Written by: NingNing
CyberConnect claims to be the earliest decentralized social network on its link3 page, which is a marketing tactic, not a fact.
The earliest Web3 social network was @steemit, created by BM in 2016.
From then until today, in the blink of an eye, Web3 social has developed for 7 years.
Compared with DeFi (the earliest project, BitShare, also created by BM), Web3 social seems very lonely in terms of user scale, deposited assets, ability to create new assets, total FDV of the track, etc.
Looking back at the past and looking at the present, although the narrative of the Web3 social track is constantly evolving, from the simple decentralized content platform in the past to today's social graph + DID + SBT, it is constantly regressing in product architecture and token economics.
A regression in product architecture
Unit-01 Steamit: The underlying architecture is the blockchain Steam based on the Graphene architecture (yes, the same architecture as EOS), with the core user interaction logic (posting, forwarding, commenting, liking) and assets on the chain. On the application layer above the Steam chain is the decentralized content community Steamit, which is governed by community voting.
No. 2 Bihu: Web2 centralized architecture + asset on-chain. The influence of users’ forwarding, commenting and liking is related to the platform tokens they hold. It wins by producing a large amount of professional content in the crypto industry for the Chinese area.
Machine No. 3 CyberConnect: Based on OpStack's L2+ social graph + a wool-pulling task platform Link3, it looks high-end, but in fact L2 is not deployed, 90% of the social graph is invalid wool-pulling party profiles, and the wool-pulling task platform Link3 cannot compete with Galxe.
A setback in token economics
Unit-01 Steamit: Steemit has a three-currency economic system consisting of equity token STEEM, utility token STEEM Power and stablecoin SBD.
No. 2 Machine Coin: The platform token $KEY has functions such as rewarding/sharing content income/enhancing influence, etc.
CyberConnect Unit 3: The only application scenario of the $CYBER token at present is airdrop.
As for why the Web3 social track continues to regress in product architecture and token economics, I think the main reasons are the following three:
The user's social graph is already strongly bound to the Web2 platform. For example, once a Chinese person leaves WeChat, his or her circle of friends will become barren. Users have lost the ability to migrate, resulting in new social platforms such as Cloud and Damus being a passing fad and unable to retain users.
Among the factors that determine the monetization value of content, the weight of content quality is not as high as the platform where the content is published and the user group the content reaches. For example, the value of my tweets posted on Twitter is greater than the value of those posted on Weibo and the value of those posted on Toutiao.
For developers and project owners, the maximum extractable value (MEV) of Web3 social users is much lower than that of DeFi users. Needless to say, the value of financial users has always been the highest.
But the degradation in product architecture and token economics does not mean that the Web3 social track has been completely falsified. After all, we still have the last hope for the whole village, the Lens Protocol developed by the DeFi project AAVE team.
