Opportunities and Challenges of Web3 Social: Learning from Failures to Open a New Chapter

Recently, the Web3 industry is filled with negativity and is considered a large-scale trap for inexperienced investors. However, while Web3 social has not been completely successful, there are still many noteworthy achievements. This article will outline the development history of Web3 social over the past 8 years, summarize lessons learned, and explore future opportunities.

The Underlying Needs of Web3 Social

Humans are social animals with social needs. Web3 technology brings new possibilities for social interaction:

• Tokens as a brand new way to connect
• Open verifiable databases expand the dimensions of information
• The new information environment nurtures new social relationships and interaction methods.

The main challenge facing Web3 social platforms is economies of scale. Establishing a scale advantage in specific demographics and scenarios is key to the survival of Web3 social projects.

The Development Context of Web3 Social

The development of Web3 social networks is mainly reflected in two directions:

1. Develop decentralized social technology standards
2. Establish token consensus through social networking

Competition of Decentralized Social Technology Standards

Early projects like STEEM attempted innovations such as content on-chain and token incentives, but faced issues like witch attacks. New generation projects like Bluesky, Nostr, and Lens have proposed new decentralized social protocols and made technological advancements.

The main challenge remains economies of scale. Token incentives have become a means for many projects to overcome scale disadvantages, but they also face numerous difficulties:

• The subjective value of social content is difficult to assess, and the effectiveness of token incentives is questionable.
• Token incentives can easily trigger a witch attack.
• External material rewards may diminish intrinsic psychological rewards, affecting social efficiency.

Some new attempts include:

• Use Meme tokens to incentivize unique features of the social platform, rather than content creation.
• Adopt more optimized token incentive techniques, such as Degen from Farcaster

The setbacks of content autonomy revolution

Early projects like Mirror attempted to put content on the blockchain and tokenize it as NFTs, but failed to gain sufficient user attention. The main reasons include:

• Users show low concern for content sovereignty.
• It is difficult for content ownership to resist infringement.
• Lack of effective content monetization models

New Exploration of Attention Sovereignty

The new generation of projects begins to focus on content recommendation systems:

• Yup, Wormhole3 and other attempts at content recommendation based on token staking
• Projects like Phavor leverage on-chain data to influence content distribution.
• Bluesky proposed the concept of "subscription stream generator"

However, these attempts still struggle to compete with Web2 smart algorithms. A possible direction for the future is to use on-chain information as the raw data for content and user tags, rather than directly controlling recommendations.

Social Asset Tokenization

Another development route is to use social media for token issuance. The main methods include:

1. Tokenization of Attention: such as Meme coins
2. Tokenization of social relationships: such as DAO, Friend.tech
3. Content Tokenization: Still Facing Challenges Such as Property Rights Confirmation

The introduction of bonding curves provides new liquidity solutions for small-scale projects.

Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social

After two cycles of development, Web3 social has conducted rich explorations in multiple fields. Future opportunities may lie in:

1. Lower the entry barrier for users: such as MPC wallets, abstract accounts, etc.
2. Enhance network performance: Support more concurrent connections and multimedia content
3. Embedded Social Scenarios: Leveraging the Composability of Web3
4. Improve middleware: data analysis, token management, liquidity solutions, etc.

The mission of Web3 social is not to save the world, but to provide users with more choices and to return the rights taken away by centralization to everyone.

Conclusion

The challenges of Web3 social stem from immature technology and the limitations of organizational forms. Possible future directions are:

• Centered around content issuers, building an ecosystem around users and service providers.
• Explore how to enhance social interactivity using Web3 technology
• Finding better ways for content and community to interact in a decentralized environment.

Only by truly addressing user pain points and enhancing social experiences can Web3 social gather traffic and achieve practical implementation.