The Current Status and Future Prospects 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 number of daily active users often sees a significant decline. How can projects maintain long-term viability? Whether tokenization can truly incentivize user participation remains an unknown. Additionally, the price fluctuations of tokens in the secondary market, the positioning of Web3.0 native applications, and how to balance the conflicting relationship between content moderation and decentralized social interactions are all questions worth pondering.

This article will explore from multiple perspectives, including the essence of social interaction, the significance of Web3.0 social products, their classification features, the challenges they face, and future development directions, aiming to help readers better understand the current status and prospects of Web3.0 social products.

The core of social interaction is "the relationships and interactions between people," which can be roughly divided into interactions among acquaintances and interest-based interactions. Considering the limited user base of Web3.0 crypto users, products focusing on acquaintance interactions may be premature. Interest-based interactions require creating new relationships in new scenarios; simply replicating 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 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.

Web3.0 social products are based on blockchain technology, providing a decentralized social experience that protects users' data privacy and security. At the same time, they can reduce the censorship and algorithmic bias of centralized platforms, giving original content creators more autonomy. Therefore, Web3.0 social products may 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 several large social media platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users. However, the emergence of SocialFi may disrupt this monopoly.

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

1. Social media should be resilient to control by enterprises and governments;
2. Only the original author can delete their own created content;
3. The review is best implemented through algorithm 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. The new trend of SocialFi could fundamentally change the landscape of the social media industry.

Main Categories and Features of Web3.0 Social Products

Current popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. The SocialFi sector is growing, with many projects based on social tokens that integrate DeFi elements, 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: Representing identity or participation, early creators or entrepreneurs can receive economic returns. Typical projects include RAC, ROLL, etc.

2. Community Tokens: Issued and controlled by the community, usually governed by a DAO. Used to incentivize community members' contributions, such as WHALE, Mirror, FWB, etc.

3. Minting and distributing platform tokens: representing control over the platform, making it easier for creators to manage tokenized communities. For example, Chilliz, RALLY, BitClout, etc.

4. Tool projects: such as Mask Network, which connects Web2.0 and Web3.0 in a plug-in manner, allowing users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and use DApps on existing social networks.

Challenges Faced by Web3.0 Social Platforms

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

2. Insufficient network effects: The user base and activity level are low, making it difficult to create a strong network effect. Attracting Web2.0 users to use SocialFi applications remains a challenge.

3. Cross-platform interaction difficulties: The differences in data formats, encryption methods, and verification rules among different DeSoc protocols hinder cross-platform interaction. There is a need for cooperation between protocols to establish standardized data formats and verification rules.

4. Sustainable Economic Model: Currently, value capture is mainly achieved through rewards for social behavior and incentives for content creation. However, there are still issues with controlling content quality and update frequency, and there is a lack of an objective and comprehensive review mechanism.

5. Intense competition in business expansion: Top influencers have become targets for various projects, and SocialFi hopes to create a self-consistent economic system by tokenizing social influence.

Optimizing the Development Direction of Social Products

1. Focus on middleware and protocol innovation: Improve the stability, security, speed, and scalability of social applications.

2. Explore privacy protection technologies: such as the application of zk technology in SocialFi, balancing privacy protection and social status establishment.

3. Create new interactive scenarios: Establish new types of social relationships among users to break social fatigue.

4. Improve user experience: Simplify operation processes and enhance product usability.

5. Strengthen content quality control: Establish an effective content review mechanism to increase the proportion of high-quality content.

6. Explore cross-platform interoperability: Facilitate data sharing and interoperability between different protocols.

In the future, Web3.0 social products need to continuously innovate interaction methods and social scenarios, while 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.