Ontology Tech Viewpoint | Web2 vs. Web3: What will happen with the development of social tools?
Getting social — together.
Social communication is one of the main ways that different subjects transmit and feedback social information. From pigeon post in the ancient times, letters in modern times, to social App essentials on our mobile phones today, people’s needs and realization methods of social communication are constantly updated and changed.
The Web2 social track has been around for many years and as such has matured. In order to attract more traffic and improve user engagement, hard work and development may have become a way for major applications to stand out in an ocean of social apps, such as adding various value-added functions to form their own ecological closed-loop.
However, with the rise of Web3, social apps seem to be optimizing in another direction.
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk successfully completed the acquisition of Twitter, and began a series of radical changes. Due to his view of “building Twitter into a decentralized social application” before the acquisition, the public, especially in Web3 circles, have paid special attention to the subsequent transformation of Twitter, which has also triggered various discussions on the future development direction of Web2 social products.
Previously, Twitter has tried many things on linked to Web3, such as:
· In January 2022, it announced its support for using NFT as a profile picture
· In February 2022, it announced its support for BTC and ETH for tipping creators
· In November 2022, a trailer announced plans to develop an encrypted wallet.
Also this year, social media site Reddit tried its hand at NFT, releasing its first official avatar NFT in April 2022, and a second batch in October, which quickly sold out within 24 hours.
In order to expand the buying group and optimize the buying process, Reddit specifically avoided using Web3 proper terms such as “NFT”, “key” and “address” when designing its own NFT series purchasing process, and chose to use the familiar “account password registration” method for users to create and purchase, greatly reducing the barrier to purchase.
Other social media outlets have also launched NFT exploration programs, such as Instagram, which launched the combined NFT function internal testing in May this year.
However, despite this process of Web2 social products embracing Web3, we find that due to the limitations of product architecture, these social tools can only stay at the compatible level of profile picture display and payment methods, and cannot solve one of the biggest problems existing in the current social software, that is, the risk of users’ privacy data being infringed.
From this perspective, perhaps new Web3 social products may be able to build and improve trusted social relationships on the basis of protecting user data.
Lens Protocol is a decentralized, underlying protocol for building Web3 social relationships. It records the relationship between addresses, such as following, forwarding, and liking, in the form of NFT, ensuring the ownership of data and greatly enhancing the feasibility of connecting subsequent products to Lens ecology. For example:
- Lenster, the “Twitter” of the Lens ecosystem, based on the existing functions of Twitter, supports decentralized data client login, ENS domain name authentication, encrypted private message chat backed by XMTP protocol, music type NFT identification, and other deep blockchain technical functions.
- Lenstube, the “Youtube” and “TikTok” of the Lens ecosystem, focuses on video social networking, supporting personalized operations such as uploading videos, limiting the objects and number of people to collect videos, etc. The project also announced the development of live-streaming and music social products in the future.
Farcaster defines itself as an “adequate” decentralized product for the underlying protocols of social networking, designed to build a portable social identity. While a user’s identity is stored on the Ethereum chain, other data, such as private messages, are stored in Farcaster Hubs, a server under the chain that allows users to fully control their identity, social connections and data.
Like Lens Ecosystem, Farcaster users currently have to be invited to use it. And because of its open protocol nature, the Farcaster ecosystem is expanding rapidly — dozens of projects have been built on the Farcaster network.
The DeBox project is more like the Web3 version of “enterprise wechat”, because it also has enterprise community management, moments and wallet payment functions. Community managers must hold the designated NFT issued by DeBox to create communities and review content. This not only improves the practicability of NFTs, but also raises the threshold of community management to ensure the professionalism of communities.
Web2 social products are well developed, and have successfully cultivated deep user habits. This also presents a dilemma for Web3 social products: how to break through the user’s inherent thinking and accept certain product innovation?
In reference to the current product development of the Web3 social track, the author believes that the following two points should be paid attention to in the future development:
- “Backward compatibility”, that is to support all functions of the current Web2 social products and transplant the social data of traditional users.
- Avoid “formalism”, which means decentralization for decentralization’s sake, such as storing all data on the chain at no cost, and forcing a large number of blockchain professional processes (such as mnemonic verification) that make it more difficult for users to operate.
In an ideal situation, Web3 social applications should be able to carry the accumulated data of users in Web2 to realize identity verification compatible with both Web2 and Web3, so as to ensure that the ownership of data is returned to users in the case of the authenticity of the account, and realize the core characteristics of independent data ownership, friendly process use, and reasonable product design.
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