Exploring the Current State and Future of Web3.0 Social Products from the Essence of Socialization

With the rise of Web3.0 social products, the number of users is continuously increasing. However, after the airdrop ends, the daily active user count often significantly drops. How to maintain the vitality of projects? Can tokenization truly incentivize user participation? How to balance content moderation and decentralized social interaction? These are questions that entrepreneurs in the Web3.0 social space need to consider.

This article will discuss from multiple perspectives such as the essence of social interaction, the significance of Web3.0 social products, classification characteristics, issues, and optimization directions, helping readers better understand the current status and future development trends of Web3.0 social products.

The essence of social interaction is "relationships between people + interaction", which can be divided into interactions among acquaintances and interest-based interactions. However, the total number of crypto natives in Web3.0 is limited, making it possibly premature for products focused on acquaintance interactions. Interest-based interactions require the creation of new relationships in new scenarios; simply migrating existing social relationships is not feasible.

The Reasons Why Web3.0 Social Products Are Gaining Attention

By 2027, the number of global social media users is expected to reach nearly 6 billion. Currently, the average internet user spends 144 minutes per day on social media and instant messaging applications. Despite the large user base of traditional centralized social platforms, they also face issues such as data breaches, content censorship, and algorithmic bias.

Web3.0 social products are based on blockchain technology, enabling a decentralized social experience that ensures user data privacy and security. At the same time, they eliminate the censorship and algorithmic bias of centralized platforms, granting original content creators more autonomy. Therefore, Web3.0 social products are receiving significant attention and may become one of the trends in the future development of social media.

Currently, giants like Facebook still dominate the social media space. However, with the emergence of SocialFi, this pattern may be disrupted. SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms, adhering to principles of fairness and decentralization. By the end of 2022, blockchain social media applications flourished, and the total number of active wallet addresses interacting with social DApps smart contracts surged. The new trends in SocialFi could completely change the landscape of the social media industry.

Common Categories and Features of Web3.0 Social Products

Current popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. The SocialFi sector is continuously evolving, with many projects based on social tokens that integrate DeFi elements and are undergoing continuous technical upgrades.

According to the issuance projects of Social tokens, they can be divided into the following categories:

1. Personal tokens: Symbols representing status or connection engagement, early creators or entrepreneurs can receive economic returns. Typical projects include RAC, ROLL, etc.

2. Community Tokens: Issued and controlled by the community, typically governed by a DAO. Used to incentivize community members' contributions, such as gaining access to the community, enjoying exclusive information, etc. Typical examples include WHALE, Mirror, FWB, etc.

3. Minting and distributing platform tokens: represents control over the platform, facilitating creators to issue and manage tokenized communities. Typical projects include Chilliz, RALLY, BitClout, etc.

4. Tool projects: such as Mask Network, which bridges Web2.0 and Web3.0 in a plugin manner, allowing users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and DApps on existing social networks.

Current Issues in Web3.0 Social Platforms

1. High data storage costs: Decentralized storage requires more computational resources and storage space. Some projects are exploring solutions such as increasing block size, sharding, or storing some data off-chain.

2. Insufficient network effects: The user base and activity level are low, making it difficult to form strong network effects. Attracting a large number of Web2.0 users is not easy and requires time and resources for mass education.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: Differences in data formats, encryption methods, and validation rules between different protocols, along with user inertia, may lead to fragmentation of social networks. Cooperation between protocols is needed to establish standardized data formats and validation rules.

4. Achieving a Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, income is mainly obtained through social behavior rewards and content creation incentives. However, high-quality content creation and an objective and comprehensive review mechanism still need improvement.

5. Intense competition in business expansion: Top influencers have become the preferred targets for many projects, and business expansion has entered a heated stage.

Optimizing the Entry Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hot topics of the next cycle. Middleware and protocols are continuously innovating, making social applications more stable, secure, fast, and scalable. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving attention, such as Nostr, Farcaster, and LensProtocol.

Privacy protection will become an important area of innovation. zk technology can be used to enhance the security and privacy of lending transactions, but it is necessary to balance the conflict between anonymity and establishing social status.

In the future, Web3.0 social products will need to explore more innovative interaction methods and social scenarios to attract more users. At the same time, they must address issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection. With technological advancements, Web3.0 social products will become more mature and widespread.