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

With the rise of Web3.0 social products, the number of users continues to grow. However, after the airdrop ends, the daily active user count often drops sharply. How can project vitality be maintained? Can tokenization truly incentivize user participation? How can we balance content moderation and decentralized social interaction? These are all questions that entrepreneurs in the Web3.0 social space need to consider.

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 better understand the current state 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, it can be 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 focused on acquaintance interactions may be premature. Interactions based on user interests require the creation of new relationships in new contexts, and simply copying and migrating social relationships from other platforms is not feasible.

Why are Web3.0 social products receiving so much attention?

It is expected that by 2027, the number of global social media users will reach nearly 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.

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, it can eliminate the censorship and algorithmic bias of centralized platforms, providing more autonomy to original content creators. Therefore, Web3.0 social products have garnered widespread attention and may become one of the trends in the future development of social media.

Data shows that Facebook is the leader in the social media field, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms has the largest social media platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users. These large centralized participants have successfully monopolized the entire industry. However, the emergence of SocialFi may disrupt this situation.

SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey once summarized three principles that social media should follow:

1. Social media must be resilient to control by businesses and governments;
2. Only the original creator can delete their own content.
3. The review is best achieved through algorithm selection.

Based on the principles of fairness and decentralization, blockchain-based social media applications flourished at the end of 2022. This can be inferred 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 completely change the landscape of the social media industry.

Common Categories and Characteristics of Web3.0 Social Products

Currently, popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. The SocialFi sector is gradually growing, with many projects based on social tokens that integrate DeFi elements, continuously undergoing technical updates and upgrades.

According to the issuance projects of Social tokens, they can be divided 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. This type of token symbolizes status or connection engagement, allowing early creators or entrepreneurs to gain economic returns.

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

3. Minting and distributing platform tokens: Social platform tokens represent control over the platform, primarily to facilitate creators in issuing and managing Tokenized communities.

In addition to the above three types of tokens, 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 different ecosystems.

Some Issues Currently Existing in Web3.0 Social Platforms

1. High data storage costs: Web3.0 social platforms store user data decentralized on blockchain networks, requiring more computing resources and storage space, which leads to higher data storage costs.

2. Insufficient network effects: Compared to traditional social platforms, Web3.0 social platforms have a lower user base and activity, and the network effects are not as strong as those of traditional social platforms.

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

4. Achieving a sustainable economic model: At present, there are two main ways for SocialFi to capture value: one is to reward users for their social behaviors, and the other is to incentivize content creation. However, there are still issues with content quality and diversity.

5. Business expansion has entered a white-hot stage: SocialFi hopes to create a self-consistent economic system by tokenizing social influence, to help more individuals with varying levels of social influence obtain benefits corresponding to their social influence.

Optimizing the Entry Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hot topics of the next cycle. At the protocol level, technologies in areas such as storage, communication, content distribution, and reputation/certification are continuously innovating. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving increasing attention.

Privacy will become an important area of innovation. zk technology can be used to protect users' transaction data and privacy, 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 attract more users to join. 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 will become more mature and widespread.