The Missing Killer Social App by Doug Petkanics

to Denver Biddle week Tuesday morning we're uh door should be opening here at the uh the Biddle Hub so we're just getting started uh we'll kick off the content my name is Doug picanix I'm the founder of a project called live peer where we're building the world's open video infrastructure and I'm going to give a talk today about an area that I think should be really important to everyone building in the blockchain in the web 3 space which is social media it's a huge opportunity for blockchain and the tools that are enabled by smart contracts and cryptocurrencies to actually disrupt and cause some really positive impacts to society relative to the harms that we've seen from the big centralized social media platforms that sort of dominate the uh the internet today and so hopefully this talk will be uh kind of interesting inspiring talk for Builders who are looking for maybe a blueprint of how we can get started building the killer breakout web3 social media applications that we haven't seen exist yet so I mentioned quickly I found a project called live pure we're an open video streaming infrastructure our users are developers that are building creator-centric apps and social applications and live peer Powers the video features within them the video uploads uh the video live streams and so our success is actually tied intimately to the growth and the success of these web3 social applications we'll talk a little bit about them today and so we're trying to basically create a blueprint to help them succeed so let's take a a look at attempts in web3 Social so far and how they fared if you go back four or five years ago you may recognize some of these names steemit pepo uh peepeth these were some of the first kind of wave one incarnations of web3 Social and they did a great job inspiring people with what's possible when you're publishing content on chain you're curating content from communities um but due to a number of factors maybe being too early these platforms didn't necessarily work or didn't necessarily take off in steemit's case all of the content that was rewarded and was incentivized was essentially promoting steemit itself and the token and it became a little bit of a you know a token pumping Echo chamber uh even though it taught us many lessons peepeth was like a Twitter clone but it was so expensive you had to pay to put every tweet on the ethereum blockchain and as Gas Prices rose that simply wasn't scalable and pepo was sort of like a web 3 Centric Tick Tock but at the time there just wasn't enough sort of content creators in the space enough interesting content to actually you know attract eyeballs and and keep people returning to the application so now let's fast forward to where we are in 2023 we're kind of at the dawn of all of these early social ecosystems which I've learned from these earlier attempts and have actually put the building blocks in place to create really valuable social applications you may recognize lens protocols from the team at Ave it's deployed on the polygon Network and they have I think nearly a hundred thousand users who have claimed profiles on lens and are publishing content through over 100 applications we recognize the farcaster protocol taking a bit of a different approach they have a really premium client called warpcast it's invite only really high quality discussion and engagement and really attempting to be the the Public Town Square that uh Twitter didn't didn't actually live up to you also see l1s like diesel creating thriving ecosystems you have projects like orbis which is built on ceramic and cyber connect which is built on BNB chain which are all creating thriving social developer ecosystems so we have cool infrastructural protocols in place with open social graphs but at the stage at the application layer what sort of things are we seeing built on them right now we're often seeing things that look like sort of clones of the big Social Web 2 platforms Facebook YouTube twitch Twitter um Instagram and I would argue that while you know it may be a good idea to have a a sort of open version of Twitter an open version of Instagram I don't think that the killer breakout application is simply going to be a clone of what you've seen work in web 2 because if all you're doing is cloning functionality except you're making it more complex with wallets and having to pay gas and deal with you know uh you know digital first identities and stuff you're probably not creating anything uniquely disruptive enough to actually attract eyeballs create a network effect and have people stay for what's unique about your application so what I would challenge developers to do is to actually look deeply at what blockchain's disruptive impacts have been so far and think about how to use those unique Primitives to create new types of experiences that were never before possible in traditional web 2 social media so what are those um you know unique disruptive impacts that blockchain has enabled uh I would say that there's four of them so far I think there's you know crowdfunding and capital formation has been a really powerful and obvious one I think permissionless access to a global digital First Financial system incredibly powerful and something that's certainly not offered through traditional web 2 social media digital ownership and verifiability is really important where you can actually claim ownership over digital items and you can verify that they're authentic and the fourth one I think is global a collective Global coordination something that traditional social media actually did a pretty good job at enabling relative to what we had before but this is really jump started by what sort of smart contract based coordination can enable and so these look like sort of big abstract theoretical Concepts that we talk about but you probably recognize them concretely by the three and four letter acronyms that we use to to Define them you know icos D5 nfts Dows and I would say anyone building a social application should look at these and the disruptive impacts they've made and think about how you can power you can kind of use these building blocks within social applications in order to really catalyze something new and different I'd also recognize sort of one other Trend related to these which is the impact of these Trends has been felt far more in the the digital world or the you know the cyberspace then they've been felt in the you know traditional physical world or the meat space and that's also been something that's been awesome about building in the web 3 world since you know 2016 or so is seeing um kind of the emergence of this online first borderless coordinated digital you know economy instead of communities that really isn't limited to the jurisdiction that you're you're in the local laws policies Etc and you know I'd say icos defy nfts Dows they all are far more powerful when you're doing something digital first and Global and online only then when you're trying to use those mechanisms to coordinate for something you know physical in the real world so there's this emerging cyber community and I think it's um you know it's really inspiring but one thing that I kind of had always wondered you know back in 2016 when we started building life here we said well all these people are talking to each other on crypto Twitter is it just an echo chamber is it just a small group of aspirational thinkers uh talking about the future together but will this ever cross over to the world the real world um you know I use the word Echo chamber before in sort of a negative sense but it's interesting when you pair it with the second point that it's actually growing at a tremendous rate and we've seen this over the year the amount of smart inspirational people that are joining the space that are building projects that are committing full time that are joining Dows that are spending their nights and weekends or you know shifting to full time to enter this space has just been growing and growing and growing it's exemplified by this sort of developer growth graph from Electric Capital and uh to me it's obvious that this is the platform of the future and I think that you know everyone here at East Denver probably sees that but when you back it up with the statistics and you back it up with seeing kind of the influx of talent capital and people from the the mainstream world uh you'll see the sorts of impacts that these you know digital first Primitives can have in a growing market and that's sort of the building blocks that you need so we have all the building blocks for the the killer app to exist let's talk about the blueprint of taking this insight and putting it together um what might you follow to create web 3's killer breakout social application I want to highlight um sort of this idea from traditional product development called come for the tool stay for the network and it's recognizing that many popular social networks with millions of users didn't start as social networks they started as tools that had a single player mode that solved a problem for an individual user or company or small group and so looking at some of the biggest examples today Instagram started as an app called bourbon which was just a way to apply nice filters to your photos and any user could get utility from that and then they would want to share those photos with their friends and that led to a follower graph and a network effect right so it started as a tool Strava it's a world's most popular kind of Fitness tracking social application probably the most positive social network on the planet it started just as a fitness tracker for an individual to track their bike rides their runs their swims and see their statistics but as you begin to want to share those as you want to go on runs with your friends collaborate give kudos Etc you can create an network from that even Tick Tock the fastest growing social application of all time started as this fun little single player mode where you could you know lip sync over an audio clip as an app called musically and it was kind of the aggregation of content from those clips and people wanting to share them that led to their ability to network this with followers create recommendation algorithms and now have you know one of the stickiest and fastest growing social networks of all time so if I would encourage Builders to start not by saying we're going to create the breakout social network but to look at this you know emerging digital web3 Centric online ecosystem and say what problems exist what tool can we build that we can solve today I have a few problems that I think exist when it comes to the the media space that would be addressable via social media the first one is we've seen the emergence of dows we've seen thousands of dows and communities and groups forming discords telegrams Etc I think these Dows create a ton of content they do all of their calls over video they communicate their Visions tons of content being captured in Discord Telegram they don't have a trustworthy home to organize and distribute this content in alignment with their web 3 values I'd imagine right now we're probably streaming this on Twitch there's going to be recordings that are uploaded to YouTube eat them Reserve super strong community and they probably do a pretty good job at organizing and have dedicated media teams and volunteer groups focused on that I'd say most of the thousands of dows don't have that and their content typically gets lost and spread out amongst media and they really could use a sort of Dow Centric content home for their content particularly video content and so I think this is a cool opportunity because you can solve a problem for any one single Dao or community and if you do then you have a happy user and there's likely thousands more that are like them and you can begin solving these problems for the Dazz themselves I think once you've gathered content for individual Dows in communities you have the opportunity to start to think about content curation and moderation services to surface this to more and more users there's lots of people here that are interested in knowing the best talks that are happening at this event the best you know calls and discussions that are happening within various Dows that they participate in and there's no great platform for curation moderation and discovery of this content when you look at the the sort of Clone type web3 social apps the web through YouTube the web 3 tick tock typically there's so much focus on just the pipes to get the content onto the home page and then once it's on the homepage it's all just dumped there but this space really could benefit from looking at curation and moderation to show the really great content um and bonus points if you can go beyond just an individual human uh performing that layer but if you can actually think about how you can get a kind of an incentivized group of collective contributors in a project or a dow to be the curators themselves so I think that's a problem and a gap and an opportunity to build into um related to this I think Discovery for high quality content in web3 is still highly fragmented I think where do you get your web 3 Centric news you probably get it on crypto Twitter you get it in disparate telegram groups you join disparate discords there's a couple media brands that you maybe trust like a bank list or a coindesk I think there's still a lot of opportunity for kind of discovery of where the highest quality High signal content lives and there's a opportunity to build the applications that fit this need for this growing ecosystem of people who are just hungry for Content about this emerging digital first world so given these problems what are some opportunities that I see first is to build something that looks like a web 3 native Zoom every project is collaborating online they're using Hangouts and Zooms in order to have their calls they're creating all this content but we're trusting it all to these big centralized companies that require corporate accounts that aren't friendly to pseudonymous participation and maybe don't allow access controls via wallets and token gating and all the sorts of Primitives that we we benefit from there's a great app called huddle 01 I recommend you you check it out they're off to a great start in this space and they actually have a developer platform that allows you to build kind of real-time chat and messaging uh for your communities related to the kind of content curation and and content management for Dallas I think there's a clear opportunity to build a web 3 native content management system for Dallas shown on the screen is streaming another project that's built on live here this was used Devcon a bunch of ethereum conferences it's open source and so anyone can take it and white label it for their own Tower event and it basically allows you to schedule upcoming streams post uploaded videos and begin to organize content in a way that your Dowry Community could actually benefit from from finding and surfacing as opposed to just cruising YouTube talked about curation I think the uh next opportunity is to build sort of a curation now for web 3 Centric content I'm highlighting lens protocol here there's thousands and thousands of posts and videos and photos and uploads and Tweets in in lens and there's a hundred clients in which you can consume them but who's curating and servicing the best content who's creating that feed that's actually interesting when you open it as opposed to just a smattering of all the latest content or the kind of initial follower graph which was recommended to you as they're bootstrapping these these platforms there's a project called cultivator Dow it's pretty nascent I recommend you check it out aimed at trying to curate um and moderate great content for this so these are just some ideas if you put these pieces together how might they lead to a killer web 3 social app I think like I said you have an opportunity to start with the tool the content management system for Dows and communities in this space it's needed it's a pain point you can make a lot of users happy you do that you begin to kind of aggregate content across many of these doubts you can sort of enable value add curation on top of this content and begin to surface the best of the best showcase what's coming up and all of a sudden you become a bit of a a home for everyone who's interested in this space to come to every day check back and see what's going on and once you create that sticky behavior of opening your app every day if you can become an app that people put on the home screen of their phone that's the powerful position that you need to be in there I think you have the opportunity to layer in web 3 Network effects people are returning to this they're participating around content they're commenting they're liking they're following one another you're layering in web 3 Centric identity based on wallets all of a sudden now you have a social graph and repeated behavior and activity and this is the great basis for for a breakout app finally if you if you succeeded that you can expand to the long tail of creators maybe not just start with a couple you know business isn't the right word but entity-centric customers who are dads themselves but you can actually allow user generated content individual uploads and lo and behold you've become not just YouTube Not Just twitch but the web 3 Centric version that's actually taken advantage of the you know unique Primitives that that blockchain has enabled this is just an idea it's a blueprint it's the basis you know the future is going to require Vision it's going to require a lot of experimentation but that's what's really exciting about this space um eat Denver you know we're here it's two weeks of hacking and building it's experimenting on these concepts with tons of projects that are providing the building blocks uh for this world to exist at live pure we're a video platform powering many apps but first and foremost we're experimenting with users around all these Primitives to help enable the sort of innovative breakout applications that we haven't seen yet because I think once we do create those multi-million user applications that cross over to the mainstream that provide unique utility that's just not available within Twitter within Facebook within Pinterest Etc that's when we're going to be able to onboard you know the next wave of influx of users into web3 and it's when this becomes the next platform for the future of the internet so I'm really excited about that I hope you all are too thanks for coming out early to join this talk you can find me at livepier on Twitter I'm dug it live here on email happy to hang out and collaborate with anyone trying to build the breakout with three social app thanks all foreign 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