Current Situation

The Internet achieved mass adoption thanks to the rise of online social networks. Before them, people could only read information online (few creators, lots of readers). Since their rise, it has become effortless for everyone to publish content (lots of creators, lots of readers). This early 00's paradigm shift attracted the world to the Internet, and as of April 2022, we are now 5 billion Internet users and 4.65 billion active social media users (1).

Yet, as World of Statistics highlights (2), "Humans now only make up 38.5% of internet traffic. The other 61.5% is non-human (bots, hacking tools, etc.).".

Isn't it paradoxical that non-humans squat the world we entirely built to enhance our everyday life? Even worse, it seems evident that bots exploit the average internet user. One could say that humans control those bots, but in practice, we feel at war against bots, not against non-humans mastered by sharp humans. So, yes, humans are subjected to bots in the world they created, and that's philosophically intolerable.

From a more practical point of view, that online non-human presence tremendously deteriorated the User eXperience (UX). From the incalculable spam - tweet “Metamask” and you'll see dozen of bots showing up in your mentions - to the ever-present feeling that you talk to a fake account on dating apps, the virtual world we experience right now doesn't inspire trust and doesn't look human-friendly either.

One could also assert that apart from being mass adopted, the Internet as we know it today betrays the principles defended by its creator - Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The Tenets (3) on which he built the WorldWideWeb were Decentralization, Non-discrimination, bottom-up design, universality, and consensus. However, the transition to WEB2 led to a digital world where a few centralized platforms capture most (all?) of the value created by their users. Those platforms can ban their users whenever they want (no universality), and because their source code is exclusive, no consensus exists.

Our identity being increasingly more defined by our online presence, we can't give those WEB2 platforms the responsibility of our virtual life experience. Interests are too misaligned between them and the end-user, so hard that it could become hazardous. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal (4) showed it well. Furthermore, as long as those platforms don't find an efficient way to prevent bot proliferation, they appear as a strategic place for malicious actors to spread propaganda and shape people's minds (5) and, therefore, can't be assigned to private entities.

How could Web3 features enhance Web2 platform UX?

No more Bots

Bots' creators are so resourceful and creative that platforms can't eliminate them. As of today, the most efficient way to not be disturbed by them is to apply a spam filter: you can restrain the accounts interacting with you.

Or you can mute some words that attract those fake accounts. It's actually not satisfying since it's inaccurate, and in the NFT industry, it leads to obliterating too much information. Imagine working in Web3 and muting the word “NFT”… This is not viable.

Solution: Twitter could ask you to sign a transaction with a wallet holding a Soulbound Token (SBTs) (6) issued by a protocol creating a Sybil-proof list of humans, like Proof-of-Humanity (7).

A more tailored and curated experience

You're a Kendrick Lamar fan from the outset, and you would like to meet people like you? Youtube could mint NFTs highlighting the first time you watched one of his clips.

You don't stop claiming that you're A$AP Rocky's biggest fan? Spotify could mint “TOP 0.1%” NFTs to people who stream him the most.

NFTs, when the most legitimate party mints them, are a powerful tool to embody people's personality traits. Let's say a dating app implements a way to display them in their profile's users, and it would shrewdly tailor their experience. People could entirely rely on these criteria to find their soulmates.

Strengthen the link between artists and fans

If Spotify has data to represent the link between fans and their favorite artist's creation, Instagram could be able to depict the connection between fans and the artist himself genuinely. We live in an era where creators could be idolized regardless of their art (Evan Mock) or could be so multidisciplinary that they are appreciated for only one of their talents (Evan Mock or Aron Piper), so to distinguish both is relevant.

A social platform could be minting a how-close-to-an-artist-you-are NFT based on likes, reposts, tags, the number of DMs, and follow back, for example. Holders of the NFTs would be rewarded with pre-sales, whitelist, private shows, etc. It allows the artists to curate accurately which part of his fanbase deserves X or Y advantages. Also, it consolidates his community around him with a shared and tangible object.

So, NFTs could increase the UX on mainstream social media platforms but will never lead to fully aligning their interests with users. Over the past few years, creators tried to ally to build fairer platforms (Jay-Z and Tidal, for streaming). Yet, to achieve this paradigm, we must create the next generation of social media on a new layer.

Until now, the Internet base layer people were building on top was… the G.A.F.A.M. Those powerful companies have allowed ordinary people to be online creators, and they capture all the value created by their users.

To genuinely change that, people must create on a decentralized, distributed, and secure layer, i.e., the Blockchain.

Web2 models into Web3

Firstly, let's think about a web3 platform that focuses on imitating web2 models. Let's remind that companies like Meta primarily make money by selling advertising space on their various social media platforms. The most significant web2 platform criticism is that they don't share this value with their talented content creators, whereas they gather this online crowd, making the platform advertising space valuable. Web3's value proposition is that it pulls out middlemen through P2P and community-owned systems.

Uniswap - the leading decentralized trading platform - allows everyone to provide liquidity to a pair and capture a cut in proportion to the size of their position in the entire pool.

This NFT represents a liquidity position in a Uniswap V3 USDC-WETH pool. The owner of this NFT can modify or redeem the position.

Let's say you have some ETH and some USDC. You could deposit them in the pool dedicated to the ETH/USDC pair, and let's say your deposit represents 1% of the total liquidity; you would receive 1% of the fees generated by the trades. It's simple and fair.

We could adjust this to a blockchain-based social media: let's say your content attracts 12% of the platform's audience, and you would receive 12% of the advertising revenue of the day. A dynamic NFT could display your % of “attractiveness” in real-time based on your actual impressions. The content creator wouldn’t be forced to extract value from followers by selling sponsoring products and replicating the Web2 platforms' business model. In our model, they would be incentivized to post the most qualitative or buzz-worthy (it's an art to create buzz) content. It would align interest with readers who only want to consume the most curated creation.

Web3 native business model

Ads ruin the user experience, and Elon agrees with us.

In a complete web3 perspective, we could eliminate them and incentivize content creators with platform-native tokens to align interest between active (creators) and passive (readers) users. At the creation of your account, you would be granted freshly newly minted tokens, and you would reward your favorite blogger with them. How to prevent abuses and scams is to be discussed (Sybil-proof, positive-sum, and sane flywheel), and we'll do it later in a dedicated article.

Now, let's focus on the practical benefit of a web3 native social media.

Free people from WEB2 chains

“To be is to be perceived”(Berkeley), and as of today, our online presence is mostly how other people see us. Our identity has merged with our virtual identity, so it became a human duty to fight for our online self-sovereignty identity. You don't own your profile on Web2 social media; you rent it. Instagram could shut down your account without any explication; Apple Store could delist your application overnight (cc Cyril Paglino and Tribe). In the virtual world, we are ruled by a totalitarian regime, we have no rights and we are subjected to the platforms.

NFTs could solve this by embodying your web3 native social media profile: you would be self-custodial of your identity. Your wallet would centralize your identity, whereas your data are scattered into all the Web2 platforms you go through.

This seems little but would be considerable progress for virtual human rights.

Conclusion

The Internet was mass-adopted when it became social. It will be the same for Blockchain-based applications. Aave developed Lens Protocol with this objective, and we look forward to seeing how successful it will be. But today, some essential tools are missing to reach this paradigm: you can't efficiently receive notifications (”XXX liked your pictures," "Derisk your borrowing position, the market is highly volatile”- EPNS is still working on it), and there's no effective on-chain messaging service (Did someone already answer you on Blockscan?).

Will a web3 native social media breaks before a mainstream web2 platform (like Meta) corners the sector?

SOURCES