Author: Anthonyx, Co-founder of Port3 Network
Recently, there have been two hot projects in the Web3 social space, one is friend.tech and the other is Tipcoin. Last week, we participated in a Web3 Social-related Twitter discussion, which sparked lively discussions on various social tracks. I think it is necessary to further explore this topic and see if we can draw some conclusions.
Friend.tech and Tipcoin
Friend.tech (FT) is a Web3 product similar to Only Fans and Zhi Shi Xing Qiu. It is a web app that can be directly attached to the desktop, without the need for AppStore review. The application is currently in the stage where an invitation code is required to join. After linking your Twitter account, you need to deposit a certain amount of funds into the Base network to continue the process of joining the community.
The innovation of FT lies in treating joining and leaving communities as a transaction of shares. To join a KOL’s community (a one-to-many chat managed by a KOL), you need to purchase a Key. The price of the Key increases as the number of members increases, similar to purchasing tokens in liquidity pools like Uniswap. This model is inspired by Unibot. People are rushing to buy Keys due to the wealth effect, and there are even bots looking for the latest Keys and quickly buying them in order to arbitrage.
Key trading on Friend.tech
Tipcoin, on the other hand, is a tipping bot that facilitates influencer mining by spreading on the Twitter platform. The mining rules are very simple: when sending a tweet, tag the Tipcoin account and include the keyword $tip. The Tipcoin bot detects users’ tweet behavior and rewards them based on influence factors such as reading volume, retweet volume, and comment volume. Different spreading actions correspond to different points rewards. Points are accumulated for each epoch, and then the $tip token mining rewards are distributed based on ranking and proportion.
It is worth noting that both of these products are built on the Twitter platform. They build social relationships and track user behavior by obtaining users’ Twitter identities.
In addition, both projects have introduced clever tokenomics, especially Friend.tech, which effectively transforms user social joining into a transactional behavior, creating a certain wealth effect. Tipcoin, on the other hand, utilizes Twitter KOL influence to spread its project and token, to some extent, it is a form of Fair Launch.
Lack of Motivation
The first problem encountered is the lack of development motivation. Mechanisms like Tipcoin, where everyone’s chips are obtained for free through mining, and the exchange condition is that they have helped the project gain significant influence through crazy retweets and tags, making Tipcoin a hot topic. However, this kind of token distribution lacks long-term motivation for the token price, and no one would be willing to take on such a large position, so it may eventually evolve towards meme direction.
Friend.tech is a good model that helps KOLs build a paid community and accurately integrates user behavior into transactions. Users can engage in speculative activities, and the platform can generate revenue through transactions. However, the user base is still limited unless they completely revolutionize social interaction, but it is almost impossible to surpass OnlyFans.
OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform that allows users to earn income by sharing photos or videos, which often have adult or explicit content. Since Friend.tech started allowing users to share images, community users have commented on X that Friend.tech is essentially a Web3 version of OnlyFans. In fact, previous decentralized social products, such as Damus, also experienced the problem of pornography content flooding during their development. In this regard, Friend.tech is no different, just more mature. After all, the only way to attract attention is through human weaknesses: money and sex.
This is precisely the problem with decentralized social platforms, which often start with rewards but gradually lose value due to excessive content flooding, ending in a hasty manner. The optimistic thing is that although such failures have been repeated, the new things now are obviously better than before, both in terms of experience and model.
Web3 social is not mature yet
There have been many attempts at Web3 social, from Steemit to Deso, the short-lived Damus, and now Lens Protocol, but none of them have become a truly sticky Web3 social product. Why is that?
There are many reasons, but the most fundamental one is that in the crypto field, the economic model outweighs the social application itself. Financing and transactions are the real needs on the blockchain, not social interaction. Therefore, we see that the crypto space is obviously utilitarian and lacks long-termism. Users’ enthusiasm is mainly driven by mining rewards, and their initial intention for social interaction is to obtain rewards. Eventually, they leave because of the lack of rewards. Since users come for mining rewards, the content they generate is of poor quality, and in the end, bad money drives out good money. No one cares if valuable social interactions occur.
Another reason is that the user experience of Web3 social products has not surpassed Web2. Web2 has a huge existing user base and the most mature products, which store a large amount of user social relationships and social data. On the other hand, Web3 social needs to start from scratch and cannot achieve economies of scale. Even through grafting, it still increases the threshold and greatly reduces the user base, with only a small number of people participating in the crypto field.
Many Web3 social projects have come up with a clever solution, which is to build a Web3 incentive layer based on Web2 data. Projects like Friend.tech and Tipcoin have indeed gained great support in the early stages. This has undoubtedly become a consensus, that is, instead of directly creating a new social platform, it is better to innovate based on the existing social infrastructure.
However, this model also has major drawbacks. Based on the Web2 platform, it is constrained in certain important data aspects. With an influx of too many users, the Tipcoin detection function is malfunctioning, and the X platform (Twitter) has begun collapsing Tipcoin-related tweets. It can be said that the foundation they have built is not solid, and once Twitter bans the API Key of the project (such as Friend.tech or Tipcoin), users will not be able to use the application normally, and the entire model will cease to exist.
From this point of view, decentralized social platforms (such as Lens Protocol, NOSTR, Farcaster) have advantages and do not need to worry about being blocked by Web2 platforms. This is the long-term direction that should be adhered to. If we want to build a stable platform, the core must be based on decentralized protocols, rather than relying on centralized platforms.
In summary, social platforms should be based on the existing Web2 platform for cold start, but the data should be stored in decentralized protocols. Initially, they should adapt to users’ habits by grafting, and then gradually bypass the Web2 platform, directly transferring users to Web3, ultimately competing for a traffic entry point. In the end, there may be a moment of rupture, but before reaching a certain scale, major platforms do not bother to challenge small platforms. What needs to be ensured is that before achieving complete decentralization, user habits are successfully cultivated, and users are cultivated to a certain size.
There is another more important issue, which is the level of infrastructure improvement. It is precisely because the current blockchain cannot handle social-level transaction volumes that it is not realistic to directly build such a social platform on the blockchain.
What kind of Web3 social platform do we need
CZ tweeted that better decentralized social platforms are gradually maturing and are on the horizon. So, what kind of Web3 social platform do we need and how do we build it?
The development of Web3 social platforms is still hindered mainly due to the incomplete infrastructure, which cannot build well-experienced products. After the launch of BNB Chain’s Green Field, we saw a glimmer of hope. Not everything should be placed on the chain, but the most essential parts should be placed on the chain, while most of the social content should be stored in a more accessible storage layer.
Firstly, social platforms should prioritize solving users’ real needs and meet our regular social needs, with sufficient rich data. Products like Mirror, for example, may not have strong Fomo attributes, but they have accumulated some social scenes, such as writing and collecting articles. It truly addresses a portion of user needs, which is why it has a reason to continue existing.
In the Web3 field, we cannot actually separate from Web2 data. Almost all discussions take place on Web2. Completely decentralized applications have a limited scope of data and can only read existing data on the chain. What we need is a data layer that can both access Web2 data and have decentralized attributes, and a Bridge that can continuously transport data to the decentralized data layer.
Just like the role played by Chainlink Oracle in DeFi, this thing that continuously aggregates and stores various data on decentralized platforms, we call it the Web3 Data Layer. This decentralized layer, which aims to balance performance and decentralization, is what Port3 Network is committed to building – a Web3 Data Layer that aggregates various data sets and puts them on a storage layer with very low gas fees and easy access. It can drive various types of Web3 applications (such as social platforms and community management bots).
Building a social platform based on such a data layer requires rich and diverse data to ensure a good user experience. On the one hand, it can accommodate the usage habits of Web2 users and gradually attract and retain users. On the other hand, there is no need to worry about severing the umbilical cord of Web2, because the formation of a real Web3 social scene is like a baby being born from the mother after it has grown enough to break the umbilical cord.
Another factor that is gradually maturing is that the current decentralized communication protocols (such as Ethereum-based Push Protocol) can also be fully embedded in Web3 applications, and user-based social interactions based on wallet identities are no longer a problem. This path has become clearer, and what is needed is the improvement of various infrastructures and various attempts to build Web3 social platforms.
Let us look forward to the moment when Web3 social platforms are born.
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