What is this article?

This is a mix of my thoughts on changes in sponsored media and new opportunities thanks to web3 social media, with a brief overview of Lens Modules. I walk through making your own marketing post with mirror rewards, how Wav3s works behind the scenes and how you can confirm if you are eligible for a mirror reward on a post.

Lens enables a wide variety of new use cases, with a composable, decentralized social graph, users are able to customize their experience online. With Lens built on Polygon, this opens the door to native payments based on social media interaction between users on Lens. This creates a whole new opportunity for creators, hopefully increasing productivity of community engagement and for users a way to earn for their participation.

Lens has a clear emphasis on “user-owned social graph”, no longer is your social graph tied to one application, bring it with you where you find best.

One such interesting aspect enabling increased personalization and monetization is Lens Modules.

Lens Modules

Through modules "... unique, custom functionality on follow, collect and reference", users are able to extend the experience to carve out their unique interaction online.

Modules function like web-hooks, an example for a follow module: when a user attempts to follow a Lens profile, the whitelisted smart contract associated with the module fires running predefined logic in a smart contract. This modularity of a social network increases user’s opportunity and for builders to create useful applications.

There are 3 modules:

Follow Module

Collect Module

Reference Module

• e.g. mirrors and comments

We are just at the beginning of Modules use cases. We’ve seen largely monetary incentivizes built with these but I expect to see increased use for communities like DAOs and others to find other interesting applications leveraging these modules, likely token-gated pages and then others through attestations.

If you want to learn more or build your own Lens Modules, check out the docs here:

The module gaining the most traction currently has been the Reference Module created by Wav3s.

What is Wav3s?

Wav3s is a Web3 marketing tool currently supporting the Lensverse. Recently we’ve seen largely seen the use case of mirror rewards, a Reference Module use case, where eligible users mirroring a post on Lens are rewarded with a set amount of wMATIC.

Mirror Rewards: User sets a reward on their post with certain constraints. Eligible users earn the reward when they mirror the post

Mirror Rewards as Sponsored Posts

Mirror Rewards (in the marketing case) are like sponsored posts on platforms like Twitter, Instagram etc with the difference being, users are not the original creator and intentionally opt into the promoting of content, rewarded for bringing content to their social graph.

Take the example a post by a musician promoting a new single on Twitter.

I find this use case interesting as music is a very personal interest, with people having a wide variety of tastes, and finding music is as much a part of the experience as listening to music you already enjoy.

The ways you’ll come across this post today is likely one of 3 ways:

• You follow this musician

• Algorithm Recommendation

  • or sponsored post included on your feed

• Someone you follow Retweeted

If you follow this musician it’s more likely you’ll be interested in this song and possibly the reason you followed them in the first place.

If you were recommended this by a recommendation algorithm on the “For You” page, maybe it would be of interest.

If someone you follow retweeted the post, its your friend who sends you new music all the time and you have a similar music taste as them. This retweet acts as a signal from that friend, “I like this song, I want others to hear it” or “I like this artist”, this is a form of an attestation. Based on the retweeter of the post, you then have additional context to decide if you believe you’ll be interested as well.

If it’s someone who always send you good new music, you’ll likely check it out.

If it’s someone with a completely different taste of music, maybe not.

Likely the strongest signal to you this song is of interest is by those who you share a similar music taste with, wether a particular artist or friend.

These retweets serve as social attestations: I trust this persons taste in music, if they liked this song I will too.

Currently for the artist on a platform like Twitter or TikTok, you can sponsor particular influencers to create sponsored posts or run promotions boosting your own post. This is a top down approach where the outcome can feel forced for users and no guarantee to reach your target listeners.

Instead on Lens, you can create a post with mirror rewards, creating an incentives uses to mirror or repost the content to their followers.The original recommender systems, humans. This rewards a larger portion of supporters keeping them engaged and potential for finding those dedicated supporters. A bottom-up approach. Where users are your direct advocates.

This can reward early supporters and sets up the opportunity for musicians to have an attribution network, understanding the path to gaining new listeners. If the post being shared is the song and through collecting the post, new users mint a copy; there is a direct attribution path for the artist to see.

With potential for future songs to be better marketed within these attribution channels, meeting the listeners where they are. While those users who contributed to this attribution channel can be rewarded for their referral, through referral fees.

Concerns

With increased promotional posts, we can have mirrors become less of an attestation or signal that they agree with the post or a useful post for their followers. With a potential to add even more noise we have to sift through to find useful or interesting information online. This can be a drawback for users and creators. For users mirrors can become less trustworthy as it is based off a monetary reward rather than personal interest. For creators this can be tough to discern true interest rather than monetary reward, will need to find a good balance for sustained community growth.

If content were to be completely monetized, this would make our social interactions online a very transactional experience.

This would move further away what I believe web3 can enable; through a user owned online experience we can closely resembling the optionality we have in our physical lives and more naturally interact online throughout the world.

Use Wav3s at your own risk.

Using Wav3s

After connecting to the app, and signing in with Lens we'll reach the dashboard.

Create your post then click "Promote".

Collect Settings

Here you can set wether a post can be collected and other settings like only followers can collect or collectors pay a fee and even referral fees.

Referral Fees Example

Alice creates a post, 1 wMATIC collect fee and a 50% referral fee.

If Bob mirrors this post and Chris collects the post which Bob mirrored, paying 1 wMATIC. Bob and Alice will receive 0.5 wMATIC. Every-time a user collects the post from Bob's mirror, this revenue split will repeat.

Mirror Settings

Here we can set the mirror reward, number of eligible mirrors and minimum number of followers users need to have to be eligible for the reward.

With these settings you can set a budget/valuation on rewards.

Take the above settings:

Reward: 0.1 wMATIC

Number of Rewards: 50

Min Followers: 100

You set a value of 5 wMATIC on potentially reaching 5000 or more views. This can help you maintain a clear budget for marketing and for users, they each get the offer of 0.1 wMATIC to share the post.

• There is a 5% fee to use Wav3s

Additional Settings

Now you can be even more selective, filtering by POAPs or rewarding only followers or for own those holding a certain ERC-20 token (deployed on Polygon).

Maybe you want to target those users who are going to a particular event and only reward those users with an ERC-20 ticket, showing proof they can attend.

After approving and depositing funds into the contract, your post will be created and those who meet your set criteria will be rewarded upon mirroring the post.

How Does Wav3s work technically?

While Wav3s does not currently have documentation, based on the structure of Lens Modules combined with on-chain transactions we can have a pretty good idea.

Let go through this high-level example with Alice and Bob.

Bob connects to the Wav3s frontend, including signing in with his Lens profile.

Then creates his post and creates the settings of: 0.1 wMATIC reward, 50 Minimum Followers and a goal of 50 mirrors.

Bob then approves the deposit to the contract at 0xcd8c193b1b2b5cf36f26b94ff42118b5c6ca4bef and confirms the transaction. Depositing 5 wMATIC to the contract. This contract contains the processMirror() logic defined for the Reference Module.

Wav3s then publishes the post to the Lensverse. Alice sees this post, and attempts to mirror it. The mirror request triggers the Reference Module, calling the defined processMirror() method.

The processMirror() method will check if there’s enough budget to pay the reward, if the mirrorer has enough followers plus a couple other checks for validity. Here we see the budget is >= 0.1 and Alice has >= 50 followers.

Now that the checks have confirmed eligible for this mirror reward, Alice will be rewarded the 0.1 wMATIC. Leaving 49 more eligible mirror rewards to be paid out.

If you’re interested to learn more, you can check out the deployed contract below.

Polyscan Contract:

• Look at “wav3sFrenMirror.sol” lines 173- 262 for the source code of their processMirror() method

Disclaimer - Reward Eligibility

Posts on Lens do not natively show the reward criteria within the post. So there could posts claiming to pay rewards while they don’t.

You can easily check and confirm the settings for mirrors rewards to determine eligibility.

On Orb, there is a modal to show what eligibility requirements are.

If you're on Lenster, using the IPFS transaction you can see the settings for the rewards.

Clicking on the "IPFS Transaction" link, a new tab will open and the complete IPFS Transaction will display.

For this example: Look for "mirrorGoal", "mirrorMinimumFollowers", "mirrorReward" and "currency". Other more complex eligibility requirements will require other fields to confirm.

"mirrorGoal": number of eligible mirrors for rewards - 15

"mirrorMinimumFollowers": example constraint - >= 300 followers to be eligible

"mirrorReward": reward to be paid upon eligible mirror - 0.1

"currency": token to be paid out - WMATIC

Now we can confirm: The first 15 mirrors by users with at least 300 followers will be rewarded 0.1 wMATIC for mirroring this post

Final Thoughts

Lens’ user-owned social graph empowers users to experience their digital life as they chose. With portability of their social identity not confined the borders of a single application, instead a part of an ever-growing network. Lens Modules offer a unique way to customize the experience and offering opportunities for creators to monetize their work and also reward users for their support. I believe we are just at the beginning of applications for Lens Modules with some of the early adopted use cases being around monetization. I suspect we’ll see increased use around token gated content within the Lens ecosystem or other attestation-based content filtering.

Sponsored posts of today typically fund one user to reach a mass of their particular followers, this won’t go away, but with applications like Wav3s, we flip the script. Giving the opportunity to more users to be rewarded for access to their individual social graph and support. While enabling attribution channels for creators to better understand their supporters and ROI from marketing campaigns.

With this increased access to sponsoring posts, this can add additional noise for users to sift through on their feed. To cut through this noise likely we will need increased personalized content filtering.

From here I hope we see Algorithm Customizability, enabling users to opt-in and out of particular recommendation algorithms. Empowering users to select how they would like to interact with digital content based on their interests and preferences at that time. Eventually leading to a marketplace for recommendation algorithms. I’ll leave diving into this topic for another time.

Excited to see what else is built in this evolution of our digital life

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this article, feel free share with a friend, collect, or subscribe. I appreciate your time and support

More soon,

Matt