Author: cryptoming [DeBox Research Institute] [Buidler DAO Investment Research Association] October 23
The article believes that the mainstream social applications of Web2 are divided into instant messaging and content creation, which correspond to the Social and Finance of web3 in a narrow sense. At the same time, combining the respective characteristics of Web2 and Web3, it describes the elements that an ideal SocialFi application should have.
Through the investigation of existing Web3 social applications, it is found that applications based on social products are more suitable for the current Web3 market. The overly radical launch of Fi similar to "content mining" is not recognized by the market. At the same time, based on the development history of Web2 social applications, there may be a Fi model suitable for Web3Social in the future, but the current SocialFi market should focus on Social, that is, products that meet users' social needs, because the essence of social interaction is people, not finance. Finance can be an add-on, but it is definitely not the main course.
1. Social Application Forms of Web2.0
According to the 2022 We are Social report, as of April 2022, there are 4.65 billion active social media users worldwide, accounting for 58.7% of the world's population. It can be seen that Internet social networking has become inseparable from people's lives. On the Internet, social networking must rely on certain network media and communication tools, that is, social applications. For example, QQ, WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin in China, and WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. abroad.
Figure 1 Overview of web2 social applications
Essentially, these applications are social applications developed based on instant messaging technology with different forms of presentation. The difference lies in the strength of the social relationship between the parties involved. According to the strength of the social relationship and the social methods in these applications, they can generally be divided into two types of social applications.
The first is instant messaging, whose main features are instant communication and strong social connection. In QQ, WeChat, and WhatsApp, the two parties in a social relationship are called "friends", which generally refers to people with a close relationship, such as family, classmates, friends, colleagues, etc. These people make up the user's address book. Instant messaging focuses more on point-to-point communication and exchange;
The other is content creation, which is mainly characterized by social content creation, which keeps users on the platform through content and creates greater value for the platform. In Weibo, Douyin, and Twitter, there is no concept of friends. The content producers are celebrities, big Vs, and anchors. These social applications are a stage for public figures and KOLs to show themselves. The relationship between them and their content subscribers (fans) is very weak. The platform must be open enough to facilitate the dissemination of content (pictures, videos, opinions, articles, etc.).
In the actual use of social applications, instant messaging and content creation are generally integrated, but with different focuses. For example, in addition to the instant messaging function, WeChat also has a public account function for content creation. Twitter and YouTube also support point-to-point private chat functions in addition to tweets and video creation.
In addition to the above social applications, we can also see some innovative ways of playing based on social applications, such as
Social + e-commerce = live streaming, WeChat business, Pinduoduo;
Social+ Information = Public Account Services;
Social+ Service = service account, mini program;
Social+ Entertainment = Games, short videos;
Social + Education = Paid Content.
It can be seen that the current Web2 social application construction is basically mature, and users are very sticky to social applications, but there are also some drawbacks. For Web2, Internet social platforms often make profits by obtaining a large amount of personal data for precision marketing, and these profits are not fairly distributed to creators and users. However, the emerging Web3 social applications go the other way and hope to build social applications that allow users to fully control the use of their own data.
2. What elements should an ideal Web3 social application have?
Although Web2 data is too centralized and users cannot verify the ownership of information and content, the centralized services and entities of Web2 provide most users with a smooth and pleasant service experience, and the threshold for users to participate in social activities is also low. Since Web3 is known as the next generation of the Internet, what elements should the ideal Web3 social application have?
From the perspective of Web2 product experience, the usage threshold and interactive experience of Web3's social applications should be no lower than those of Web2's mainstream applications.
From the perspective of Web3’s decentralization and financial characteristics, people will have absolute control over their social data in the social applications of the Web 3 era. At the same time, in Web2, we have seen that data and traffic have already had the models of Internet celebrity economy and fan economy, and Web3 has emerged from DeFi, so financial characteristics are an integral and important part of Web3 social applications.
Therefore, in a broad sense, all social applications of Web3 belong to the category of SocialFi. SocialFi products are based on the underlying infrastructure of Web 3, starting from people's demand for "decentralized social" or "decentralized finance" (ie DeFi), and then integrating the two needs into a product category. The combination of decentralized social and finance can break the platform monopoly, eliminate single-point risks, and create new business models and product categories in the wave of the global digital economic system.
As mentioned above, Web2 social applications are divided into two types: instant messaging and content creation. For content creation social applications, Web3's decentralization and Fi features perfectly solve the problem of production materials (data) ownership and flow. However, for instant messaging social applications, Web3's social applications do not seem to be that attractive. Let's first look at the initial social application exploration results of Web3.
3. Exploration of Web3 social applications (SocialFi application)
Since SocialFi is a combination of Social (instant messaging) and Finance (content creation), we might as well take a look at the representative projects of each social application in Web3 based on their different product focuses.
In the social section, the current mainstream Web3Social applications include Blockchat, Atem, DeBOx, AVE.ai, etc.
The blockchain chat tool created by Blockchat's etherscan team supports conversations between wallets and on-chain information transmission. Although etherscan has a high user flow, it is clear that they have not grasped the needs of Web3 users. Most of the current users are hackers or some online beggars.
Atem is a social-based NFT trading platform where you can buy NFTs of suitable prices and preferences through chatting on Atem, which meets the needs of some users to "bargain" in the market.
AVE.ai was originally an APP that tracks tokens and conducts visual market analysis. The latest version adds a chat function to the market page, allowing users to find a space to vent their emotions while tracking the market, which also meets user needs, although most of the information is FOMO.
DeBox is a Web3 social platform based on DID. It inherits the characteristics of WeChat from Web2 and also innovatively integrates the characteristics of Web3, such as position chat, multiple Dao group tools, and multi-dimensional DID identity display. DeBox plays a great role in NFT and token consensus, community management, and real social interaction. It is committed to solving false and fraudulent messages on telegram and discord, which basically meets the real needs of Web3 users and communities for social software, and also meets some of the elements of the ideal Web3 social application mentioned above. DeBox is currently in the internal testing stage, and basically maintains an iterative version update every week, and there is no particularly clear token economic model.
Figure 2 DeBox (building the “WeChat” of web3)
In the above-mentioned Web3Social applications, there is no clear token economic model. They focus more on the product side. To be more precise, they provide a social window. How to use it and how to develop it depends on "people".
In the Finance section, Finance is what is often referred to as the creator economy. Here we select Mirror and Monaco Planet as representatives for analysis.
Mirror is a decentralized writing platform issued on Ethereum. By registering a wallet address and ENS domain name, authors can publish articles for free, or they can mint articles as NFTs and store them permanently on Arweave. Readers can purchase the NFTs as collections.
Mirror used to have a token economic model $WRITE. $WRITE was not publicly sold, but the top 10 people who participated in the Write Race each week would receive tokens. However, this voting and selection mechanism caused the big bot to form a "sybil attack", resulting in the address that obtained $WRITE creating content of low quality. Then mirror simply cancelled the financial mechanism of voting to obtain tokens and replaced it with review by Mirror Dao core members. Therefore, the articles pay more attention to quality, and the way for creators to obtain economic benefits is that readers collect the creators' NFTs to make profits, which increases the content quality requirements of creators. Currently, mirror is one of the main creation tools for Web3 people.
Figure 3 Mirror
Monaco Planet is a social platform deployed on BSC, focusing on content mining, that is, creating content to get token rewards. In the early days of its release, Monaco Planet had a quantitative "content mining" token financial model, which once attracted market attention. However, because there was no reasonable mechanism to restrict the content quality of creators, a large number of users formed alliances, followed and liked each other in order to obtain token rewards, and produced spam content, which led to the proliferation of low-quality content on the platform, the deterioration of community quality, and finally became a social product that no one cared about.
From the examples of Mirror and Monaco Planet, we can see that for social platforms that focus on content creation, although Web3 meets the ideal needs of content creators, the wrong financial token model will cause the social application to become a failed product. After weakening the token economic model, Mirror has become a high-quality decentralized creation platform, which seems to be more in line with the needs of current Web3 users.
4. Does Web3’s Social have to include Fi?
Through the analysis of the current mainstream applications of Web3 Social and Finance, it is not difficult to find that applications based on Social products are more suitable for the current Web3 market. The overly radical launch of Fi similar to "content mining" is not recognized by the market at present.
Back to the development of social applications in Web2, the social applications of instant messaging ICQ and QQ can be traced back to 1996, while the blog based on content creation was launched in 1998, Facebook and Twitter can be traced back to 2004, and the creator economy appeared even later. Taking history as a mirror, there may be a Fi model suitable for Web3Social in the future, but the current SocialFi market should focus on Social, that is, products that meet users' social needs, because the essence of social is people, not finance. Finance can be an add-on, but it is definitely not the main course.
Therefore, friends who are interested in SocialFi can pay more attention to Web3 social applications that focus on products or user needs in the early stages, such as DeBox, Mirror, Atem, etc.
References:
1. From web2.0 to social
2. A comprehensive view of the SocialFi ecosystem: from the current market to the future development of the industry
3. Will Web3 social networking replace Web2 social networking?
4. SocialFi: Perhaps the next hot spot
Original link:
https://mirror.xyz/0xdebox.eth/xQvb7UNNrNAVV1KGS0z8qmoDwl7NnuXKFlJhzTnxsJs
