Exploring the Current Status and Future Development of Web3.0 Social Products

With the popularity of Web3.0 social products, the number of users continues to grow. However, once the airdrop ends, the daily active user count will plummet sharply. How can the project maintain its vitality? Whether tokenization can truly incentivize user participation remains an unknown. Additionally, with tokens crashing in the secondary market, do Web3.0 native applications have a foothold, and how can the contradiction between content moderation and decentralized social interactions be balanced?

These are the questions that entrepreneurs in the Web3.0 social domain need to consider. This article will explore various aspects such as the essence of social interaction, the significance of Web3.0 social products, their classification characteristics, issues, and optimization directions, helping readers better understand the current status and future of Web3.0 social products, and providing some ideas to alleviate social fatigue.

The essence of social interaction is "the relationship between people + interaction". Broadly speaking, it is divided into interactions among acquaintances and interactions based on user interests. However, the total number of crypto natives in Web3.0 is limited, so products focusing on interactions among acquaintances may be premature. Interactions based on user interests require the creation of new relationships in new scenarios, and simply copying and migrating social relationships from other platforms is not feasible.

Why Are Web3.0 Social Products So Highly Regarded?

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 per day on social media and instant messaging applications. Although traditional centralized social platforms have a large user base, they also face many issues, such as data breaches, content censorship, and algorithmic bias.

As a result, more and more people are starting to pay attention to Web3.0 social products. These products are based on blockchain technology, enabling a decentralized social experience that ensures user data privacy and security. At the same time, Web3.0 social products can eliminate the censorship and algorithmic bias of centralized platforms, providing more autonomy for original content creators. Web3.0 social products are gaining significant attention and may become one of the trends in the future development of social media.

Data shows that Facebook is the dominant player in the social media field, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. A certain tech giant has the largest social media platform with over 1 billion monthly active users on four platforms, including its core platform, two instant messaging applications, and a photo sharing platform. These large centralized players have successfully monopolized the entire industry. However, with the emergence of SocialFi, this situation may be disrupted.

The emergence of SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. A co-founder of a well-known social platform once summarized three principles that social media should follow:

1. Social media must have resilience against control by businesses and governments;
2. Only the original authors can delete the content they created.
3. The review is best achieved through algorithm selection.

Based on the principles of fairness and decentralization, blockchain-based social media applications have flourished 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. Currently, the total number of smart contracts for social DApps is rapidly increasing, and the new trend of SocialFi could fundamentally change the landscape of the social media industry.

Common Categories and Features of Web3.0 Social Products

Currently, popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools, etc. Among them, the SocialFi sector is gradually developing and growing, with many projects based on social tokens, integrating DeFi elements, and continuously undergoing technology updates and upgrades, becoming SocialFi projects.

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

1. Personal Tokens: Token holders can access early fan groups, enjoy discounts or participate in events early, and receive merchandise, NFTs, etc. These tokens represent a symbol of status or connection engagement, allowing early creators or entrepreneurs to gain economic returns.

2. Community Tokens: Primarily issued and controlled by a community, usually governed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). They are mainly used to incentivize community members to contribute to the community, such as granting access to the community, enjoying special information, etc.

3. Minting and distributing platform tokens: Social platform tokens represent control over the platform and are mainly designed to facilitate creators in issuing and managing tokenized communities.

4. Tool-type projects: Social tokens require the use of third-party tools such as token distribution in project operations, and these tools may sometimes overlap with those used in other blockchain projects within the ecosystem.

Current Issues with Web3.0 Social Platforms

1. High data storage costs: Web3.0 social platforms store user data in a decentralized manner on the blockchain network. This method requires more computing resources and storage space compared to traditional centralized storage methods, resulting in higher data storage costs.

2. Insufficient social network effects: Compared to traditional social platforms, Web3.0 social platforms have a lower user base and activity level, so the social network effects on these platforms are not as strong as those of traditional social platforms. Users may face challenges in finding suitable social circles and communication partners.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: Different DeSoc protocols may use different data formats, encryption methods, and validation rules, requiring cooperation and communication between protocols to establish standardized data formats and validation rules.

4. Achieving a Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, there are two main value capture methods for SocialFi. One is to reward users for their social behaviors, and the other is to incentivize content creation. However, in most projects, 80% of content providers are from the project team's own members, and 20% of the content suffers from serious homogenization issues or difficulties in accuracy verification.

5. Business expansion has entered a white-hot stage: for influential figures with top traffic, they have also become the preferred targets for many competitors vying to settle in SocialFi projects.

Optimizing the Entry Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hot topics of the next cycle. In this field, we see an increasing number of middleware and protocols continuously innovating and evolving, making social applications more stable, secure, fast, and scalable.

At the protocol level of SocialFi, technologies related to storage, communication, content distribution, and reputation/credentials are continuously innovating. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving increasing attention.

Privacy will become an important area of innovation. Certain privacy protection technologies can be used to achieve private and secure transactions on the blockchain. Combining SocialFi with this technology can enhance the security and privacy of lending transactions.

In summary, Web3.0 social products need to continuously create new interaction scenarios and establish new types of social relationships among users to break social fatigue. In the future, Web3.0 social products need to explore more innovative interaction methods and social scenarios to attract more users to join. At the same time, it is also necessary to address issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection. With the continuous advancement of technology, we believe that Web3.0 social products will become more mature and widespread.