Opportunities and Challenges of Web3 Social: Exploring the Future of Decentralization Social

The Web3 industry has been highly controversial recently, especially in the social domain. Some believe that Web3 social is a scam, but in reality, this field has been continuously exploring and progressing. This article will review the development of Web3 social over the past 8 years, analyze the challenges currently faced, and look forward to future opportunities.

The Underlying Needs of Web3 Social

Any successful product is built on a solid demand. The fundamental needs of Web3 social include:

1. The need to establish connections between people
2. The need to perceive others' emotions and psychological activities through links.
3. Obtain feedback to correct self-needs

Holding tokens is a brand new way of connecting in the Web3 environment. Open and verifiable databases expand the dimensions of information we obtain from connections. This will nurture entirely new social relationships and interactions.

Compared to traditional social networks, the unique advantage of Web3 social lies in:

• Underlying information support across databases and organizations
• Freely choose a front-end composable and pluggable social interface
• Quantify rights with tokens, supporting interactive new scenarios

The Development History of Web3 Social

The development of Web3 social can be roughly divided into two directions:

1. Develop decentralized social technology standards
2. Build token consensus through social interactions

Decentralization social technology standards competition

Early projects like STEEM proposed many innovative ideas, providing a reference for later projects. New generation projects such as Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, and Farcaster have all offered their own Decentralization social protocol solutions.

The main challenge faced by these projects is how to break through the bottleneck of economies of scale. To this end, most projects use token incentives to attract users.

Token incentive revolution encountered obstacles

Token incentives face two major dilemmas in a social environment:

1. The subjective value of social content is difficult to assess, and the effectiveness of token incentives is questionable.
2. Token incentives face witch attacks

Taking STEEM as an example, its early content production and filtering recommendations based on token staking weight were effective. However, as the consensus collapsed, this mechanism quickly became ineffective.

Content Independent Revolution Stage Setback

Many projects attempt to "put content on the chain" to achieve content assetization. However, in the internet era, while content can be authenticated, information can easily be transferred. In the absence of scale effects, users do not care about content sovereignty.

The new journey of attention sovereignty

The project began to explore a smarter content recommendation system. The "Subscription Stream Generator" proposed by BlueSky is an innovative attempt. Debank's social module also shows potential, correcting user profiles through on-chain data to improve recommendation accuracy.

Social Asset Tokenization

Another development route is to issue tokens using social media. This mainly includes three methods:

1. Tokenization of Attention: Creating token attention through content, KOL, community, and wealth effect.
2. Tokenization of social relationships: injecting the value of social relationships into tokens
3. Content Tokenization: Emphasizes the relationship between tokens and content ownership.

The application of bonding curves addresses the liquidity issues of small-scale projects and is an important innovation.

Opportunities and Mission of Web3 Social

After two cycles of development, Web3 social has rich practices in multiple fields. Future opportunities are mainly reflected in:

1. The technical threshold is continuously lowering, and user experience is consistently improving.
2. Innovation of Embedded Social Scenarios
3. The middleware and infrastructure are becoming increasingly完善
4. The number of Web3 natives is continuously increasing

The future direction of Web3 social development may be: centered around content creators, freely choosing suitable protocols and tools, allowing other participants to engage in the economic cycle through tokens.

The mission of Web3 social is not to save the world, but to return the rights taken away by centralization to every individual, providing people with more choices.

Conclusion

The key to the success of Web3 social lies in: how to reduce costs, optimize recommendation mechanisms, and how to enhance user interactivity. In the future, it is necessary to explore better interaction methods between content and communities in a decentralized environment, as this will determine whether Web3 social can truly gather traffic and take root.