How Web3 Will Impact the Future of Social Media 🙇🏽‍♀️

Hey friends!

In case you missed it, Twitter announced their plans to sell the platform to Elon Musk for in a $44 billion deal at $54.20 a share. Elon has been outspoken about his belief that Twitter should be a place for free, unregulated speech and I guess he felt so strongly (and has so much…clout & money?) that he decided to just buy out Twitter himself.

People have varying opinions on whether this was a good move or not. Personally, I think one of two things will happen—either Twitter is going to turn into a platform of misinformation and division OR Elon has some plans up his sleeve to transform Twitter into some sort of Web3 social media titan. No matter what happens, I imagine a pretty notable shift in the platform. Like so much of this Web3 stuff, only time will tell.

Today’s announcement led me to research what people are saying about how Web3 will shift the social media landscape. Based on an article I read by Kadima Digital, I wanted to share three ways I envision the world of social media shifting for both creators and consumers 👇🏽

Web3 communities will be powered by their native tokens.

“The platforms that we use earn huge money, yet the users generally never receive anything in return. Web3 alters this substantially by rewarding users for their participation.

Several blockchain-powered Web3 platforms are currently available, including web browsers, video-sharing platforms, blogging platforms, and social networking platforms, all of which benefit both creators and consumers. 

Powered by their native tokens, these platforms introduce a symbiotic paradigm to the internet where everyone benefits instead of pursuing a zero-sum strategy where one side must-win for the other to lose.

To do this, decentralized social networks offer built-in payment layers, avoiding undesired middlemen and unneeded expenditures. 

They are also fully interoperable, allowing consumers to effortlessly purchase, sell, and exchange native assets across multiple platforms. For example, content creators can monetize their material using NFTs and sell it across marketplaces.” 

Creators will use incentive programs to reward their most engaged community members.

“Web3 platforms enable content creators to tap into the developing metaverse by letting them create an array of play-to-earn, learn-to-earn, and other similar incentive programs for their communities. 

By engaging in these activities, community members may earn platform-native tokens, which they can use to purchase new features inside the platform, reward creators, or trade them for other tokens. 

Holders of a native token on a social network can have a say in how that network develops in the future, as well. Unlike Web2, where consumers have little to no input about the platform’s evolution, Web3 distributes this responsibility among stakeholders. 

The future of a platform lies in the hands of token holders, who may vote on proposals that best serve their communities. New features, enhancements, and changes to current development and marketing are just a few examples of the vast range of issues covered by these proposals.”

Creators who are successful in building the most engaged community will sustain for a long term win!

“Having a community that is highly engaged with one another enables brands to shoulder the support load. Existing members who are engaged will begin greeting new members and addressing their queries. 

This relieves marketers of the need to manage everything.”

Web3 will ultimately give everyone, from individual creators to mature brands, the ability to create their own mini-worlds where tokens are used as currency and everyone benefits based on how active they are in the community.

This week’s recommended action: Check out Decentralized Social ($DeSo)!

DeSo, which stands for Decentralized Social” is “the world's first open-source layer-1 protocol custom-built to scale decentralized social applications,” according to their Twitter.

I know that may have been a lot of jargon, but they break it down really well in their white paper. See below:

“While much research has been dedicated to scaling "decentralized finance" or "DeFi" applications, relatively little has been invested in building blockchains that can scale social media applications, even though the latter category is arguably just as large, if not larger, and holds just as much promise for value creation. Moreover, while several general-purpose blockchains tout their ability to scale to tens of thousands of transactions per second, scaling up posts per second is a very different problem, and none of these blockchains is currently equipped to handle the storage and indexing requirements of social media applications at scale.

To use an analogy from the centralized world, the infrastructure that powers the New York Stock Exchange today is vastly different from that which powers Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter -- they have completely different architectures tailored to support their respective applications at a massive scale. Similarly, our thesis with DeSo is that a blockchain that can scale decentralized social applications to one billion users will likely look vastly different than a blockchain that can scale DeFi apps to the same level.

Thus, we believe the future of crypto does not consist of a single general-purpose blockchain that rules them all, but rather a series of dominant, specialized blockchains, each tailored to a particular category of applications. DeSo represents a more than two-year effort to create a blockchain capable of decentralizing the social media category, and we believe it presents the first clear path to solving the existing problems that plague social media today.”

$DeSo is also available on Coinbase if you’re interested in investing… 🚀

If you made it to the end of this and have any questions, feel free to drop them here!

Until next time :)

Kendall