated experience and lessons as well as the continuous advancement of technology are constantly pushing us closer to the singularity of the industry’s explosion.
Due to the advantages that the Web3 environment provides to entrepreneurs, the development of social projects presents two parallel development trends:
1. How to develop decentralized social technology standards
2. How to use social networking to establish token consensus
If we believe that humans are social animals, 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 equity power to companies and governments. If we lose the sovereignty of social information, we will 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's 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 above, 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 penetrate this disadvantage, token incentives have become the most direct means for most projects in the short term.
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 parties, the use of tokens can be used as subsidies to reduce the operating costs of the project.
The token incentive revolution faces two major dilemmas in the 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.
STEEM blockchain can be regarded as a pioneer of 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 STEEM blockchain is a social media, and the quality of media content is determined by users with the number of tokens staked as weight. In the early stages of the project, the project founding team had an absolute advantage in both reputation and the number of staked tokens. At that time, content production and filtering recommendations based on token stake weights were effective. Similar to most projects that use token incentives, the huge wealth effect will attract a swarm of witches. However, the token stake of 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, consensus collapsed. In the early stage, the collapse of consensus led to more individuals choosing the witch attack method to profit: 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 thousands of user content, and this refined content selection is beyond the reach of human resources + content sorting and push based on content tags.
After STEEM, many projects used the issuance of tokens 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 stage. These incentives violate the "non-monetary return" element of social interaction. Experiments show 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 incentive with mixed sand leads to lower social efficiency. It is natural for a channel that is already lacking in information to face more noise.
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 web3 in social projects (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 more 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 operation 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.
Web3 focuses on decentralization, which means de-monopolization in business.
The starting point of Web3 social networking should be in 2016-2017. At that time, Web2 social products had been developing in full swing. In the last two cycles, social projects were all playing the narrative of content autonomy. Various projects are trying to "chain" content, and on the basis of "chaining" content, they can do content assetization work.
STEEM, which was born in 2016, fell behind in development progress because the project team fell apart. Although content was already 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-chain was given to Mirror. The selling point of Mirror is that it provides a friendly text content editing environment. Users can publish their own text content with wallet signatures. Content is on-chain and no one can tamper with it. Other users can subscribe and follow a certain account. And the content can be cast into NFT and traded in the NFT market. So far, the project has continued 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 rights of content data on the Internet through wallet signatures. The content after confirmation can be issued as NFT 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-winded articles, lacks traffic and is a discarded child in the era of garbage culture. At the same time, there are also projects starting with sound and video to put content on the chain. Apart from 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 came out. 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, all of which 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 that the timing is wrong. Although reason tells us that the value of personal information is expensive, users don’t really care about their own content sovereignty.
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 pledged to sort content and establish lists. This idea was subsequently repeatedly borrowed by different projects.
A project that is more inclined to content recommendation: Yup, exists in the form of a social plug-in. By issuing tokens, users are encouraged to interact with content through this web3 plug-in. Using this interactive information, plus the token pledge weight, the content on other Web2 platforms is replicated and reorganized under their own list.
Wormhole3 is also a content recommendation plug-in. Unlike Yup, it supports using 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 the corresponding community, and the number of tokens pledged determines their voice in the community channel. The distribution power of some tokens is also controlled by the 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 through token incentives cannot capture attention. In the attention market, the previous generation of simple sorting + tag classification content recommendations have been difficult to compete with intelligent algorithm content recommendations. As an advertising system, in order to pursue decentralization and programmatic, the immature algorithm of Web3 projects is actually not as accurate as the professional algorithm of web2 in pricing advertising space. 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 finally turned.
Experience and lessons tell us: 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 make cross-database recommendation middleware, but the process and solution are more abstract. Content recommendation system is a necessary component of 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 interaction is extremely low, so witch arbitrage attacks were born.
The power logic behind the use of tokens to control content recommendations is that attention is controlled by organizations rather than individuals. I personally think that allocating 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 are now seen on the market
Ordinary people’s favorite social tools have been replaced by personal attention programs. At present, any new generation of social media pushes content to individuals and adjusts the recommended content according to their likes and dislikes of the content at all times. If we advocate 1V1 content push, then the information on the chain should be more of the original data of the content and user tags.
Here we have to mention the "Subscription Stream Generator" created by BlueSky. It is a combination of recommendation algorithms and communication protocols. Anyone can provide self-developed recommendation algorithms for communication protocols. 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, the badge it launched, account display combined with stream has reached an industry height that many projects that focus on badges 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. Debank currently lacks an effective recommendation system, and its early accumulation will help it occupy the high ground of the recommendation system.
Overall, the current status of decentralized social development is:
1. The strategy of token incentive scale is not smooth, and no independent user group that can highlight the scale advantage has been found.
2. Content is on the chain, and users are autonomous 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, a little dawn is revealed. 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.
Looking for the unique scale advantage of our web3 social network among Web3 users, I think it is possible. 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, there are two positive signs:
TGbot: Introducing transactions directly into social networks. Social networks and transactions are seamlessly connected, which is very suitable for users' trading habits of buying coins by the head. More talk is worse than more action. 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 going to Twitter to find Alpha, it is better to communicate directly in Farcaster and form a community. More teams are willing to migrate their projects to Farcaster, and the emergence of projects is happening.
Another evolutionary route for Web3 social 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.
How to make the market recognize the value of tokens is the crypto alchemy that every project wants to understand. Historical experience has given three recipes.
1) Tokenization of attention
Tokenization of attention is the secret recipe of Meme coins. 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 networking. Whether it is Farcaster's frames framework that directly implants social goods (tokens) into the platform, ERC404 adopts the 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 issued currency from various technical levels.
The consensus of Meme tokens is easy to establish, but it is difficult to last. Regardless of the external environment, there are no consumers for Meme tokens. 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), otherwise after the peak of attention, Meme tokens will fall into an irreversible two-way spiral collapse of value and liquidity.
2) Tokenization of social relationships
If Meme, this cultural popular value linked to the value of tokens 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 is 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 depends on the application approval system and costs money), or Yueniao DAO, which focuses on high-quality investment information, they all 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 organizations of thousands of people established in the early stage through NFT casting + order placement mode.
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 matter of RWA. This property right is from off-chain to on-chain. When there is a lot of uncertainty in the property rights on the chain, when the property rights on the chain will only increase the cost of rights protection, these functions are just decoration. Only when most of the 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 it cannot use the wealth effect to accelerate the maturity of the industry. In a society flooded with AIGC, content is not scarce, but attention is scarce. Lack of scarcity hinders the wealth effect.
Although Bonding curve is not based on social innovation, it solves the liquidity cost problem of small-scale projects. The steep version of the bonding curve proposed by Friend.tech, not to mention the wealth effect under small-scale funds, has indeed greatly reduced the operating costs of personal tokens to provide liquidity. 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 asset issuance.
Although the problem of Friend.tech (FT)'s operating rhythm has led to the attention of the later period being taken away by farcaster. But the impact of the Bonding curve is far-reaching. FT's attempt has taught 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 we should 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 (clubs) to multi-center, mesh-like communities, and on the other hand, it adds 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 jumps directly to a conventional decentralized exchange. This is also an innovation in liquidity supply. In summary, over the past two cycles, Web3 social networking has carried out rich experiments in multiple fields and multiple angles.
Throughout the two cycles, Web3 social networking has been constantly exploring and failing on a rugged road. However, the progress is still obvious to all:
Our front end has jumped from the PC to the mobile end, and from the APP to a 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 the time for transactions to be completed can be almost immediate. In order to achieve decentralized social availability, the builders of the social protocol layer even actively build layer3 suitable for their own characteristics, and determine the degree of decentralization of information according to the credibility and importance of 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 innovations attempted by the industry. Because it is an open source project and an open source database, it comes with a Lego-like combination that does not require permission. We have been able to embed any interaction into social (for example, we can directly buy and sell 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 number of Web3 natives is increasing, and the Meme tokens that are closer to user understanding, NFT has been educating potential users with one wave after another.
Social innovation is not a dead end, and there are always challengers in every era. For example, the recently launched ReelShort focuses on attracting users with short dramas with melodramatic plots. Let an anchor, an MCN, and a media company build their own social media platform at a low cost. There are suitable recommendation algorithms to guide traffic and form a federal network structure.
Speaking in this way, it is dry and there is no sense of picture. Let us combine the traffic password and the blueprint in my mind.
The previous discussion is based on the social development of the Web3 industry in a conventional way. Put it into the overall social product competition landscape, including the use of social to issue Meme coins, which is as pure as a virgin. Let me show you the social scenes I have seen.
Since the emergence of streaming media, we basically can no longer see social platforms based on text and pictures.
Even in streaming media, 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 late night big pendulum, I drink alone and get drunk. Look at Farcaster, STEEM, 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 make massive adoption of web3 social, you must connect web3 social with the thigh of content.
We thought that introducing content meant that we would airdrop to content creators and give a lot of incentives to a group of creators who could not create traffic content, under the guise of breaking the platform monopoly. In reality, 1% of super KOLs create 90% of traffic but do not get the rewards they deserve.
In the social field, some detailed technologies are not that important. For example, if one day Tiktok says that it will use its own wallet to log in, it is not that important to use MPC or AA. Whoever has traffic is the king. Whoever has content that can create traffic has traffic. Is there a possibility that the organization of the industry is not a technology-oriented protocol or project to operate a platform similar to "web2", but that each content creator occupies a core position in a small economic cycle, freely choosing protocols and tools suitable for its own content format, and then combining all protocols and tools more organically, so that other social participants can participate in their own economic cycle through tokens.
This typical fan economy has actually already taken shape in real life:
A senior "opposite sex emotional masseur" may have a Twitter account, a TG group, Onlyfans and Pornhub channels at the same time. 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, and at the same time, due to the traffic brought by self-media, it helps them get rid of platform exploitation.
To give a more recent example, there is a live streaming platform for artists in Japan called Zaiko. 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 the project. In his previous career, he established business relationships with many Japanese artists, so Zaiko has no shortage of users. Now Zaiko can bring millions of dollars in goods in a live broadcast. Decentralized technology has already 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 a platform, and the platforms form links through third-party curation or recommendation tools. Let's imagine a possible blueprint for web3.
A certain capital spent a lot of money to invite 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. The project then continued to move forward and began filming the drama. In order to circumvent regulation, the project adopted a decentralized media solution (such as farcaster+livepeer) and airdropped content tokens to early viewers. Users holding a certain number of tokens can influence the plot trend, participate in voting to decide new role actors, and see new episodes and get various peripherals one step earlier. For some regions, we can even sell customized products such as the same fashion and real estate as the protagonists directly through frames in the drama. 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 drama need to be unlocked with the corresponding fan tokens + content tokens. In the plot, the new coins issued are simultaneously sold in reality with pump.fun. Independent streaming media belonging to this drama sells and rents out their own overflow traffic through curation tools such as Tako and phavor. These short videos are released on the Web2 platform simultaneously after being edited and compliant.
As a Web3 user, we can imagine how good our social experience will be. We can get tokens by watching the drama, and use these tokens to increase the exposure of the memes we hold in the plot, and manipulate traffic to gain income. Support our favorite actors and communicate with them face to face and at a negative distance. We can even squeeze ourselves into the crew as an insignificant extra to satisfy our cosplay desire. This experience is not something that Web2, which has no sense of participation, can achieve.
What we need is nothing more than more convenient login, lower content storage costs, lower latency and other technical support.
Web3 is not the Guanyin who saves the suffering, nor is it the Messiah who saves the world. The bottom of the Web3 revolution is liberalism. There is nothing wrong with gambling, and there is certainly nothing wrong with paying for friends. Watching addictive short videos is human nature. God gives people choices, and we Web3 is also to provide more choices. The wide door, the narrow door, hell and heaven, are all between people's thoughts. Our web3 mission is to return the rights taken away by centralization to every natural person.
Web3 social networking is not a scam, but Web3 is not a child's playhouse experiment. (Even my Web3 social concept was laughed at by some friends as a typical play, but the success of the industry is crawling out of these ridiculous failures.)
At present, the dilemma of web3 social comes from the immaturity of technology on the one hand, and our costs have not been reduced enough. 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, we still focus on the technology platform. 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 adopt Web3 technology to enhance the interactivity of user social networking. 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.
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https://cn.cointelegraph.com/news/lens-protocol-overview
《Crypto Popularity: The Birth of Meme Wealth》
https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_16831.html
The Rise of Decentralized Social Networks
Nostr Assets Protocol disputes founder's claims, asserting its mission to empower developers and build business use cases on the Lightning Network and Nostr. Custodial solutions are defended as legitimate, and the upcoming NOSTR assets are clarified to have no direct links to Nostr's core developers. The protocol remains dedicated to strengthening the Lightning Network and Nostr through innovative financial applications.
BerniceWeb3 gaming was full of promise, before it died down. Will it see a successful revival?
ClementOrganised by DeFi platform ArrayFi, Bridge Web3 2023 was a three-day conference hosted on Phú Quốc island in Vietnam.
DavinThe key benefits of web3 include improved data privacy, transparency, and innovation.
BeincryptoThere are a few things that make Jack Dorsey’s vision for Web5 distinct, including not wanting to completely replace Web2 but work with it.
CoindeskWhere is the action in crypto social networking? We break down the rising players.
BanklessThe "exclusivity" of the topic makes some people uncomfortable and feel embarrassed to ask questions if they realize they don't know enough about the topic
CointelegraphWhy Web 3 matters 🧵 Web 1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders. Web 2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.
CdixonWhat’s next in web3? 🧵 First, where are we today? Let’s start with some anecdotes. We have an awesome games team led by [@Tocelot](https://twitter.com/Tocelot/) that invests in founders out of top game studios like Riot, Epic, Blizzard etc. Almost 100% of founders they've met with recently are exploring NFTs in some way, or are already building NFTs into their games
CdixonWeb3 technology is here to revolutionize how the current internet works. Web3 achieves this by decentralizing the current framework into ...
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