Web3 New Internet Social Networking

Author: JOEL JOHN

Original compilation: Block unicorn

Today's newsletter is co-authored by; Siddharth; who, ironically, is enjoying a trip somewhere in the Himalayas outside of social networks. Over the past few months, we've been brainstorming about the current state of the internet and whether web3 primitives will play a role in the future. This article is not a detailed analysis of the market overview, hardly any tokens are mentioned, and it is definitely not the best case for decentralization and the Internet.

Instead, it explores the motivations and reasons for the emergence of social networks today. Along the way, I explain in detail how we can build a new vision for the Internet and the creators within it through the infrastructure empowered by the blockchain.

In "2020", when the global outbreak of the lockdown, I started spending a lot of time on the "Clubhouse". I spend an hour every morning talking about what's going on in the cryptocurrency industry, and I attract a large audience. Everyone was working remotely and people were stuck at home, and just like AI, decentralized finance, and non-fungible tokens today, Clubhouse; became a hot topic. However, Clubhouse's value has plummeted from $3.4 billion and is now an app people don't talk about anymore.

There are many reasons for this. The novelty wears off. People don't have time to engage in conversations online all the time. Or they have a better chance of dialogue in reality. One might think that ;Twitter Spaces; just replicated the functionality of ;Clubhouse; for many users. But looking back, it was a valuable lesson for anyone building an audience online.

The quality of your social network links determines your performance, and your network is only valuable if it can be maintained and advanced. This is the difference between a city (like New York City) and a gaming community, where the potential for social networks to disappear is very real. Physical social networks are more permanent than those we form online.

Investigate social network

Telephone operators recognized the challenges of social networking a hundred years ago, before social networks such as "Clubhouse" existed. In the early days of the telephone, independent telephone operators in the community often connected the telephone to a speaker to communicate. Similar to later podcasts, people could broadcast information in real time over the phone, allowing villages to communicate, think of it as a primitive form of radio.

As early as 1922, there was a campaign against radio advertising

As large corporations like AT&T and Bell took over America's phone lines, these smaller phone networks and their original podcasts disappeared as operating a private, niche phone network became unsustainable. It's an episode we'll see many times in this article, as we travel through the rise and eventual demise of multiple social networks.

The emergence of new networks, whether railroads, telephones, or the Internet, and new communication media have one thing in common. They opened up entirely new ways of collaborating, and both the Age of Enlightenment and the Arab Spring benefited from those who found new expressions to drive human progress. But as we've seen, new forms of communication aren't built overnight.

They go through a process of evolution and mutation until acceptable behavior on those platforms is defined. For example, you won't behave on ;Reddit; like you would on ;LinkedIn; (I think). In order to establish these ground rules and play socially, a social network is required.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Realize user's attention

In the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Shoshana Zuboff; refers to user interaction on platforms such as "Google" as behavioral value residual. Historically, a company had finite resources that it had to immediately use to produce and sell to you. Otherwise, companies will pay high storage fees. A pencil manufacturer has to ship pencils, a Ford factory has to sell cars, they can't just keep stocking wood and rubber.

However, this changed with the advent of the Internet. Companies like;Google; or;Meta; can keep your data for ten years until they can monetize it for their benefit. I can now log into;Facebook; and download all the embarrassing text messages I sent to crushes in "2011" (you can do the same).

As I often do on this publication about how to parse blockchain data for better consumer targeting, teams at Google have been thinking about using sensors to capture user data as far back as the '2000'. They note that capturing data from wearable devices and indoor sensors can help create user profiles that are more tailored to individual needs. At the time, they didn’t know that we would be carrying watches capable of taking EKGs 24/7, or that half of the world’s mobile devices would be powered by a Google-supplied operating system (Android). A new resource has emerged here. The supply of user data is abundant, but the monetization mechanism is not yet mature.

At the beginning of the 21st century, most Internet companies' projects were like today's artificial intelligence websites, with a lot of traffic but little or no business model. You can license your search engine to large corporations, or sell sponsored ads like Yahoo. We've tried doing that on this blog, but as anyone knows, bear markets are the worst times to sell ads. So Google had to find a different way to sell ads entirely.

Rather than having people bid and list ads based on their assumptions about what audiences will click on them, Google's data scientists can measure and predict which ad will work best for which person. Instead of a brand’s ad manager working on assumptions, it’s a data scientist targeting users, enabling brands to clearly see the rate of return they’re getting from every click on Google.

The perfect opportunity is ready for the growth of the network. A business realizes that it can generate and store a resource (user data) at almost no marginal cost, and has the means to monetize it (targeted advertising). And the only thing missing in most VC-backed company styles is a mechanism for scaling, which is where social networks come in.

Quoting from the book:

In Google's early days, the feedback loop involved in improving its search features created a balance of power: Search needed people to learn, and people needed search to learn. This symbiotic relationship allows Google's algorithms to learn and produce increasingly relevant and comprehensive search results. More queries means more learning; more learning yields more relevance, and more relevance means more searches and more users.

See the section on "More Users"? One of the most powerful user portals is the network effect of new age networks like; Facebook; and; Twitter; Social networks serve two purposes, first, they make the Internet go from being a weird niche technology (like; LimeWire; or; AOL) to one where kids in school talk about cool stuff. Second (and more importantly), it provided the business model for the Internet.

More users effectively means you have a critical mass that can be segmented and sold as various items. Users belonging to similar social networks can be grouped and provided with similar content, which becomes the basis for finding love, work, laughter, despair, and hope in the current algorithm feed.

As creators, today we spend time on platforms like; Twitter; or; Facebook; because they are the means by which content is distributed. This is because these social networks have an insatiable need to be able to provide content relevant to the relevant social network, which keeps users engaged. If a group of fintech enthusiasts are constantly receiving content from cryptocurrency influencers, they will eventually get angry and leave the platform.

Likewise, if my Web3 content is shared with a subset of audiences who hate it, my incentive to create content will be greatly reduced, and platforms play a key role in targeting content delivery based on their data on users. Platforms that keep users engaged for longer periods of time are able to sell more ads and collect more data. As they accumulate more data, their ads become more relevant. In every sense, the process is an unlimited money-printing machine.

In the Web2 network, the social network is a kind of moat. If you allow users to interact with social networks through third-party applications, you reduce your chances of capturing user data. After all, users will no longer use products that you control. If users can simply move their network of friends and family into another app, they have no incentive to go back to your app.

We don't have a shared protocol for social apps at the scale of;Meta; or;Twitter; because of how the existing giants' incentive structures are structured. A Web2 product that opens up a network of social relationships will face competition and declining revenue, neither of which may be desirable outcomes.

Composable social network

In the golden age of platform censorship, the centralization of social networks also poses risks. A recent article in The Verge summarizes the questions people have been asking in the context of Elon Musk's "Twitter" behavior and America's desire to control the growth of "TikTok".

The following is an excerpt from the article:

But if our current social system were decentralized, you could post a photo on ;Instagram; and I could see it and comment on it in the ;Twitter; app. Your friends can read your tweets in their;TikTok; app. I can exclusively use ;Tumblr and you can read all my posts on ;Telegram; Different apps will have different strengths, weaknesses, censorship policies, and creator tools. But no matter which platform you use, you will have the same followers and follow the same accounts. No more "Facebook; friends" and "Twitter; followers". Social networks and product markets will be completely separate.

What they describe is a network of social relationships that is composable at scale. This is a mechanism that enables users to access their network between different applications in the way they think is best. What would that look like? Many applications that emerged after the 2000s do not yet have standardized protocols. We have for email; SMTP, for resolving domain names; DNS, and for articles; RSS.

But what if you want to send disappearing pictures between;Snapchat, Whatsapp; and;Instagram; What if you could use content on ;Twitter; with a proprietary algorithm tweaked to suit your preferences? Or what if there was a version of ;Instagram; that didn't force you to watch ;Reels;?

Without an agreement for social network maintenance and portability, control is lost. Users can no longer be sure how and what content they consume. Through; RSS; Feed, users can control their own content. But on;Twitter; Elon Musk and his followers are in control.

As early as; 2007;, for this situation, a solution has been proposed. OpenSocial; is a collaboration of several large social networks to create a set; API that allows the platform to replicate a user's social network elsewhere. For users, this means they don't need to worry about re-friending when they join a new social network. For platforms, this means not having to compete with the network effects of existing networks. Everyone is a winner, right?

This is not the case, and platforms today are known to have closed social networks. Initially, the product was only used by; Orkut; and eventually attracted more than; 350; million users. There are rumors that Google; with some social networks such as; Friendster; and; Myspace; signed a non-disclosure agreement, and then to; Facebook; disclosed the news, and forced; Facebook;

The strategy worked for a while, as the chart below shows. By the end of 2007, OpenSocial's application network traffic was five times that of "Facebook". In 2008; there were 350 million users on the network, but by the 2010s, people gradually realized that an open social network did not meet the wishes of the Internet. Like the "Libra" in "2022," a project with large organizations collaborating on a non-profit basis will often be defeated by small, fast-moving teams.

In just a few years, Facebook; rose to prominence and became dominant because they managed to build a huge user base. They do this by being an open platform on which third-party developers can deploy applications. In the early days of social networking, people didn't just come to these platforms for the content. The app was a big draw for them, remember; Farmville;? The company behind it (Zynga) is growing on platforms like; Facebook; through network effects. Every activity you take in the game spreads across your social network, which means more friends to play with.

In the early days of social networking, apps enabled the platform to capture attention, while user-generated content was gradually emerging. Posting shocking comments on the internet is not yet a habit, and the dopamine rush from the like and retweet buttons has yet to be discovered. However, these three elements-powerful applications, network effects and the ability to distribute content and spread through social networks-allowed social networks to establish themselves in "2010".

Looking back, everything we explored about Web3 has already been covered on the Internet. Portability of social networking? It has already been realized. Embedding of applications and identities? Yes, I tried. A single protocol where multiple applications can interact with each other? Is boring.

There is nothing novel about these new approaches, but the technical layers to support them did not exist in the past. From the past server-side, monopolistic centralized ownership to the infrastructure transformation of blockchain-based user decentralized ownership, this is the "innovation" of Web3. OpenSocial; was last updated in; 2013;. People I know don't have access to their ;Friendster; or ;Myspace; social networks today. You can't build or publish apps on;Twitter; the way you used to, and blockchain may intentionally change that.

Mining the benefits of human attention

Siddarth Jain; has used a beautiful metaphor to describe this problem. When a tree in the jungle dies, it has continuity, contributing to the growth and maintenance of other trees afterward. When a community on the internet dies, there is little it can pass on to the thing that takes its place. Going back to how I started this article, Clubhouse; went from the app we use every morning to the one no one cares about.

As I write this, Naval;'s;Airchat; is trending on;Twitter;. I'm excited about this because it uses artificial intelligence to enable people to have conversations in their native language. I want the app to be able to communicate with our global readers, in their own languages. But when we started using ;Airchat; we started with a blank canvas - a network of social relationships that didn't exist.

Lens Protocol; provides an alternative for this situation. The essence of their product is very simple, you have a social network associated with your identity, owned by a wallet that allows you to log into a series of different applications. As a hypothetical example, it means that subscribers to this blog can also choose to see my posts in feeds like ;Instagram;, or short pieces of content like ;Twitter;, without having to sign up for each app separately.

This protocol approach to human attention is innovative in Web3. It already works in;SeaPort; and in;DeFi;liquid;NFT;as we saw in;Uniswap; But if human attention is captured in a protocol like Lens; can it be shared across different applications?

I'm not sure, but there are some advantages to doing this. It greatly enhances the competitiveness of social networks and lowers the barriers to entry for creating new social networks. Founders can focus their time on the app itself, rather than building user communities themselves.

In this case, you can have your own social network of friends, but you will connect with them and post content through a third-party application. Nikita Bier; recently shared on; Twitter; a modular approach to enabling social networking. I guess he may not like Web3 too much, but the "reusable" element he mentioned is exactly what can be applied to the blockchain.

As;Lyn Alden; points out in this post, we've had open money for a long time. But open social networks have yet to take off at scale, in part because of the lack of a clear business model. When social networks like "Facebook" took off in the mid-2000s, it was an ad-driven model that had been perfected over the years.

It is not very clear about how to profit from Web3 social products. Now we need to clarify several differences. First, decentralized social networks have been around for a while without the use of tokens. Mastodon, Nostr; and; Bluesky; are all functional products without tokens, and I don't entirely see tokens as the future standard for social networks.

Second, decentralization presents challenges that may not be solved through existing means. Data must be stored in a decentralized social network in a P2P network like; IPFS; or; Filecoin; There are costs involved, and even if these costs are small, they can be prohibitive for many users. Additionally, there is currently no clear model for discovering content or algorithmically targeting users if content exists entirely on-chain.

Today, discovery content is often analyzed on-chain via products with massive barriers, such as; Nansen; or; Covalent. For now let's ignore for now the fact that the content is different from the transaction data. These products incur costs in parsing and categorizing what appears on the chain. Who bears these costs? It also ignores that in this model, service providers can still tweak their algorithms to fit their agenda, leaving users with little choice in what content to consume. So we end up making the same mistake again.

I would like to make the following two points: ;

1. Decentralized social networks have been around for a while, and humans are creatures of convenience. Incentives for content dissemination, distribution, and discovery are much more efficient in Web2 localized products, with no upfront cost to users. This is why most of the social networks we know exist in closed centralized social networks.

2. The lack of early liquidity of human attention cannot be compensated by simply introducing tokens, because unlike capital in; NFT; or; DeFi; projects, attention cannot be "locked" on a product. When a user locks up;1000;USD on;Aave;, the transaction can take;10;minutes. You can't just hand out tokens and expect users to spend;1000;hours on a social network, which is why most Web3 social networks die off very quickly. (Remember ;Steem;?)

Block unicorn; Note: Steem; is a decentralized social media platform based on blockchain technology, which uses tokens to reward users for participating and contributing content. Now tell us that the way of "Steem" is a failure, this sentence reminds people not to forget the failure of "Steem", to emphasize that the use of tokens alone does not guarantee the success and durability of a social network.

Embedded Social;DApp

So, what is the point of Web3 social networking? Is it just to issue tokens and pretend we're on the verge of a new internet? Or do these infrastructures really have potential? We can think through the perspective mentioned by @mhonkasalo; in this post.

Apps need a certain liquidity threshold to become impactful. For ;Uniswap; this is locked capital. For ;Mirror; or ;Lens; this is the number of people creating and engaging with content. Essentially, token-based networks have a huge advantage over; Mastodon; or; Nostr; in terms of launching initial liquidity to become influential.

This does not deny that someone will spam or contribute to writing content just for the airdrop. If you think about it, people like; Ben Thompson (from; Stratechery) or; Packy (from; Not Boring) have very little incentive to move to new Web3-native platforms, and their audiences are on their mailing lists and; on Twitter; a strong relationship has been formed.

But for a brand new creator, building a whole new audience base and finding opportunities in a community of drop hunters like;Lens; can be a powerful strategy. Token networks help scale social graphs like;Lens;from;0;to;1;. A prime example of a creator growing with a platform is; Bill Bishop. He was one of the first authors of;Substack; and his newsletter subscriptions have grown dramatically as the platform has grown.

The challenge is how to keep the community active after reaching a threshold level, say ;10,;000; active members on the app. At this time, Web3's "DApp" ecosystem factors will come into play. Remember when I mentioned that apps like; Farmville; were key to the massive audience base on the social network?

In Web3, apps and social networks will forge a symbiotic relationship, since neither currently sees a substantial user base. But what if you could trade tokens based on what the influencers you follow are mentioning? Or collect an article directly from your feed as an "NFT"? Interfaces already exist to do this, but they are scattered across different applications.

Just like 'Facebook' enabled a generation to build applications based on their private social network relationships, Web3's 'DApps' will be able to leverage emerging social networks using protocols like 'Lens'. In such a case, we need a tool or interface that enables users to easily interact and operate between social networks and "DApps" so that they can share content, trade assets, collect "NFTs" etc. without Requires a specific platform or application.

I'm implying the combination of social networking and "DApp" composability. In this case, users can consume content, trade assets, collect; NFT; or reward creators directly, without the platform having to bear the risk of these operations. You can get liquidity from; Uniswap, OpenSea; or; Mirror; to perform these operations.

Platforms can charge a small fee (eg; 0.1%;) per transaction as a service fee for connecting protocols and users together. This may sound unbelievable, but consider that assets traded on the Metamask platform alone have reached approximately; 3 billion; USD in transaction volume. Once you have established a user base, you can embed various financial applications.

Open interaction between social networks and open-access applications is key to making Web3-native social networks a reality. As things stand, we exist in isolated islands. We often make some skeptical decisions alone when trading on "Uniswap". We track the ;DAO; activity through products like;Snapshot;, wondering who else is involved, and then we read on;Mirror;, articles by our favorite authors and support them, every interaction in Web3 Is isolated, and people don't like to be alone for too long, and interaction between users is needed.

No one knows which cool Web3-native game their friends are playing. Crypto and Web3 these days is either a cutthroat; PVP; game where only a select few emerge as winners, or an isolated one-player game where you hold your assets tightly in your hands. And the technology to enable cooperative multiplayer games already exists, namely; The DAO.

But our platform is rarely used; DAO. Imagine having a large group of people with all the pieces ready but not organizing and collaborating effectively enough to reach their full potential or achieve their goals. In the meantime, they're yelling - WAGMI (we'll all win/win), scrolling on ;Twitter; to see if Ethereum is considered a security by the SEC, that's what we're doing on some infrastructure something that has been doing.

My point is not that Web3 native social networks are going to be a breeding ground for;Twitter;influencers looking for more ignorant victims to promote their new coin. True creators can monetize their work and empower the community to exploit it. For example, we often have readers translate our work into Chinese or Vietnamese, and I love when people take our content and create their own spinoffs.

People often ask me if I can do this to avoid being accused of causing controversy when translating works. Web3 can solve this simple problem if one can mint a;NFT (Non-Fungible Token) on the;Mirror;as a derivative work of our article and upload their own;NFT;to the same collection . (By the way, at the moment I have no plans to make more articles into ;NFTs, but I will be compiling all translations I see on the site soon).

Establishing the relationship of authorship on the blockchain adds credibility to both original articles and derivative works without stealing any thunder from the creator. It is a simple but effective proof of provenance. But what about the distribution of money? Woolen cloth?

I've been thinking about the business element of being a creator. We did a paywall test on some of our archived articles on ;Decentralised.co; because ;Substack; doesn't allow you to make content (for free) visible only to subscribers. Despite the "please don't pay" message on the paywall, we've still had people pay for content over the past few weeks. I'll share more plans at another time, but here's how the math works out in very simple terms.

For creators on TikTok to earn $60,000, if their only source of income is advertising, they need a consistent;100 million views per month for a year. And if a newsletter that costs $20 a month wants to reach the same number, it will take about 250 subscribers. Nas; pointed out that the numbers may be a little off, but the basic point remains valid.

Free content often spreads well, but current monetization mechanisms don't effectively empower creators who specialize in smaller niches. We’ve already seen that Web3 offers an alternative through royalties in NFTs. The idea is that creators can make an asset (like a painting) and they get a cut of the royalties every time that asset is traded. I don't think this model is scalable because most artists who don't have distribution channels probably don't have access to it.

Community as Network Economy

Instead, a community formed around a creator will pool resources to support that creator. In a Web3-native social network, artists can distribute and disseminate their content (attracting attention) at the same time, and like collecting articles on "Mirror" today, some core users "collect" them, and these core users in turn Can be aggregated and coordinated like a ;DAO;

When a creator publishes a new work, those subscribers who have already bookmarked the creator's work can be the first to access it. Build micro-communities for creators through feedback loops that incentivize community members to actively contribute. This will be when creators will be able to benefit from the economic activity of the people they bring together, and creators will become founders of new digital cooperatives.

I believe this is the future of the creator economy, and for good reason. Creators have branched out into business areas, increasing their revenue streams. Most frequently mentioned celebrity brands include Ryan Reynolds' collaborations with; Mint Mobile; and; Aviation Gin; But before that, Rihanna had; Fenty Beauty, Jay Z; had; Rocawear, MrBeast; had his burger joint. Historically, creators' sources of income have been limited to their artwork. Modern creators capture more value by extending their brands.

However, a creator might not be the best fit to enter a new line of products. For every celebrity acquired for billions of dollars, countless influencers launched brands and failed. Even if there is a chance to launch a brand, it needs to reach a certain scale and specifications.

Protocols like ;Lens; allow third parties to look up how many likes or retweets a post has received. An application could then be built to curate connections between only those members who have gained a certain amount of engagement on-chain. Of course, the challenge with such a system is that it incentivizes individuals to spam for engagement. But with strict content curation, such a curated social network could be attractive if apps were built on top of it.

I tried to explain what the transition would look like in the picture below, the model below shows the difference between Web 2.0; influencers and Web 3.0; community curators. Blockchain-enabled payment channels will enable creators to enable commercial interactions between members. Green lines on the left represent payments between members, while dotted blue lines pointing toward creators represent possible royalty payments.

For example, someone could build a version of something like;Producthunt; and bootstrap community members from among our members at;Decentralised.co; A third party could build an angel list or a consortium; DAO, and query the most active VCs and founders in our community, both possibilities exist today.

However, today's Internet lacks the composability of social networks. When we advertise, we pay Google or ;Meta (or the writer of this blog) to recommend a startup to a smaller subset of the audience. The way humans think, however, is because we've effectively blocked ads from our immediate surroundings. An average person sees approximately;4000; to;6000; ads in a day. We consume without realizing it, and the human attention span has evolved to ignore ads because it's a cognitive load we didn't ask for.

Composable social networks can solve this problem by getting people to buy new products. For example, if a new game is being released and they want to attract the ;Decentralised.co; community, all they need to do is list them on ;Substack;. Users can choose whether they want to interact with their products. This shift—from platforms deciding what is best for users, to users choosing products based on their preferences—is the fundamental promise that Web3 social networks can deliver.

You might think this seems far-fetched and unnecessary, but experimentation is the key to making; DeFi; and; NFT; When a centralized product manager runs a platform like; Instagram; or; Twitter; you have no say in how the product evolves. You could also argue that users shouldn't have a say in how the product evolves - but I think it's a different story when it comes to social networks. When users are the ones driving the growth of the platform, there needs to be a balance of power between shareholders and stakeholders.

Community-driven content networks have been around since the existence of the Internet. Wikipedia is a powerful example. What Web3 brings to the equation is the possibility of financialization and user ownership. Would Wikipedia contributors like to have an opinion on the direction of the product? I think they will.

Attracting large numbers of users (scale) has long been the main motivator for the internet. As I've written before, people write on ;Twitter; instead of ;Mirror; because the distribution happens on the former. However, if we change the incentives so that people don’t become products, we can lay the foundation for a better internet—one that doesn’t require the creation of content to stir emotions.

It might seem far-fetched to imagine a social network that involves payments, but;Twitter;already charges $10;$ for premium subscribers, and the internet is littered with instances of communities switching from free to paid consumers.

In India, most of my generation in the early 2000s used torrents because products like 'Netflix' or 'Spotify' didn't exist yet; . However, something has changed in the past decade. As more and more Indians go online, and the payment network in the country develops, we can say that economies of scale have been achieved. Paying to watch the latest movie or cricket match has become commonplace because it's easier to pay than bother to go the illegal route. Convenience is the ultimate sales pitch if consumers don't have to spend money to make a decision.

The act of monetizing content on the Internet has always been limited to an elite minority who have achieved scale. The native social network of Web3 allows creators to change the monetization model by providing new alternatives.

Viewed through this lens, we will soon have digitally native nations. Balaji Srinivasan's research focuses on the other end of the equation—an era in which digital communes can perform functions that traditional states do. I think that before that shift happens, creators will be the founders of niche-oriented micro-nations.

They won't collect taxes or issue identity verification documents like governments do today, but they will play a key role in creating and growing entirely new industries. This may seem far-fetched, but considering that Satoshi Nakamoto and; Vitalik Buterin; are the founders of their digital economy, their holdings of Bitcoin and Ethereum represent the value they generated in creating a new financial paradigm.

Powers given to users

Erik Hoel; is one of my favorite writers on;Substack;. In his most recent article, he argues that the emergence of new social networks is impossible and no longer worth pursuing. As we scale up, we hit what he calls "semantic nadir" - the tendency to understand things in the worst possible way. You publish an article about how much you like burgers, and someone on the internet will see this as a declaration of war on vegetarians (Block unicorn; note: this is mostly to emphasize that in the context of the internet, even very simple and harmless information can also be misinterpreted or maliciously interpreted).

He argues that as human networks expand, our tendency to slander or attack each other increases. The internet can sift through the worst things humans can do and present it to you overnight.

His argument is correct as long as we assume that distribution (and nothing more) is the key incentive for social networks. My thesis is that incentives can be completely restructured. However, there will be a transition period before this happens. During this period, users can adjust the algorithm to suit their preferences.

In such a system, the social network might not be owned by the user, but the algorithm that decides what to show the user can be adjusted by the user. This might seem far-fetched, but platforms like ;JoinColumn* are already working in this direction.

One place where the internet has seen the power of community and users is; Reddit. Drivers; Reddit; external mobile apps; API; interface prices have risen dramatically. This change will affect everyone, from giants such as; OpenAI, to small mobile applications, will be affected.

Numbers indicate the number of subforums that have been privatized for protests, of which; 8800; subforums are currently privatized in the largest protest in the digital sphere.

Reddit API; price changes for interfaces (eg; Apollo) made it impossible for these interfaces to continue to function. Many large subreddits with tens of millions of users started to become "darknet," meaning that the pages were set private so that users could no longer access the subreddit.

Unless users leave in large numbers; Reddit, the outcry may be somewhat feeble. (At the time of writing, a total of;8800; subforums; 8400; have been made private). However, as platforms like;Snapchat; and companies like;Meta; have demonstrated over the past decade, social networks have a strong Lindy effect - the longer they exist, the less likely they are to continue bigger. This is because users face a high opportunity cost of deleting their;Facebook; or;Twitter;accounts entirely.

They can't easily reach the same group of friends elsewhere, and portable social networking connections (such as; Lens; enabled schemes) provide an alternative, users can log out of the platform, but still maintain the connection with friends.

Think of it as social networks are countries and platforms are business entities. Transitioning completely from one country can be very difficult, as anyone who has ever moved and lived elsewhere knows. However, a platform with a commercial interest should entirely be considered an entity that can be switched at will.

Today's Internet does not give users this option. We're seeing the impact of this in text-based apps like;Signal; and;WhatsApp; You can choose to quit ;WhatsApp entirely, and message the same friends on ;Signal;, only to find out that only a small percentage of your friend group actually use ;Signal.

Ultimately, creating a new internet with entirely new incentive structures requires rethinking how the internet has evolved over the past three decades. Assuming that users will be attracted by slapping token incentives or shiny new buttons is a poor revelation. We need creators and their audience base to rethink how and why we interact with each other on the web, and the ways in which some of this can be monetized without involving user data.

A model that preserves privacy but does not distribute may not succeed, and likewise a model that achieves scale but does not retain users will not work. We'll see multiple iterations and narratives in the market as these transitions happen, but it's clear to me that now is the perfect time to try and create a truly Web3-native social network for the masses. Humans are creatures of habit, and changing our past;30;year habit of getting content for free and posting pointless ads will be a slow and difficult process.

Peter Thiel sparked controversy in the early 2000s for his vision of an era of technological stagnation. If I were a venture capitalist in that era, I would have thought the same. (I still think so now though, because mentally I'm a pessimistic old man). In fact, Twitter's; Tascha; took a very similar stance recently - there's been nothing new or groundbreaking about cryptocurrencies for a while, and until we get to it, the market probably won't recover.

I agree with these points, but I also think we are looking at the problem in the wrong way. Cryptocurrencies have no shortage of fund apps or trading products. It's not even a UX challenge if you take account abstraction into account. What it lacks is a social network that can help these products spread in a way that keeps consumers entertained and engaged. And, unless we produce social products that offer more than tokens, this won't happen. We see massive, privately held network graphs emerging. For example, Layer;3; has more than half a million users, with credible, on-chain activity in their user base, and they are perfectly capable of scaling into a social network.

As the aforementioned user pointed out on Twitter; the difference between AI; and cryptocurrencies is how many people use the underlying technology. One way to invert the relationship between token holders and product users is to look at social products, where tokens are not required to interact with the product.

Just as it was in the mid-2000s that retail-oriented large-scale social networks emerged in Web2, it may be a while before we see large-scale social networks in Web3. It's a function of time, and we've tried in the past, experimented and failed many times with social products in this space. But the difference is that in '2023', the technology to make these kinds of social products possible already exists, which gives me hope.