Exploring the Current State and Future of Web3.0 Social Products

With the rise of Web3.0 social products, the number of users continues to grow. However, the number of daily active users often significantly declines after the airdrop ends. How can projects maintain their vitality? Whether tokenization can truly incentivize user participation remains unknown. Coupled with the price fluctuations of tokens in the secondary market, how can Web3.0 native applications establish themselves and balance the contradiction between content moderation and decentralized social interaction?

These are the questions that entrepreneurs in the Web3.0 social field need to consider. This article will explore various aspects such as the essence of social interactions, the significance of Web3.0 social products, their classification characteristics, the challenges they face, and optimization directions, 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", which can be broadly divided into interactions among acquaintances and interactions based on user interests. However, the total number of crypto users 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; simply copying and migrating social relationships is not feasible.

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

By 2027, the number of global social media users is expected to 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 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 and can achieve a decentralized social experience, ensuring 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 are expected to become one of the important trends in the development of social media in the future.

Data shows that Facebook remains the dominant player in the social media space, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns the largest social media platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users. These large-scale centralized platforms have successfully monopolized the entire industry. However, with the emergence of SocialFi, this situation may change.

The emergence of SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. Some believe that social media should adhere to three principles: resilience against corporate and government control, only original authors should be able to delete their own content, and moderation should preferably 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 total number of active wallet addresses interacting with social DApps smart contracts. Currently, the total number of smart contracts for social DApps is rapidly growing, and the new trend of SocialFi may completely change the landscape of the social media industry.

Common Categories and Characteristics of Web3.0 Social Products

The current popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools, etc. Among them, the SocialFi sector is thriving, with many projects based on social tokens, integrating DeFi elements, and continuously undergoing technological 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 gain early access to fan groups, discounts, or opportunities to participate in events ahead of time, as well as merchandise, NFTs, etc. These tokens represent a symbol of status or engagement, allowing early creators or entrepreneurs to receive economic returns.

2. Community Tokens: Primarily issued and controlled by the community, usually governed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Mainly used to incentivize community members to contribute, 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 used to help creators issue and manage tokenized communities.

In addition, there are some tool projects worth paying attention to, such as Mask Network. It bridges the concepts of 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. Mask Network uses distributed system technology to enhance the security and privacy of user data.

Some Issues Currently Existing in Web3.0 Social Platforms

Web3.0 social platforms face some challenges during their development, mainly including:

1. High data storage costs: The decentralized storage method requires more computing resources and storage space, leading to higher costs. Some projects are exploring solutions such as increasing block size, sharding, or off-chain storage.

2. Insufficient social network effects: The user scale and activity level are low, making it difficult to form a strong social network effect. Attracting traditional Web2.0 users to use SocialFi applications is not easy and requires more time and resources for public education.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: The lack of standardized data formats and APIs between different platforms makes data transmission and sharing challenging. Although some projects are working to achieve cross-platform interoperability, they still face challenges related to technology and user habits.

4. Achieving a Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, the main value capture methods of SocialFi include social behavior rewards and content creation incentives. However, high-quality content creation and a完善的审核机制 remain bottlenecks in development.

5. Business expansion has entered a white-hot stage: top traffic Influencers have become the target of many competitors. SocialFi aims to tokenize social influence to create a self-consistent economic system that helps individuals with varying levels of social influence to earn corresponding rewards.

Optimizing the Entry Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hot topics of the next cycle. Middleware and protocols are continuously innovating, making social applications more stable, secure, fast, and scalable. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are receiving increasing attention, such as LensProtocol.

Privacy protection will become an important area of innovation. zk technology can be used to enhance the security and privacy of lending transactions, 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. At the same time, issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection also need to be addressed. With continuous technological advancements, Web3.0 social products are expected to become more mature and widespread.