Emergent Consumer Behavior in Web3
Evolving from our traditional paradigm of digital social exchange, opening the age of Web3 social.
Every other tweet on Twitter right now is about Zuckerburg’s “Threads”. Threads surprisingly has a Web3 smell. Apart from that it onboarded 5 million users in just hours, you can write and read posts but also connect your instagram contacts and interact with other open interoperable social applications (i.e Mastodon). This got me thinking about the current Web3 social dApps… Web3 often wags the flag of privacy and self-sovereignty to entice users, but with such a huge monopoly with 20yrs of experience releasing a Web3-like social, I see only one way going forward for Web3-native social dApps to succeed. Emergent consumer behavior.
Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude.
- Benjamin R. Barber from Consumed
Most Web3 social projects we see today replicate existing successful social media networks with crypto features. Of course, with good reason. But the sheer amount of projects that pitch themselves as the “[some famous Web2 company] of Web3” is just astounding. Web3 socials must understand why users want social apps — social capital, entertainment, utility — and play a different game by invoking new emergent user behavior. Web3 socials should encourage new consumer behavior and deviate from existing social network interfaces and experiences.
Let’s explore
- What users want in a social app (Status-as-a-service)
- What notable Web3 socials are doing
- Skeuomorphic vs Emergent consumer behavior in Web3
Status-as-a-Service
First, user experience and creator monetization are only meaningful when one understands social networks in the form of applications from first principles. According to the legendary Status-as-a-service, social networks offer three dimensions of value; entertainment, utility, and social capital (capital that derives from networks of people*). Users and creators are bootstrapped when there is the anticipation of earning social capital (status) alongside entertainment and utility.
People are status-seeking monkeys seeking the most efficient path to maximizing social capital
- paraphrased from Status-as-a-Service
Let’s stop here for a second and see how notable Web3 social projects are doing based on these axes.
Landmark Web3 Socials
There are four landmark web3 social networks that have garnered significant traction and are good models for this thought experiment; Lens, Farcaster, Friendtech and Debank. Lens and Farcaster are decentralized, more protocol fat with thin apps plugging in, and familiar (most apps are comparable to Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook with crypto features). Meanwhile Friendtech and Debank are more Web3 native in their experiences, unfamiliar, dependent on non-skeumorphic consumer interactions with NFTs, wallet to wallet exchange and DeFi models. From the perspective of social capital, utility and entertainment, these apps tick the basic boxes of social apps.
(Quick overview of they operate👇, skip if you already know)
Lens and Farcaster: Social graph and profile carries across its dApps (social capital), a wide variety of apps that are comparable to Twitter, Facebook, Wechat are launched in its ecosystem (entertainment and utility). Both are protocol fat and developer friendly, opening more opportunity for novel app experiments.
Debank: Most popular profiles that are adding value are ranked and streamed (social capital), interactions are comparable to NFT bids with real financial realizations in the form of messaging (entertainment and utility).
Friendtech: You can create a following that can steal (buy) your images and draw a social graph leading to you as the highest bidder (social capital), the novelty of “stealing” (entertainment), the transactions involved in stealing (utility).
Despite their great traction and partly successful Web3 hypothesis, next to the most popular social apps of our generation… the disparity is detrimental.
So I say, do what only Web3 native socials can do. MORE OF IT.
Let’s explore what they are and how they work.
Emergent Consumer Behavior
The masses are unlikely to pay for privacy, autonomy, or sovereign identity, especially at the expense of convenience. At least for the time being. Thus for success in the near future, Web3 social products should prompt emergent consumer behavior and build products that can provide non-skeuomorphic social experiences through crypto’s landmark features. For example, look at the following projects.
1. Skeuomorphic with Crypto Features — Lens Protocol
Lens Protocol allows users to mint a profile that will carry the user’s social graph and credentials onto any app building in its ecosystem. The act of minting your profile and carrying it across apps is non-skeuomorphic but the apps in its ecosystem replicate many familiar Web2 apps just with better creator economy, data sovereignty, token integration and share-to-earn or play-to-earn options.
At the end of the day, these projects are just “upgraded” versions of existing consumer experiences. If users are doing the same actions (skeuomorphic behavior) then networks effects and size of the platform is what will decide the success of the project. If your competitor is Meta (Threads, Facebook, Instagram) that would be hard to beat.
2. Skeuomorphic with Crypto Features — Farcaster
Likewise, Farcaster is known to be “sufficiently decentralized” building to return power to users and developers. Farcaster (app) has a familiar user interface and Twitter screenshots below of Warpcast’s updates (Farcaster’s client) again reflect skeuomorphic user experiences.
This is not to say that either project must compete with Meta or Twitter. In fact, Lens and Farcaster are the fastest growing and largest Web3 social protocols with innovative and crypto-native qualities (management of data, open social graphs, integration of NFTs and community-led growth). The point here is that the apps themselves are some iteration of existing consumer behavior which would place them in direct competition with existing traditional social platforms. Which I’m betting is not the best market strategy.
Instead. What if Web3 social drove consumer behavior?
3. Emergent Consumer Behavior — Friendtech (previously Stealcam)
Friendtech from the onset branded themselves as a “home for financial and social experiences” and are a testament to how Web3 Social doesn’t need to be a “remedy” or “alternative” to our beloved Facebook and Twitter but a parallel option (which I personally am more convinced by, Web3 socials should play a positive-sum game with Web2). Although Friendtech is currently closed, revamping with hints of more finance-focused services, let’s take a quick dive into their birth project “Stealcam” to understand how projects can change consumer behavior.
Stealcam: Anyone can upload a single image. The image becomes a Ethereum NFT on Arbitrum that can only be seen when it is “stolen”. The first user can steal a image for free but from the second steal, a small minimum amount must be paid. Thereon every steal is bought with a 10% increase. You can’t see the image before you steal it and the image will disappear as soon as someone “steals” (buys) it from you (no consent needed).
When it first launched it was the perfect place for e-girls, artists and even writers(!) to reap the fruits of creator economy. For users it was a fun betting game since if an image was “stolen” from them they would receive a percentage of the buy.
With novelty (entertainment), utility (for creators) and social capital accumulation, Stealcam was a representative example of how products can drive consumer behavior (paying to see an image without knowing what it is, having images “stolen” from you).
4. Emergent Consumer Behavior — Debank
Another fun app that creates a new frame of consumer behavior is Web3-native messaging app, Debank.
Debank, like Friendtech has a heavy focus on finance x social and although their “stream” much like the familiar “feed” replicates existing consumer apps, its features and the app’s intentions are clearly different.
A representative example of how products change consumer behavior is Debank’s concept of “Attention NFTs” or “Saying Hi”. According to the whitepaper, users exchange/trade “Attention”. Attention as an asset here takes a form of an NFT when minted by the receiver. The novelty in this is that before the message receiver opens the app to mint the NFT, buyers can first offer bids for the NFT by sending messages. When the receiver logs into the app, they can give attention to all the messages receiving the sum of all offers as the final price of the Attention NFT.
Pretty new concept.
Again, point being, a project like this would begin a new pattern of consumer behavior. “Attention as an NFT” in and of itself is a new understanding of value exchange but partnered with financial incentives, consumers are motivated to start building their social capital here. Sooner or later the paradigm of how we understand “messaging” and financially incentivized social interaction is also bound to expand.
📌 Note tokens themselves are already a new format of consumption and can be used to design new emergent behavior (much like how we saw zoom normalize virtual meetings and twitter normalize microblogging). Moreover, we know from Status-as-a-service, new social networks are analogous to crypto projects (ICOs in particular) thus in the perfect position to leverage social app features.
Think about it, they both have a form of social capital (web3 usually in the form of tokens), some proof-of-work is required to earn social capital and there is built-in scarcity.
Web3 literally has the best tools to harness emergent consumer behavior.
Conclusion
There are very complex challenges namely privacy, regulation, data decentralization, token rug pulls etc. that follow the Web3 social narrative. Yet the new paradigm of value proposition, trust-less exchange and proof-of-activity is Web3’s quirk that existing social networks, the larger they are, will never be able to replicate. So more than replications of existing frames of consumer behavior I can’t wait to try out more novel concepts of social interaction that can redefine social activity. I hope you’re excited too 🚀
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