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SocialFI in Web3 : Social has no end

2022-09-26 18:54

Read this article in 47 Minutes

Perhaps in the future social future, we don't need to use language, but we already have the same mind.

Original author: Jayde Zhang

Social, the full name is society socialize. The written definition is "social activities in which individuals communicate with each other and conduct material and spiritual exchanges." In social interaction, people share opinions, emotions, and experiences with each other.

Man is a social animal. As the god of Web2 social networking, Zhang Xiaolong, the father of WeChat, believes that the essence of social networking is to find similar people. Zhou Yuan, the founder of Zhihu, said that the essence of social interaction may be to answer two questions-who am I and who are others.

"Self" is a complex philosophical concept, but social interaction is a universal need . People’s desire to have social connections with other people is essentially derived from three reasons: the exchange of value (economic value, social value); the satisfaction of emotional appeals; the acquisition of sexual resources. In the process of socializing, behavior brings about information exchange and the formation of a relationship network.

Socialization is a "people" business, and the value of the 100 billion market is always the same It is the highlight of the entrepreneurial battle. Web 2 social networking is often equivalent to one or more social software. But it is obvious to all that the Matthew effect of super social apps is becoming more and more obvious, and WeChat seems to have become a black hole for all social products.

On the other hand, with the peaking of mobile Internet dividends and the business imagination of Internet giants The space is also compressed again and again. The overall performance of social products in the Web2 world is weak and lacks innovation. After the emergence of Clubhouse in 2021, there has been no exciting mainstream phenomenon-level product that has swept the world.

Opportunities are born in crisis, Web2 creators have meager income, vicious competition, platform hegemony and other issues All are forcing the rise of the SocialFi track. Along with the paradigm shift from Web 2 to Web 3, looking back at the Web 3 SocialFi track, a group of entrepreneurs with great vitality are thriving in the soil based on blockchain infrastructure.

"SocialFi Entrepreneurs Talk" deliberately found three representative SocailFi tracks Excellent practitioners, listen to them talk about their career stories, industry cognition and vision. I hope to use other people's stories as nodes, inspirations, and fires to hold torches to illuminate each other in the charming virgin forest of Web 3.

01/ Louis Lu: Build a Web3 digital identity platform and witness the "user-centric" Social paradigm change.

BOOM CTO | Twitter @boomapporg

After 6 years of working on Web2,

I decided to go All in Web3.

When I was a student, I was fortunate enough to come into contact with and participate in Bitcoin mining and trading, and I also started a business to develop a basketball community APP. After graduation, he successively engaged in data mining work in Baidu and ByteDance. His business mainly involves user behavior mining, information flow recommendation and advertising optimization. Thanks to a lot of data-related work in Web2 search, recommendation, advertising and other fields, I have a deep understanding of the problems existing in Web2's social products. Web2's social products are highly centralized, and there are many disadvantages in terms of user data.

Data ownership issue: The Web2 centralized platform regards user data and creator content as Its own core "data assets" and "data barriers"; but for users, they basically have no control and management rights over the data. For example, if Facebook and Twitter want to ban your account, you will not only lose the creative content and fans on it, but more importantly, you may have no way to appeal. This creates a great sense of insecurity for users.

Data privacy issues: all data is stored in the company's centralized database, and the centralized platform management, there may be a risk of data leakage. It is worth mentioning that various social platforms collect user data basically without the user's knowledge.

The issue of data revenue rights: For example, one of the main monetization methods on the Internet is advertising, and the platform mainly relies on creation However, only a small part of these revenues flow into creators and users.

Joining Web 3 on the one hand is because with the development of Web 2 for nearly 20 years, the industry has already Highly centralized, business growth has peaked, and policy dividends are exhausted. It is necessary to explore the next outlet. On the other hand, some of my classmates and friends who played Crypto in my student days chose to stick to Web3 after graduation, and have achieved relatively great success in the rapid development of Web3 in the past few years. Moreover, Web2 friends around me have also joined the Web3 industry one after another. When an emerging industry attracts more and more venture capital funds and talents, I perceive that there will be great opportunities in the future, so I decided to leave Web2 and join Web3.

Do the hard but right thing,

Witness the paradigm shift from "platform-centric" to "user-centric".

Web3 With the development of DeFi, GameFi and NFT, the scale of users and industry influence continue to expand, and social networking has become inevitable one ring. However, the existing social products of Web2 have the problem of high centralization, which cannot solve the new needs of Web3 users for data ownership, income rights and privacy, and require a new paradigm of social network.

Boom aims to build a next-generation social network based on blockchain technology. I am mainly responsible for technical architecture design and product development at Boom. Currently we are focusing on the development and construction of the Web3 digital identity label protocol. User identity is the core of social products. With the emergence of applications and concepts such as social graphs and soul binding tokens (SBT) , It is already a consensus that Web3 needs a better DID (Digital Identity).

Web3's blockchain-based decentralized technology enables users to achieve decentralization and composability of creative content, social relationship data, identity reputation, etc., without the need for a centralized platform . These changes will bring new paradigm solutions to users' data ownership, income rights, privacy and other issues, and build a social network that pays more attention to users.

Users come for tools,

Stay due to network.

Looking at the current development model of social products, the current successful social products of Web2 can bring practical utility and entertainment to users. And users can clearly perceive it. For example, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, they allow you to reach a lot of people and understand their dynamics. Things like WhatsApp or Wechat help you communicate with people all over the world, video chat, without paying for text messages, this is a practical utility.

Social networks also follow Metcalfe’s law: a social The value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The more users there are, the greater the value of the social platform, and then the user growth curve will suddenly explode at a certain single point.

But users will wonder why large social networks lose their original sense of value when their users surge? Why do some big social networks decline and some new and small social networks rise? Why is it that a small network with an excellent tool experience has already attracted many users, but in the end users cannot stay and form a social network, while a seemingly useless one can?

For example, after Facebook, the platform-level social products Instagram and SnapChat appeared one after another. Tiktok also poses a huge challenge to Facebook. For example, many young people now "play dead" in WeChat Moments, but "bounce" on Douyin.

To explain this, the new social product model expands beyond practicality and entertainment The third dimension: social capital (Social Capital).

How to obtain social capital and quickly accumulate your own social capital advantages?

This seems to be very similar to capital acquisition in blockchain networks:

1 .Each social network will release a new social capital (such as the number of fans, likes), compared with the token of the blockchain network.

2. You must show a proof of work (POW) to get a token, which corresponds to blockchain mining.

Facebook/WeChat Moments, you need to post funny status; Instagram, you need to update interesting photos; Tiktok/Douyin need to update interesting short videos. In this way, you can work to prove that you can get more social capital such as attention and likes on social platforms. Users who join a social network mining early will also gain the advantage of accumulating social capital.

Celebrities with inherent advantages in social capital will also have natural advantages when joining new social platforms , similar to the token pre-mining in the blockchain network. Like cryptocurrencies, value is tied to scarcity, and the scarcity of social capital stems from proof-of-work (POW).

However, we must also clearly see that social networks, like blockchain networks, have respective life cycles. As time goes by, it will become more and more difficult to mine tokens on each social network, that is, the deflationary effect. Then users feel that they cannot gain value in the old social network, and they will gradually leave in the end.

Long-term persistence,

Build a user-centered social network with young people as the main force.

Web3’s social networks are relatively early. In 21 years, the fan community was tokenized, and the decentralized SocialFi was also a flash in the pan. However, decentralized social networking is gradually gaining popularity, and the DAO and Web3 social infrastructure and protocols of decentralized social networking are still developing. It is believed that in the next cycle, a more user-centric social network will emerge.

Web3 Socialization is currently mainly scattered in the Web2 social network. In the future, the social networks of Web3 and Web2 will not be completely separated and opposed, and there will be cross-integration, but the specific form cannot be predicted.

Historical experience shows that young people will be the main force of the next generation of social networks. The advantage is that it can spend time exploring new social networks and finding attractive new social capital.

I have been working in the Web3 Social field for a long time, and I have also experienced a round of SocialFi’s life cycle . From the beginning of exploring the Social Token of the fan-shared community, to now building a decentralized social graph and Web3 digital identity. We have made a lot of attempts, and have accumulated a lot of experience in the combination of Web3 technology and social products, and in the growth of Web3 users.

In the future, I will continue to study ZK technology, focusing on how to better help solve user identity management and Privacy issues, this is an important supplement of Web3 to Web2 social. User privacy is very important to Web3 social products, but it is a pity that there is no special application integration point.

Looking at the general trend of the industry, the entire Crypto industry is currently in a bear market, and the direction of BOOM products will focus on For iterative infrastructure, a Web3 digital identity platform will be built first to empower the next round of social products.

02/ Li Yihe Ryan Li: laying a solid foundation for the upcoming unified system of social relations

02/ h3>

CyberConnect CTO｜Twitter @ryanli_me

The third time to enter the social network,
From the original intention of simply shortening the distance with friends to Empower industry content creators.

I was an undergraduate student in Berkeley, California, and I tried social product entrepreneurship as soon as I was an undergraduate. That was my first attempt, and I successfully took a sum of money from Tencent, aiming at socializing with acquaintances. But seven or eight years ago, I discovered that sometimes it is not enough to make a good product, because everyone is playing on SnapChat or WeChat. However, after seven or eight years, it can be clearly perceived that many changes have taken place in the product ecology.

After graduating from undergraduate in 2017, I made a product called Lino, which is based on block chain technology to create a decentralized autonomous video platform community. The original intention is to help content creators realize better cash, so that creators have more ownership over their data. At that time, this project was the first relatively large project on Cosmos. Convey positive feedback to creators through content value, and then distribute benefits to creators. Every content creator can be the owner of this platform.

Based on Lino's products, I made DLive with the team, a Game streaming platform. In 2019, PewDiePie, the largest game blogger in the world at the time, streamed exclusively on it. This product has almost achieved 1 million daily and 10 million monthly active users, which can be regarded as a relatively successful entrepreneurial experience. It was acquired by BitTorrent in 2020, and I also worked as BitTorrent's CTO for a year and a half. In March last year, I started the CyberConnect business.

Web 3 has many interesting things, such as Defi and NFT related things are more interesting. I also made some attempts, and finally decided to focus on social infrastructure.

My previous entrepreneurial experience has allowed me to accumulate a lot of understanding of content creators, especially Some understanding of what it takes for creators to truly own their data. I hope that users, including content creators and ordinary users, can truly own their own relationship data, their social identities, and the content they create can truly have the login authority to do social networking through a common identity system. Then provide such a complete infrastructure system to developers, enabling developers to complete the native development of social platform websites relatively quickly. Similar to completing a part of the infrastructure before the native development of the next generation of Twitter or Facebook products.

My interest in social networking comes from seeing that social is a process of content delivery and community formation . There are different types of social interaction, such as between acquaintances, between strangers, small circles between groups, etc... Social channels serve the delivery of content, and there is a subtle relative relationship between the value of content and the distance of relationships. When I first started doing it, I was committed to doing a good job of socializing with acquaintances. The original intention was to make me and my friends closer.

Gradually, especially after the monetization method comes out, content creators More cases are more interested in cross-platform. I hope that I can help you get the benefits you deserve from content creation and help you maximize its value.

The enclosure is a prison for social networking,

Return the social assets of people and platforms to the dimension of people and people.

In the context of Web 3, not every content creator needs to have millions of followers, In fact, if content creators only serve a small part of their fan base well and make regular fans like them very much, they can still live comfortably. This logic did not hold up before, but now many opportunities really appear, and this is an opportunity that I have been exploring.

The connection between me and the team will be relatively long, and we have been exploring together for a long time. Wilson (my other founder) and I initially explored the direction of monetizing opinion leaders. It was later discovered that the distance between opinion leaders and their communities is actually quite far. Later, we switched to infrastructure construction and wanted to better reflect the relationship. For example, to help build personal social channel infrastructure, I personally think that it may have more long-term value than just doing KOL realization and selling NFT.

The entrepreneurial direction of user relationship itself is not a particularly fast and profitable thing, for example, I want To bring my friends into a new product is actually to bring all his friends into the product.

Relationships are a complex thing in themselves. In the real physical world, after people get to know each other, we can go offline and make appointments for shopping. This relationship is between people. For example, I made a new friend in a bar, and we formed a good friend relationship in the bar. But then you won't say that you have to go back to the same bar every time you ask this friend out. But in the Internet world, the relationship is actually on the platform. You and I are WeChat friends, and you and I are SnapChat friends, and the relationship stays on WeChat and SnapChat. I follow someone on Twitter, and I want to keep following that person, and I need to go back to the same place every time. This hinders developers from making innovations, because no matter how good a product is, it is meaningless if the cost of user migration is too high.

In the beginning of the Internet, there was no concept of users, no concept of native data ownership. So it has to exist in the form of multiple platforms coexisting. I look at making improvements around a specific application, around the data and relationships that the user owns.

From one dimension, the purpose of social networking itself is different. The value of the content conveyed by each information flow is also different under different scenarios using networks with different relationships. For example, on Douyin, users are more likely to browse some centrally distributed PGC content. What we read on INS and what we read on WeChat are different.

In the future, I can foresee that social relations may be a unified system. If the relationship itself can be fully disclosed and fully owned by individuals, what I want to do is to configure directly for developers in the context of individuals.

Future goals:
Make unique technical contributions and create long-term value for the industry.

As far as the product is concerned, I definitely hope to serve millions or tens of millions of users. We provide good tools for products with social attributes, so that everyone can create a better experience. It can better help realize the content creation, and help the relationship between friends to be better maintained and established. I do this with long-termism, hoping that we can define the technology of the next generation of social application software.

I am now making a product called Link3, which is similar to LinkedIn for Web 3. I define it as an identity verification network product, and I hope to build it for Web 3 practitioners, or a group of people who really care about the long-term success of Web 3; for those who want to establish a relationship between themselves and the project, and participate in the development of the project A person's Web 3 business card, so that it can be displayed on a personal homepage that can be trusted. This is what I am doing in the short term.

In the long run, I hope to make my own unique contribution in the field of Web 3, Create long-term value for the entire industry. Provide developers with better tools and users with better products. Now the entire industry is still at a relatively early stage, and most of the applications are still market-oriented. Now the composition of the market is the denominator, which determines which applications will be the mainstream of everyone.

Extremely innovative products have not yet appeared, and new needs have not yet been created. The current products also stop at meeting some of the simplest needs of human nature. It must be that as more users join Web 3, more products of different forms may be born. Only when there are more applications in the ecosystem, users will have a better and updated experience.

03/ Luke Wang: Innovating the construction of social licenses, with newer and more exciting Ways to create social interaction

SwapChat CEO｜Twitter @Web3MQ

MIT Media Lab technical background,

I hope to create something different through technology.

I am a newcomer to Web 3, and I entered the industry in 2015. At that time, Ethereum had just released the first version with EVM. The decentralized company everyone admires is still called XRP, although no one cares about it now.

But at that time, my main energy was still finishing my studies. The core of the professor's class will still be on data science, machine learning, and natural language processing. On the one hand, I have limited interest in this aspect, on the other hand, I am eager to make some real contributions to the world. I have tried the consumer track and the health care track successively, and I can be regarded as a veteran of Web 2 entrepreneurship.

But at that time, I had already seen the trend of the bubble bursting, and I was thinking about the overall situation of this round The cycle bonus has passed, and it is time to plan for the next cycle. I hope to seize the first-mover advantage in the upcoming and next cycle, and build my own influence in the entire ecology.

At that time, the mainstream society had a relatively shallow understanding of Bitcoin, thinking that it was just a digital form small steel coin. Everyone's research focuses on how to use digital currency to transfer money. It should be ERC20 that really brought Web3 into the mainstream. Everyone found that Bitcoin can be programmed, and it can also create a huge ecology.

The first computer was just a machine, Web1 allows people to share with each other through the network Files, Web 2 and mobile have taken sharing even further. The innovation of Web 3 is that permissioned construction will become faster and faster.

Big companies naturally have a huge advantage when users need an agreement to get a license. In this ecology, large companies can be crazy about the companies and projects that come in later. Projects that big companies like can grow, but projects that big companies don't like, that are not good for the interests of big companies, have little chance to grow.

Because big companies are always out of the current paradigm and hinder the rights of future generations, this will Greatly hinder the vitality of the entire ecology.

My ideal ecology should be a sharp increase in the ease of making applications. But today a lot of infrastructure is not very effective. For example, it often collapses, and the dynamics of ownership are different after many infrastructure networks are dismantled. In Web 2, large companies own a whole set of computer infrastructure, while Web 3 is now run by scattered small groups and small nodes, such as the Ethereum public network, or some other Web 3 infrastructures are run by self-employed individuals. from.

collectively owned,

Put important things under everyone's supervision.

There is a concept in politics called "capture", where a group of people captures an organization or a functional department. If the organization design is not good enough, it will be corrupted infinitely, because the organization is captured.

For example, a country’s central bank has a design flaw where employees can print money. Print it out and spend whatever you want. But the actual central bank has a lot of supervision and will try its best to avoid such a situation from happening. But some big Web2 factories may not be under everyone's supervision. In the early stage, because it needs to grow, it is very considerate for everyone. In the follow-up, it will inevitably become a platform that is only good to itself, but not good to others, because the company's task in the future is only to increase the stock price. Rather than serving users to improve word of mouth.

It is difficult for everyone to understand Web3 at the beginning. Game dynamics. It will use some mathematical methods to ensure that what I do will definitely promote the game dynamics. It should be noted that certain game dynamics cannot be done.

For example, "I" need to do something now, but before that " I" need permission. The solution is for a group of people to vote to decide whether "I" can have this permission, and some underlying cryptographic functions or underlying consensus mechanisms need to be used to ensure the fairness of voting. In fact, on the surface, these modes can all be implemented in Web2, because Web 2 is also fully programmable.

But the difference is that a large platform can modify the rules at will. The platform can say that everyone comes to my place today, and my place is the most friendly platform. Sorry to say tomorrow, since you all come to my platform, I want to change the rules now, because I want to make more money.

This is an inevitable trend, no matter how kind the company is at the beginning, when it develops to In terms of its huge size, in order to continue to grow, it has to construct the entire ecology into the most beneficial form for itself.

Youtube is a typical example. In the beginning, it was a very friendly place for individual creators, and now Youtube is not at all. Now Youtube content takes the appeal of big advertisers seriously. Because they are the patrons. It is very difficult for newcomers to get a cold start on the platform. Now it takes a lot of effort for an ordinary person to subscribe to a YouTube channel with tens of thousands of people, which was not the case at all before. Therefore, the most important change in Web 3 is to ensure the realization of game dynamics through some infrastructure and the mathematical design of the infrastructure.

Optimistic about Web 3 infrastructure,

It is difficult to break through the underlying social content.

Web 3 breakthrough, I am more optimistic about the creator economy. Future tools will change the way creators receive money, and the revenue share of creators and platforms, but what creators do may not change too much.

For the SocialFi track, we need to take a long-term view. In the short term, there is no Web 3 infrastructure that is better than Web 2. The Web 2 infrastructure is far more mature, far faster, and far more scalable.

Facebook and WeChat are used by one billion users every day. Web 3 products are currently unable to carry such a large number of users. Regarding the innovative methods and prospects of Web 3, I would like to use the chip industry as an example.

Looking at the entire chip industry, for a long time, there was no competition within the industry for several years , because Intel is the only one. In the early days of the industry, many chip companies actually entered the game. Later, as they withdrew from the competition one after another, Intel became a giant. AMD is just Intel because of the US anti-monopoly law and does not want to be forcibly split, so it left such a company.

Just like why Microsoft invested in Apple back then, because Microsoft didn’t want to be the only one in the world Software system provider, because if so, Microsoft will be forcibly split.

But objectively speaking, Intel's chip is indeed the chip with the best performance on the market. There is also a reason for users to choose it, because Intel is the best in the core indicators that users value, but the price is also relatively expensive.

In fact, AMD has existed for a long time. But when it was first established, no one noticed it at all. At the beginning, it only did design, and did not do other links. On the other hand, Intel is doing it in the whole industry chain. Then slowly moved to the terminal, and everyone gradually started to use AMD. Just because it is a relatively open ecology, it allows any manufacturer who wants to make electronic devices to make mobile phone chips based on its core. You will use AMD to make server chips; you can better make CPU chips that can be combined according to your customized needs. Apple's A16 chips are all made with AMD cores, and their performance is much better than those made by Intel. A large part of Intel's sales comes from this server market, and the server is beginning to be eaten away, which means that Intel is no longer a dominant player.

In fact, entrepreneurs may not be able to do social innovation today. With Facebook in the United States and WeChat in China, it is difficult for entrepreneurs to compete against giants. This period of time may be equivalent to the low period in the entire history of web innovation. It is similar to the middle years when Intel dominated the world in the chip industry. Intel is alone. But for the whole industry, it lacks innovation.

Web 3 is more like opening a different path. Adhering to the principle of long-termism, this will have a very far-reaching positive impact on the entire network effect, although in the short term, it is always difficult to surprise people at first glance when new things appear.

The development of Web 3 needs to spend enough time to accumulate. But fundamentally speaking, Web 3 can create more value and have a larger pattern in the long run.

SwapChat & Web3MQ:

If Web3MQ is Android, then SwapChat is Google Phone.

When Google first made Android it made a phone so people would know how to use the Android OS. SwapChat is a demo DApp of MQ (Message Queue), and Web3MQ is the underlying communication protocol behind SwapChat.

Web3MQ is like Android, and SwapChat is a Google phone, an application on the platform. I want users to enter the world of Web3 by installing the SwatChat chrome plugin.

In the future, Web 3 will have more wisdom implemented into specific scenarios and go deeper . At present, Web 3 is still in the process of early collective construction. Today's Web 3 application has tens of thousands of users, which is quite good, but in Web2, an app with hundreds of thousands of users may not be able to cause a splash, because there are 6 billion people in the world. I hope to build together with practitioners in the early stages of the industry. To be a pragmatic romantic who sees and puts what I believe in into practice.

For me personally, the first important stage goal is to ensure 99% delivery The active address of the message body occurs in SwapChat. Personally, I don't like the first and second terms, because the comparison of the first and the second means a homogeneous comparison, which will promote entrepreneurs to do homogeneous things. If compared horizontally, the performance of SwapChat internal test is the fastest in the industry. But I hope that we can truly empower the industry instead of simply falling into involution.

Social also involves the future metaverse. Possibly as the metaverse develops, the medium itself will be revolutionized as well. We obviously don't want the communication experience here to be the same as the previous generation, and users can only experience social interaction locally. Is there a newer and more exciting way to experience it? I hope to contribute to social communication, to building this kind of relationship between people. Of course, this needs to be built together with everyone in the industry to accelerate the dynamic changes of the next-generation Web 3 social paradigm. In this process, it is of course best if we are the first, but this is not the most important thing. I am more concerned about the best thing that generates the most value for everyone.

There is no end to social networking, and no product can possibly meet all needs. Ma Huateng once said: "It will definitely not be WeChat that defeats WeChat, it must be something more fun. Imagination is the sky, tools are the foundation, and the evolution process of human beings is in the middle. Innovation on the tool side reversely promotes the relationship between people. The connection. Humans once invented words, and since then humans have had new means of interaction. Maybe in the future social future, we don’t need to use language, but we already have the same mind.

The future is fascinating because of imagination, and alive because of creation. The future It's here...