Why We Need Web3 Social Media

next up we have Mackenzie cigalis moderating a panel on why we need web 3 social media welcome Mackenzie welcome panel cool go ahead sure thanks panelists come on up here I'm MAC I'm a tech reporter at CNBC and I'm gonna just go down the line and have everyone introduce themselves so Francis your first step my name is Francis Haugen and I am an advocate for social media accountability and transparency you may have heard of me before as the Facebook whistleblower though I am only one of many and I'm very happy to be here hi it's Mike check hi Richard Muirhead from fabric Ventures kind of Builder turned backer and we are actively exploring all of the important possibilities of web 3 social media it's Jenny Stanley College of so I'm the founder and CEO of rvm we're a company that built the Ave protocol in D5 and lens protocol which is a way of creating a online presence on the um in in the web tree hi uh my name is Chris golzinski I'm a CEO and co-founder of Niche we're building a web 3 decentralized Network previously as one of the co-founders of Tinder I helped invent the swipe and I co-created bumble so I want to key in on Elon Musk and Twitter and what it's been like having him in charge there in some ways it lays bare the risk of centralized ownership of a major communications platform a lot of you as you just explained in your bios are in some capacity working with blockchain to mitigate those problems but do you right now see the average social media user really caring about decentralization and owning their data and I put this question to the entire panel the way I usually frame uh like people ask like why would people want to move from a centralized platform to a decentralized platform and I think one of the big opportunities is the decentralized social networks introduce interesting opportunities around self-governance that we've kind of come to accept that we are subjects of like a king like Mark or Elon and we can either follow their rules or like leave and there's an interesting opportunity for people to be citizens of their platforms you know having an ability to vote but also having responsibilities that come with that and I think in general when you ask people do you want to be able to influence things you care about or not influence things you care about people in general say I would rather have the ability to influence things that I care about and my online identity in my online community are something that mean a lot to a lot of people let me pile into this one so uh and actually I kind of I'm torn because I kind of agree with you but actually there's a debate that happens um uh a lot internally within our family at least as to kind of how we're going to affect this transition from uh you know web 2 to web 3 and I think um you know I think humans are particularly bad at kind of looking after themselves or kind of not waiting until the issues occurred and then bolting the Barn Door um and so I think the problem is that uh that is the case and I think sometimes though that we're proven within web3 that if you particularly if you get a hold of early adopters you can incentivize them through ownership to really change their behavior But ultimately you know these new forms of social media and web3 need to solve some you know new problem uniquely to compel people to adopt them um and and so I think that's where some of the sort of the thesis work that we do comes out but I think another another way of looking at it is that we're kind of asking the wrong question like why do we need web free social media I would posit that actually whereas in web 2 Zuckerberg came along and kind of bolted on a crude form of you know social onto web one to create web 2. with web3 this is this has been a Grassroots movement that has intrinsically social from the get-go identity is baked in cryptographically you bring your Social Capital to the apps that are being built you actually bring your Capital to the apps that are being built and your data and so forth and so that everything that is built all the apps that are going to be built now that we are finally going to have a stack that you can develop them on you've got some of them on on the stage year they're going to have those social aspects and they could be doing anything from addressing sustainability or co-owning a sports team or dating or whatever or getting a job and but solving a real problem not necessarily going up to the big guys from the from out of the gates I also think the the kind of idea like distinction between like web 2 and web3 is uh also kind of like unnecessary because like um I just a simple question for for the audience like who of you think that the internet is cool place so internet is cool right okay so do you think the web 3 is cool like is crypto cool well it's a yeah equal amount of audience like agree that like internet is when you know it creates opportunities and I think what's um personally um exciting for me is that I I grew up on over online so you know starting with gaming and um getting better Broadband broadband connection and and being able to get information across globally um and making connections as well so um first time ever with um with the internet you can actually find people across the world that share the same ideas and they don't necessarily live in the same neighborhood as you do um and I think it's kind of interesting because web2 it really made it very easy to actually connect um and and the bigger social media platforms as well you can share content you can you can find information that is valuable for you um and and obviously what changed over the past um decade and a half is that you know all these relationships that we're making all the time we start to make more and more relationships actually online um but the thing that we want to change is is is that identity part so being able to actually have a ownership of your presence so the connections you are making um over online the audiences You're Building uh the monetization streams You're Building as a user you're kind of are in a place that you really should have that ownership and that's what uh battery is about it it really uh brings um you know it commoditizes uh the internet and and brings it closer to you and and also gives you a share of that and I think um usually when I think about building protocols uh also I think about you know we have to build something that is better faster stronger um meaning that you know if you are using Social Web free social media applications and you have to sign uh every transaction or you know the user experience isn't what you're used to uh we're not getting far and those are the things that we're focusing in with our team that how we can just build better social and then you get those benefits of whatever ownership provides you as a user but I feel like with social platforms like the big problem is really getting to scale and so like we've kind of dissected a lot of the and you did a great job of breaking down the the advantages once you're there but nobody wants to be on a new platform where they don't have a network yet where their friends aren't um already on there with them and so when you think of centralized owners they can invest in marketing to drive early scale but how do decentralize platforms like a lens scale and who drives that usage how I just feel like this hasn't been done successfully just yet yeah I mean there's obviously the technical scale part which we're actually getting in a good shape because you know a lot of things that wasn't possible to do with the blockchain um uh is actually viable now so with the layer twos and and more scalability solutions as well but when it comes to the actual um user and Community scale what I found very fascinating is that when you actually give the ownership of the profiles and audiences to the users um you know the way you build the applications you actually have the flexibility to go from one application to another and you retain your user base and what it means also for the developers and that are building the the new experiences um is that when they integrate lens into their existing application um as a social layer um or they're building some sort of a new cool interesting um use case they can actually use the existing user base and it's kind of like a a idea of building together or growing together so lens is kind of like a garden where you know you have a lot of people coming in and planting seeds and and and you're you're basically um cultivating together with the community and other users and and and developers and you know it's a big database but end of the day the applications can choose what they want to curate and what kind of experience so example there is one application um or a product actually called Enzo Enzo Collective and they're simply creating a digital closet where you can collect uh fashion as nfts and they use lens protocol for for doing that and sharing um whatever you have in your digital wardrobe and that use case is is something that is very novel um and they're using they're curating the audience from the lens protocol itself which is quite interesting so when you make it very easy you kind of like mitigate the chicken and egg problem as well for for those who want to build new experiences I think in general you can broadly divide social media into two buckets there's broadcast social media where creators don't really care about exactly who they reach you know you're not you're not creating because you want to reach one specific person or you want to reach your grandma you're you want as much reach as possible and that's why you see clones of things like Tick Tock inside of YouTube inside of Instagram inside of Snapchat and then you have personal social media that's where you're not creating because you want someone to see it you're creating because you want Grandma to see it and I totally agree with you that there are network effect problems where like you have to get everyone in one place at the same time but a number of new novel social networks have been rolling out over the last few years that are borrowing the same Playbook from Facebook they start at places like college campuses they start with fraternities you know they start with discrete communities and they go after those discrete communities so that you do get that um coincidental effect like you know everyone you one is there and so I think it's this question of what problem are you trying to solve because if you're going after the broadcast use case it doesn't matter if not everyone's there yet you're still building from a beginning community and if you want to get that Network thing you're just gonna have to adopt a similar Playbook to what Facebook did and right now when I think about some of the most promised prominent decentralized social media Alternatives there's a lot of you know Twitter substitutes and so we talked about lens and then there's Noster and Blue Skies coming out um you come from the world of Tinder and Bumble like tell me tell me about when we're gonna diversify out because right now you don't have like the Instagram alternative or something in that other category I don't I don't think it's good enough just to have a web 3 version of Instagram or Twitter I think there's got to be a new set of like values or or like a new proposition that we're giving to Consumers to actually do this that's that's like the chicken or the egg problem there there's got to be something for whoever to cross the road to get to it I think like there's no there's no reason for me to jump on to uh something because it's decentralized or whatever like the the previous question like does it matter is it decentralized I think to a consumer no does it matter that it it's uh built on privacy it doesn't matter that it's a distributed ownership doesn't matter you know what I mean XYZ those are things that actually matter to people and it's up to I think people that are building the consumer layers to translate what that technology does as an into a new value proposition to the end consumer and that's what's going to drive I think Mass adoption and use and value and people coming back to it and that are going to find Value in it you're going to see the innovation in the kind of lens Garden for all these different kind of possible models so around Fashion whatever it is you've got your model with with you know the different niches that you you support and but I think you know and then people maybe they don't care about self-sovereignty of their data enough to change the behavior you know maybe they don't care about privacy enough um but if you take the ownership question and translate it into the ability to innovate around the business models now that these different Niche social sites are freed from the ad Revenue kind of tyranny it's a it's it's an incentive question I think yeah we were talking about that before it's the the only incentive model now is to drive ad sales because that's the way we've been able to monetize networks is to Coop the connection to one another for ad sales so that dictates a certain model of behavior on the platform and if we can take that away and start building value for the creators and give them new methods to monetize through you know Club membership for this that or the other that that changes everything one of the social networks or the new novel ones that I'm most excited about is actually a centralized one it's called post news and one of the reasons why I find it so interesting is it goes after that incentives question you know they say right now when you look at sub stack there are a small fraction of creators on sub stack that make money but most make almost nothing if you could begin saying you could tip someone for an article like you wrote an article I'm willing to give you a five cent tip a 10 cent tip I'm willing to do a micro subscription to this thing I'm not willing to pay 25 a month for the Sacramento Bee but I do really want to read this article I'm going to do a micro payment for that I think those kinds of models have a huge opportunity especially in a web 3 context web 3 lends itself to social it reinforces the the point there's an economy built into it there's I mean Dows are a fantastic model of self-organization I also think that the the incentives that we have in social media they really suck at this point because like uh if you want to have like five million views or like 10 million views and and then you get like four dollars as a Creator um to me it's kind of like a um and I think even like uh bigger social media platforms there start to uh incentivize creators in in monetary way and I think that's good for for creators but I think um as long as the the creators uh as long as they don't own their audiences um and they depend on those many of these platforms you know there's not going to be um equal economy in in that sense so you know creators will do whatever the platforms will do you know because they they own those audiences and and audiences and distribution um and I think something that the the decentralization aspect can really help is to shift that power to to actually the creators itself and the users and uh maybe that way um the the actual businesses have to think about how they can attract the audience and and puts them into a different kind of a competition and I think one of us is you can either compensate creators with solely money which is kind of what we just talked about or you can compensate them with control right and in a world where your ability to create and then create content that is consumed earns you some kind of influence to then govern that's a platform that's very attractive to creators and in the end content is what drives the success of social networks I mean and this is what we've just been touching on like this concept of social fine Financial infrastructure being crucial to web3 social on on the other side so regulation like this is the biggest topic with so many of the people who I'm speaking to is are navigating their business models Francis you've been all over the world speaking to lawmakers who are trying to understand how to regulate around the space and you've been talking about it in in the context of uh the existing like big Tech players that are kind of controlling the social media ecosystem what is it how does that Ripple into web 3 social I think there's going to be some interesting challenges in coming years and I I have a a Fireside tomorrow where we talk about how people have been disparaging things like web3 social media or end-to-end encrypted social media by playing the safety card it'll say oh this is dangerous these forms of social media are dangerous because they're they're private and intrinsically none of these systems have to be dangerous we can design for safety as we go along but I think one of the things that's going to be a thing that we have to think about proactively is laws are being passed around the world now that say if you get bigger than a certain size you're going to have to have certain transparency requirements and so either that's going to lead to a world where we have many fragmented smaller than a certain size networks or we need to to plan for success and say how can we be ready to um open our the curtain a little bit about how we administer these platforms I can add one interesting thing is that um especially when kind of as a user you you don't really have to rely on one particular platform or a client and you um you you you remove the the idea of Network and and the actual application it creates a lot of choices for the users and I think what's valuable there is that maybe you start to see applications there are like communities so something that I actually like about Mastodon is that um as a Federate Network it really allows people to create communities and values and you know content moderation policies and rules for those communities like um and for me what's interesting is that what we might see in the future is that we have different kinds of policies that these communities are setting and you as a user you can choose a community that is aligned with your values and the trust and safety policies and and you have more Choice there that's something that I'm very excited to see in the future I think by organizing into those types of communities it naturally silos that type of content or whatever in its own in its own Community right and it kind of limits that crossover right now we're in one big Wagon Wheel of a of a network and we see everything so exactly and so building on the incentive point you know you're kind of drawn like you know birds of a feather flocking together around a particular Niche because of the content and you're drawn to it because maybe it's plugged in a different business model that is not ad Revenue driven but I think an interesting um sort of aspect is going to play out going forward is that we've got algorithms driving ad Revenue historically where we've been used as the product we've given up our data willingly unwingly whatever and going forward there's going to be increasingly sophisticated algorithms that are going to be kind of constructing search results different opinions and hopefully sort of consensus around moderation and truth and and even hate speech and the rest of it and so it's more important than ever that we get to choose how we give up our data to train those algorithms and how we maybe even give up our opinion to express the kind of how how good the outcomes the score how good the outcomes of those algorithms are and so I think we're going to move into a kind of even more complex and critical environment you know that actually whether it's from regulation or whether it's from the Innovations in web3 uh hopefully we'll get this proliferation of of choice for the the user it's going to be an important thing in your respective sorry could you repeat that question the echo is really bad no just like what are the bottlenecks right now there's a lot of Market stigma right just in in what's happening uh a lot of the times if I say I'm building a web 3 decentralized whatever it's like the blank stairs but if I'm like if I'm saying I'm building the next evolution of social uh networks that focuses on people owning their networks and this that and the other uh okay that starts to resonate so I feel like we're trying to almost like obfuscate away all the web 3 stuff and just like really like stake that hypothesis of like this is a new core benefit based on like a tech stack like I don't really think about Facebook Tech stack when I post on Facebook groups nor really should you and I think the same goes for web three if it's going to be ubiquitous you shouldn't have to think about the technology you should just see the benefit of it yeah and I I Echo that that as well because um you know it's you have to you have to take the complexity away from from the actual consumer facing uh part um and that's that's something that when we were building lens um we tried to figure out like how we make these applications um and clients that that are building um on lens how they could actually function the same way as any internet application um and coming from a bit more web 3 background it's actually something that you really really need to shift your mind about because you're not building Financial applications You're Building pretty much like non-financial applications and you want the experience to be pretty much something that the consumers are used to and I'm super excited how actually today if you use one of these lens applications when you post content it reflects right away but the actual blockchain logic happens in the background and also second thing is that how much blockchain you actually need so it depends on the use case maybe you want to secure the actual profile with a blockchain maybe you want to keep the followers in a database still to have more privacy or maybe you want to have them on a blockchain so that you can actually secure that audience uh for for your users and then you can decide what where the content has to be nfts and can be Collectibles which could fit well for example for a music Audience and and distributing music but then if you have something more intimate maybe you want to still use off-chain Solutions so there's sort of design choices and on beyond the technicalities you need to build an amazing application on top of that that people are excited about so that's the the the biggest challenge on any social regardless of the tech it has to be easy it can't be complex it can't be any more complex than what the internet is right now in fact I would argue it has to be simpler right and and just to roll back through history you know when we got web 2 part of the reason we got that was technology got to the point where we had enough bandwidth that we could pull down data in the background we got to the point where JavaScript was had enough capabilities that we could do those asynchronous kinds of actions we're getting to more and more to the place where you can start to build really compelling intuitive applications and I think we should expect to see only accelerating growth in the next five years well you know one thing I think of and maybe standing you can speak to it in the context of lens but you know there is this wait time interacting with the blockchain so like which part of user social media interactions should be on chain and and which should be off chain I think it really depends on the use case and I don't put a lot of distinction between blockchain and rest of the like technological stack because it really depends on what you're building it's very I think it's a cool idea to have a a pro like own sense of ownership of a profile and and maybe also on the you know follower graph so especially for creators because they you know they wanna they benefit for having ownership over their audience um and and having that relationship in a way where it's not locked into one particular platform uh but it when it comes to the actual content I think it really depends on the use case and I don't think there is um any like a good answer for me because usually the builders that are building a particular use case they usually know the product better um what fits them well um but I think it's building web free social is is building like any other application you have to talk to your users what they like what they hate um and you know how they get closer to something that people actually enjoy using so we're over time but before we go I'd love to hear from everyone on the panel about where are we with decentralized social media by the end of the year like what are your predictions for uh where we end 2023 do you want to start it off yeah I'm just gonna say like I mean this has been a 10-year Journey people talked about a web free stack um first basically sort of 2014 so coming up to 10 years ago and I think the the push for a world computer upon which we could build these things got like hijacked by The People's desire to have a world casino for a little bit forgetting that actually those capabilities of handling value and identity and so forth that we were building into the stack actually were most useful for lens with the greatest respect to Ave you know lens is you know um is perhaps you know going to be the real the main show and and so I think when you ask the question what's the bottleneck right now um I think you know we got ahead of ourselves and something we're a little impatient I think it is there has not been a bottleneck that we suddenly need to fix there's been a lot of work going on we're now reaching the point I think to the point that's been made by the panelists that it's gonna be possible to build these apps and that's going to happen right now we see it happening on this stage happening downstairs um in the basement and and not uh before too soon because I think it's critical uh for everything from society to the emotional health of children I I'm I'm so I don't keep close enough track on these things so I I would I'd only embarrass myself by making predictions but I do think it's a thing where people are experimenting more and more and I I get I get into probably once a month or once every month by a new Social Network that is like oh we want to collaborate um and so I'm just excited to see how much energy there is in the space I think we'll we will see the rise of consumer-friendly applications in web 3 like the the web 2.5 uh kind of forays into people staking hypotheses onto like hey this is something better than uh Web 2.0 come check it out I would like to see some um entrepreneurs that are you know starting the pre-social applications and you know using already like existing uh protocol and and tapping into that user base and just trying to build small interesting use cases and if it doesn't work just living the app to the community and moving to the next one and and reiterating so one thing about web3 social is that when you have a social graph that you know anyone can tap into and and compute as well it means that you know it's you can actually build faster and and necessarily if if the application is very successful and and people love it you know then that that takes the takes things forward but I I like to see actually um tries and failures and tries and failures and and just make that process easier and when it comes like to the point where you know we're in the state of game development you know we see a lot of games most of them don't take off um and if you see the same way that we have a lot of new interesting applications on social and most of them will not take off but we will make it more easier for entrepreneurs to build faster and iterate that will be like the um my expectation well thank you to the panelists and to everyone who joined us today uh it's been a pleasure joining you at Eve Denver so thanks guys [Applause]