The Current Status and Future Outlook of Web3.0 Social Products

With the popularity of Web3.0 social products, the number of users is continuously increasing. However, after the airdrop ends, the number of daily active users often declines significantly. How can projects maintain their vitality? Whether tokenization can truly motivate user participation remains uncertain. Additionally, with the price fluctuations of tokens in the secondary market, the survival space of Web3.0 native applications, as well as how to balance the contradiction between content moderation and decentralized social interactions, are all issues worth pondering.

This article will explore multiple aspects such as the essence of social interaction, the significance of Web3.0 social products, their classification characteristics, existing problems, and optimization directions, helping readers understand the current situation and future development trends of Web3.0 social products.

The essence of social interactions is "relationships between people + interaction", which can be divided into interactions among acquaintances and interactions based on user interests. However, the total number of Web3.0 crypto natives is limited, and products focused on interactions among acquaintances may be premature. Interactions based on user interests require the creation of new relationships in new scenarios; simply copying and migrating social relationships is not feasible.

Reasons Why Web3.0 Social Products Are Gaining Attention

It is expected that by 2027, the number of global social media users will approach 6 billion. Currently, the average internet user spends 144 minutes daily on social media and instant messaging applications. Although traditional centralized social platforms have a large user base, they also face issues such as data breaches, content censorship, and algorithmic bias.

As a result, more and more people are paying attention to Web3.0 social products. These products are based on blockchain technology, providing a decentralized social experience that protects user data privacy and security. At the same time, they can eliminate the censorship and algorithmic bias of centralized platforms, giving original content creators more autonomy. Web3.0 social products are expected to become one of the important directions for the future development of social media.

Currently, Facebook remains the dominant player in the social media space, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four social media platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users. These large centralized participants have monopolized the entire industry. However, the emergence of SocialFi may disrupt this situation.

SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, proposed three principles that social media should follow: resilience against corporate and government control, only original authors should be able to delete their content, and moderation should preferably be achieved through algorithmic selection.

Based on the principles of fairness and decentralization, blockchain social media applications thrived at the end of 2022. This is evident from the sharp increase in the total number of active wallet addresses interacting with social DApps smart contracts. The new trend of SocialFi could fundamentally change the landscape of the social media industry.

Classification and Characteristics of Web3.0 Social Products

Current popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. The SocialFi track is growing, with many projects based on social tokens that integrate DeFi elements and continuously undergo technological updates and 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 rewards. Typical projects include RAC, ROLL, MeTokens, MintGate, and ALEX.

2. Community Tokens: Mainly issued and controlled by the community, typically governed by a DAO. Used to incentivize community members to contribute, such as gaining access to the community, enjoying special information, etc. Typical cases include WHALE, Mirror, FWB, Cent, Yup, etc.

3. Minting and distributing platform tokens: represent control tokens for the platform, making it easier for creators to issue and manage tokenized communities. Typical projects include Chilliz, RALLY, BitClout, etc.

In addition, there are some noteworthy projects, such as Mask Network, which bridges Web2.0 and Web3.0 in a "plug-in" manner, allowing users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and even DAPPs on existing social networks.

Issues Faced by Web3.0 Social Platforms

1. High data storage costs: Web3.0 social platforms distribute user data across blockchain networks, requiring more computational resources and storage space, resulting in higher data storage costs. Currently, some solutions have emerged, such as increasing block size or implementing sharding for parallel processing, as well as storing some data on off-chain servers.

2. Insufficient network effect: The user scale and activity level of Web3.0 social platforms are relatively low, and the network effect is not as strong as that of traditional platforms. Users may find it difficult to find suitable social circles and communication partners. Attracting a large number of traditional Web2.0 users to use SocialFi applications is not an easy task and requires more time and resources for public education.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: Different DeSoc protocols may adopt different data formats, encryption methods, and validation rules, requiring collaboration between protocols to establish standardized data formats and validation rules. In addition, users may prefer to stay on the initial DeSoc protocol, leading to the fragmentation of social networks.

4. Achieving a Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, the main value capture methods of SocialFi include social behavior rewards and content creation incentives. However, there are still issues with content quality and diversity, lacking high-quality content creation and incentive mechanisms, as well as an objective and完善的审核机制.

5. Business expansion competition is fierce: Top influencers have become the targets of many SocialFi projects, and business expansion has entered a white-hot stage. SocialFi aims to create a self-consistent economic system by tokenizing social influence, helping individuals with different levels of social influence to obtain corresponding benefits.

Optimizing the Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hot topics of the next cycle. Middleware and protocols continue to innovate, making social applications more stable, secure, fast, and scalable. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving increasing 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 on SocialFi platforms, but it is necessary to balance the conflict between anonymity attributes and establishing social status.

In the future, Web3.0 social products need to explore more innovative interaction methods and social scenarios to address issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection. With technological advancements, Web3.0 social products are expected to become more mature and widespread.