Social interaction is defined in writing as “social activities in which individuals interact with each other and carry out material and spiritual exchanges”. In social interaction, people share opinions, emotions, and experiences.
Humans are social animals. As a god of Web2 social networking, Zhang Xiaolong, the father of WeChat, views that the essence of social networking is to find the same kind of one’s own. Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan said that the essence of social interaction may be to answer two questions — who am I and who are other people.
“Ego” is a complex philosophical concept, but social interaction is a universal need. People’s desire to connect socially with others is primarily motivated by three reasons: the exchange of values (economic value, social value); the satisfaction of emotional demands; the acquisition of sexual resources. In the process, social interaction brings about the flow of information and the formation of relational networks.
As a “people” business, the value of the market with 100 billion has always been the highlight of the entrepreneurial battle. Web 2 social interaction often equates to one or more social software. But it is obvious to all that the Matthew effect of the super social APP is becoming more and more visible, and WeChat seems to have turned into the black hole of all social products.
On the other hand, with the ceiling of the dividends of the mobile Internet, the business imagination space of Internet manufacturers has continuously shrunk. The overall performance of social products in the Web2 world is sluggish and lacking in innovation, and after the emergence of Clubhouse in 2021, the market has no exciting mainstream products sweeping the global phenomenon.
Opportunities are nurtured in crisis, and Web2 creators’ meager profits, vicious competition, and platform hegemony are all contributing to the rise of the SocialFi sector. With the paradigm shift from Web 2 to Web 3, there is a group of very vigorous entrepreneurs who are thriving in the soil based on blockchain infrastructure.
“SocialFi Entrepreneurs Talk” specially found three representative outstanding practitioners of SocailFi and listened to them talk about their career stories, industry perceptions, and vision prospects, expecting to use other people’s stories as inspiration and fire for illuminating each other in the charming virgin forest of Web 3.
01/ Louis Lu：Build a Web3 digital identity platform and witness the transformation to the “user- oriented” social paradigm.
BOOM CTO ｜ twitter @boomapporg
After 6 years at Web2,
I decided to go All in Web3.
When I was a student, I was fortunate enough to contact and participate in Bitcoin mining and trading, and I also started a business and developed a basketball community APP. After graduation, I worked in data mining for Baidu and ByteDance since graduation. The business mainly involves user behavior mining, information flow recommendation, and advertising optimization. Thanks to having done a lot of data-related work in Web2 search, recommendation, advertising, and other fields before, I have a thorough grasp of the problems existing in Web2’s social products. Web2’s social products are highly centralized with many drawbacks in terms of user data.
- Data ownership issue: The Web2 centralized platform regards the user’s data and creator’s content as its core “data assets” and “data barriers”; however, users essentially have no control and management rights over the data. For example, if Facebook or Twitter decides to ban your account, you will not only lose the creative content and fans mentioned above, but more importantly, you may have no way to appeal. Users feel a great sense of insecurity as a result of this.
- Data privacy issues: All data is stored in the company’s centralized database and managed by a centralized platform, and there may be a risk of data leakage. It is worth mentioning that various social platforms collect user data basically without the user’s permission.
- The issue of proceeds from data: For example, one of the main monetization methods of the Internet is advertising. The platform mainly relies on the advertising revenue monetized by creators’ content traffic and user data, but only a small part of these benefits flows into creators and users.
It is vital to look for the next outlet since, as a result of the development of Web 2 over the past 20 years, the industry has become highly centralized, business growth has peaked, and policy dividends have been exhausted, which is the part of reasons to join Web 3. On the other hand, some of my classmates and friends who played Crypto together in my student days chose to stick to Web3 after graduation, and achieved relatively great success in the rapid development of Web3 in the past few years. And my Web2 friends have also joined the Web3 industry one after another. When an emerging industry attracts more and more venture capital funds and talents, I feel that there will be significant potential in the future, so I decided to leave Web2 and join Web3.
Do the hard and right things,
Witness the paradigm shift from “platform-centric” to “user-centric”.
Web3 With the development of DeFi, GameFi, and NFT, the user scale and industry influence continue to expand, and social networking has become an inevitable part. However, a new social network paradigm is required since the existing social products of Web2 cannot solve the new demands of Web3 users for data ownership, revenue rights, and privacy due to their high degree of centralization.
Boom’s goal is to build a next-generation social network based on blockchain technology. At Boom, my primary responsibilities are technical architecture design and product development. At present, we are focusing on the development and construction of the Web3 digital identity labeling protocol. User identity is the core of social products. With the emergence of applications and concepts such as the social graph and Soul Binding Token (SBT), it is a consensus that Web3 needs a better DID (Digital Identity).
Web3’s blockchain-based decentralized technology enables users’ creative content, social relationship data, identity reputation, etc. to achieve decentralization and comparability, without the need for a centralized platform. These changes will bring new paradigm solutions to users’ data ownership, revenue rights, privacy, and other issues, building a social network that pays more attention to users.
Users come for tools,
Stay for the network.
Looking at the current development model of social products, the successful social products of Web2 can bring practical utility and entertainment to users. And users can clearly perceive it. Like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, they allow you to reach a lot of people and keep track of what’s going on with them. Like WhatsApp or WeChat to help you communicate with people all over the world and access video chat without paying for text messages, it’s all practical.
Social networks also follow Metcalfe’s law: the value of a social network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The more users, the greater the value of the social platform, and then the user growth curve will suddenly explode at a single point.
But users will question why large social networks lose their original sense of value when users surge? Why do some big social networks decline while some nascent small social networks rise? Why do users flock to a small network with a great tool experience, but ultimately leave to form a social network with something that seems to have no practical application?
For example, after Facebook, platform-level social products such as Instagram and SnapChat emerged one after another. And Tiktok, which was quite popular for a while, also caused huge challenges to Facebook. For example, many young people are now lifeless in WeChat Moments, but active on Douyin.
To explain this, the new social product model extends a third dimension beyond utility and entertainment: Social Capital.
How to acquire social capital and quickly accumulate your own social capital advantage?
This seems to be very similar to the acquisition of capital in a blockchain network:
1. Each social network will release a new social capital (such as the number of fans, and the number of likes), compared with the token of the blockchain network.
2. You must show proof of work (POW) to obtain tokens, which correspond to blockchain mining.
Facebook/WeChat Moments, you need to post fun statuses; Instagram, you need to update interesting photos; Tiktok/Tik Tok, you need to update intriguing short videos. This way you can prove your work and gain more social capital such as followers and likes on social platforms. Users who join a social network mining early will also gain the advantage of accumulating social capital.
Celebrities with innate advantages in social capital will also have natural advantages to joining new social platforms, similar to token pre-mining in blockchain networks. Like cryptocurrency, value is related to scarcity, and the scarcity of social capital stems from proof-of-work (POW).
However, we must also clearly recognize that social networks, like blockchain networks, have their own life cycles. Over time, each social network will experience a deflationary effect as it gets more and more difficult to mine tokens. Users will soon start to progressively depart the old social network if they believe they can’t get anything from it.
Persist for a long time,
Create a user-centric social network with young people as the driving force.
The social network of Web3 is in a relatively early stage. In 2021, the tokenization of the fan community and the decentralized SocialFi are also short-lived. However, decentralized social networking is gradually gaining popularity, and the DAO and Web3 social infrastructure and protocols for decentralized social networking are also developing. It is believed that in the next cycle, a more user-centric social network will emerge.
Web3 social media is currently mainly scattered on 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, though the specific form cannot be predicted.
Young people will drive the development of the next generation of social networks, according to historical evidence. They enter the market late, and are unwilling to scramble for old social products with the elderly, so their advantage is that they can spend time exploring new social networks and finding attractive new powerful social capital.
I have been working in the field of Web3 Social for a long time and also experienced a round of SocialFi life cycles. From the beginning of exploring the Social Token of the fan 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 integrating Web3 technology with social products, and the growth of Web3 users.
In the future, I will continue to study ZK technology with a particular emphasis on how to better help solve user identity management and privacy issues, which is an important supplement of Web3 to Web2 social networking. User privacy is very crucial for Web3 social products, but it is a pity that there is no special application combination point.
Looking at the industry trend, the entire Crypto industry is currently in a bear market stage. The BOOM product direction will focus on iterating infrastructure. At present, a Web3 digital identity platform will be built first to empower the next round of social products.
Learn more: https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/31948
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There is no end to social media. Also, it is impossible for a single product to satisfy all needs. Pony Ma once said: “WeChat will definitely not be the one that defeats WeChat, but something else that is more fun. Imagination is the sky, tools are the foundation, and in the middle is the evolution of human beings. The innovation of the tool side in turn promotes the connection between people. Humans once invented writing, and since then human beings have had new means of interaction. Maybe in the future social future, we will no longer need language to achieve communication with each other.
The future is fascinating because of imagination, and alive because of creation. Now the future is coming…
About BOOM
BOOM is a SocialFi platform connecting Web2.0 and Web3.0. Since it was launched in January, the early users have surpassed 100,000 and Boom has now become the most popular decentralized Crypto Lovers community in 2022.
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