In-depth Discussion on 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, after the airdrop ends, the daily active user count often sees a significant decline. This raises a series of questions: How to maintain project vitality? Can tokenization truly incentivize user participation? In the face of declining token prices in the secondary market, how can Web3.0 native applications establish themselves? How to balance the contradiction between content moderation and decentralized social networking?

This article will discuss from multiple perspectives, including the essence of social interaction, the significance of Web3.0 social products, their classification characteristics, existing problems, and optimization directions, aiming to help readers better understand the current state and future development trends of Web3.0 social products.

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

1. 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 per day on social media and instant messaging apps. Despite having a large user base, traditional centralized social platforms 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 ensures user data privacy and security. At the same time, they can eliminate the censorship and algorithmic biases of centralized platforms, giving original content creators more autonomy. Web3.0 social products are expected to become one of the important trends in the future development of social media.

Currently, Facebook remains a giant in the social media field, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four large social media platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users. These centralized giants have successfully monopolized the entire industry. However, the emergence of SocialFi may break this situation.

SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. Based on principles of fairness and decentralization, blockchain social media applications surged in popularity 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 total number of smart contracts for social DApps is rapidly increasing, and the new trend of SocialFi may fundamentally change the landscape of the social media industry.

2. Major Categories and Characteristics of Web3.0 Social Products

Current 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 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 activities early, and receive merchandise, NFTs, etc. These tokens represent status or engagement, and early creators or entrepreneurs can gain economic returns. Typical projects include RAC, ROLL, MeTokens, MintGate, and ALEX.

2. Community Tokens: Mainly issued and controlled by a group, typically governed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Used to incentivize community members' contributions, such as gaining access to the community, enjoying special information, etc. Typical examples include WHALE, Mirror, FWB, Cent, Yup, Matataki, SWAGG, KarmaDAO, Ark, Seed Club, Forefront, Flamingo, and Aavegotchi.

3. Minting and distributing platform tokens: Represents the control tokens of the platform, mainly facilitating creators to issue and manage tokenized communities. Typical projects include Chilliz, RALLY, BitClout, Zora, CircleUBI, Loopss, Fyooz, Bluesky, Audius, Mastodon, Nafter, Coinvise, and Calaxy.

In addition, there are some noteworthy projects, such as Mask Network. It bridges Web2.0 and Web3.0 in a "plugin" manner, allowing users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and even DAPPs on existing social networks. Mask Network uses distributed system technology to enhance the security and privacy of user data.

3. The Current Issues Facing Web3.0 Social Platforms

Although Web3.0 social platforms have decentralized characteristics, they still face some challenges during their development.

1. High data storage costs: The decentralized storage of blockchain requires more computing resources and storage space, leading to higher costs. Some projects are exploring solutions such as increasing block size, sharding, or adopting the Farcaster model, which stores identity information and read-write data capabilities on-chain, while other data is stored on off-chain servers.

2. Insufficient social network effects: Compared to traditional platforms, user scale and activity levels are lower, resulting in weaker social network effects. Attracting a large number of Web2.0 users is not an easy task and requires more time and resources for public education. Some projects propose creating middleware tools to help users become familiar with SocialFi, but native applications still face challenges.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: There is a lack of standardized data formats and APIs between different platforms, which makes data transmission and sharing difficult. Although some protocols like Nostr and Lens provide APIs for synchronizing data, differences between protocols still pose obstacles. Achieving large-scale cross-platform social interactions will still take time.

4. Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, SocialFi primarily obtains value through social behavior rewards and content creation incentives. However, the lack of content quality and diversity, as well as the absence of high-quality creation and a comprehensive review mechanism, have become bottlenecks for development.

5. Intense competition in business expansion: Top Influencers have become the targets of various projects, and SocialFi aims to tokenize social influence to create a self-consistent economic system, helping individuals with different levels of social influence to obtain corresponding benefits.

4. Optimizing the Development Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi remains one of the important hotspots. More and more middleware and protocols continue to innovate, improving the stability, security, speed, and scalability of social applications. At the protocol level, technologies such as storage, communication, content distribution, and reputation/credentials are continuously advancing. Among them, decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving significant 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, safeguarding user transaction data and lender privacy. However, there is a need 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, addressing issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection. With technological advancements, Web3.0 social products are expected to become more mature and widespread.