The Current Status and Future of Web3.0 Social Products

Web3.0 social products are attracting increasing attention. As the number of users continues to grow, these products face the challenge of how to maintain activity and attractiveness. Whether tokenization can truly incentivize user participation remains uncertain, and the performance of tokens in the secondary market is also concerning. At the same time, finding a balance between content moderation and decentralization is also a challenge.

This article will start from the essence of social interaction and explore the significance, classification, characteristics, issues, and optimization directions of Web3.0 social products, in order to help readers understand the current situation and development prospects of this field.

The core of social interaction is the relationships and interactions between people, which can be broadly divided into interactions among acquaintances and interest-based interactions. However, due to the limited user base of Web3.0 native users, products that focus on acquaintance-based socializing may not yet be mature. Interest-based interactions require creating new social relationships in new scenarios, and simply replicating the relationship networks of other platforms is not feasible.

The Appeal of Web3.0 Social Products

By 2027, the number of global social media users is expected to 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.

Web3.0 social products are based on blockchain technology, enabling a decentralized social experience that protects user data privacy and security. At the same time, these products can reduce censorship and algorithmic bias, empowering content creators with more autonomy. Therefore, Web3.0 social products may become one of the future development directions of social media.

Currently, Facebook is still a giant in the social media field, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Meta owns four social platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users. These large centralized platforms have monopolized the entire industry. However, the emergence of SocialFi may disrupt this pattern.

SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, once proposed three principles that social media should follow: resilience against control by corporations and governments, only the original author can delete content, and moderation should ideally be achieved through algorithmic selection.

Based on the principles of fairness and decentralization, blockchain social media applications flourished at the end of 2022. This is evident from the sharp increase in the 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

The currently popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. The SocialFi sector is rapidly developing, with many projects based on social tokens, integrating DeFi elements, and continuously undergoing technological upgrades.

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

1. Personal tokens: represent the rights to access early fan groups, discounts, or early participation in events. Typical projects include RAC, ROLL, MeTokens, MintGate, and ALEX, among others.

2. Community Tokens: Issued and controlled by the community, usually governed by a DAO. Used to incentivize community members to contribute. Typical examples include WHALE, Mirror, FWB, etc.

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

4. Third-party tools: such as Mask Network, connect Web2.0 and Web3.0 in a plug-in manner, allowing users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and DAPPs on existing social networks.

Challenges Facing Web3.0 Social Platforms

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

2. Insufficient social network effects: The user base and activity levels are low, making it difficult to form a strong social network effect. Attracting Web2.0 users still faces challenges and requires more time and resources for education.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: There are still barriers to data transmission and sharing between different ecosystems. While some projects are trying to address this issue, achieving large-scale cross-platform social interaction will still take time.

4. Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, value is primarily captured through social behavior rewards and content creation incentives. However, the quality and diversity of content still need improvement.

5. Business expansion competition is fierce: top influencers have become the targets of various projects, leading to an intense phase of business development.

Direction for Optimizing Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hot areas. Innovations in middleware and protocol layers are constantly emerging, making social applications more stable, secure, fast, and scalable. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving increasing attention, such as Lens Protocol.

Privacy protection will become an important area of innovation. zk technology may play a significant role in protecting user privacy, but it is necessary to balance the contradiction between anonymity and social status establishment.

In the future, Web3.0 social products need to explore more innovative interaction methods and social scenarios to attract users and break social fatigue. At the same time, issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection also need to be addressed. With the continuous advancement of technology, Web3.0 social products are expected to become more mature and widespread.