Since the rise of Ethereum in 2016, people in the blockchain community have been looking for a real-world success story that isn’t about money. Can a web3-powered app make it to the mainstream and do something fundamentally different and disruptive from what its web2 counterparts can do? So far, hopeful examples like Cryptokitties and Axie Infinity have caught the world’s attention for a short time and sparked large crypto-based movements, but they haven’t had the staying power to show the world a long-term success story.
At the same time, social media apps, which have caused many of society’s problems in recent years and are ripe for disruption thanks to the theoretical promises of web3, have not been able to get mainstream use. Early experiments like Steemit, a Reddit-style community, and Pepo, a mobile-first TikTok-style app, couldn’t get mainstream attention, and the explosion of early apps on top of new social protocols like Lens, Orbis, Farcaster, and DeSo haven’t yet reached product maturity to have a compelling shot at inspiring and connecting the world.
So far, a lot of what we’ve seen has been attempts to copy the features of social sites that people already use every day, like Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and Twitch, but on Web 3.0. It’s usually a nearly identical but mediocre experience, with the added hassle of having to pay for every user interaction and the vague promise of better ways for creators to make money or take control of their data. Mainstream users have shown that they may not care enough about data ownership to switch platforms just for that reason, and unless the app really delivers on better creator monetization and distribution in a sustainable way, it’s unlikely to attract the high-quality content it needs to reach a wider audience. The apps that have gotten close to bringing mainstream users together with token-incentivized content have often ended up as token-pump echo chambers and then lost their importance.
It’s unlikely that the killer social platforms of the future will be clones of “web3 versions of X.” Instead, they will likely introduce a fundamentally new feature or way of doing things that are only possible with blockchain-coordinated, decentralized networks.
True Impact
Let’s look at some of the ideas in the blockchain ecosystem that have changed things in a unique way:
- Crowdfunding and getting money
- Access without permission to digital-first financial services around the world
- Digital ownership and the ability to check it
Coordination on a global scale
The above list can be summed up with the acronyms ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs.
We all try to show how innovations in these areas can change and improve the physical meatspace for society as a whole, but I don’t think it’s hard to see that the effects are most obvious in the digital-first web3 social media app development world.
When compared to efforts to raise money for the physical world, local projects that aren’t part of the web3-future that everyone believes in and wants to happen, on-chain funding for ecosystem growth and development projects gets recycled digital first asset capital quickly and around the world.
DeFi protocols are much better at interacting with composable on-chain assets, transactions, and digital goods than they are at doing things like getting a mortgage to buy a new house.
NFTs that represent digital assets like in-game items, PFPs, or collectibles are much more interesting and disruptive than NFTs that represent physical assets like event tickets or deeds, which usually cause more trouble and legal work than they are worth.
Token-coordinated DAOs have brought strangers together online through chat rooms, codebases, and other online tools much faster than any company or non-profit has been able to form, grow, and reach a complex goal.
I look at all of these signs and realize that a digital-first, web3-centered world has emerged and is being pushed forward by the disruption that blockchain has made possible in the above categories. But I think this is even more important when you realize that this web3-centered world is growing at an incredible rate.
I’ve used the term “echo chamber” before, and I think it’s a good topic for discussion. Six years ago, when I put all of my time and energy into this world, my biggest fear was that it was just a group of forward-thinking optimists and less-ethical opportunists who only talked to each other about their hopes for data and financial sovereignty and better economic alignment between creators, users, and platforms. Even if this fear is still justified, it’s been amazing to watch this echo chamber grow by orders of magnitude. One of the most inspiring things about working in the web3 space is seeing how talented developers, entrepreneurs, creators, investors, social scientists, and others are so caught up in the web3 bug and spend so much time on it.
In the early 2000s, New York City had Internet Week, and conferences like SXSW brought together the whole internet industry. Soon, the internet affected every part of people’s lives. This made the idea of an Internet Week pointless since there was no way to bring together a single group of people in an industry that affected everything and meant different things to everyone. (Take a look at this Internet Week 2010 schedule to see how the content themes went beyond a small group of enthusiasts.) We see something similar in blockchain, where there are so many different areas, such as core infrastructure and scaling, gaming, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), regulation, web3, metaverse, and more, that all depend on the powerful disruptions listed above but thrive in their own online space.
How big does an echochamber have to be before it’s just the web in a new form?
Making the Best App
Some of the best ways to change the way people interact with each other have been to “come for the tool, stay for the network.” At first, Instagram users could add filters to their phone photos to make them look great. This was useful even if they didn’t have any followers. But you could also follow your friends on it, and it grew into one of the largest social networks in the world. Musically let you record and share clips of yourself singing or lip-syncing to popular short audio clips. After adding a social network and a recommendation algorithm, it eventually turned into TikTok.
Because the next big web3-enabled social app won’t just be a copy of a web2 app, and because it’s hard to recreate an existing social graph in the web3 context, it’s likely that it will start out as a tool that solves a real problem for users in the web3 echo chamber today. So, what problems does this ecosystem have to deal with because web2 social can’t adapt to this new world? Based on the four areas of breakthrough impact we’ve seen so far, there are a few clear opportunities in social and content.
DAOs need a safe place to store and share their content that matches their web3 values.
Curation and moderation services aren’t available in Web3 Social, and people haven’t been incentivized to do them.
There are still a lot of various ways to find high-quality Web3-centered content.
I’ve talked about how powerful it is that DAOs and blockchain-based schelling points can help people act in the same way even when they can’t talk to each other directly. These DAOs talk to each other using digital-first tools, and most of the content they put out is in the form of videos: community calls, core development calls, project demos, project overviews and reviews, token analyses and reviews, etc. On traditional social and media platforms, this kind of content hasn’t had a safe place to live because it was often taken down at the content level or, even worse, at the account level.
If it isn’t taken down, it can be demoted in search algorithms and even stop making money for its creators when their content suddenly disappears from search results. Platforms have a lot of power and can make changes that hurt creators without their permission at any time. Content about capital formation and global access to a new financial system without permission feels like a threat to the status quo. It needs a safe place where it won’t be blocked by web2 for no reason.