Web3 brings the next evolutionary stage of social media, promising a decentralized approach to overcome challenges related to privacy, ownership, and equitable monetization.
Use Case
The next iteration of the internet, Web3, is proposing a new infrastructure based on blockchain technology to build a democratic global social media ecosystem that caters to all stakeholders.
Web3 adepts hope that the widespread adoption of blockchain technology will solve some of the major challenges that have plagued social media, including monopoly, privacy issues, poor monetization practices for creators, fake news, and the overall lack of control for users.
While there are already great Web3 social media alternatives, they still have some pain points to address in order to ensure mass adoption of decentralized platforms.
Web3 social media challenges
The integration of Web3 systems into social media has a promising future, but there are several challenges that need to be addressed first. Here are a few of them:
- Complex onboarding – Web3 is open to everyone, but the onboarding process is often confusing for beginners. Non-tech-savvy users are unfamiliar with hot or cold wallets, network fees, tokenomics, accounts, etc. Accessing decentralized applications (DApps) with zero technical background is quite difficult. Finding the ideal balance between functionality and user experience is a major task for Web3 platforms that want to stay in the game.
- Equitable monetization – monetization practices in traditional social media platforms have been notoriously focused on the centralized parties owning the platforms. What’s more, users’ lack of control over their social graphs often allows these platforms to singlehandedly strip away access to the already limited monetization options available.
What’s more,many platforms exploit the content created by individuals, developing business models that benefit the platform at the expense of users. This results in creators receiving inadequate compensation for their efforts. This unfair distribution of revenue affects the value of creative work, discouraging individuals from pursuing their passions and showcasing their talent. - True ownership – one of the biggest problems of traditional social media platforms is that users have minimal control over their data, including personal data as well as the content they upload and the community they create around their profiles. Blockchain is the best technology to transfer data control into the hands of communities. Still, adopting the right infrastructure is a major task that not all Web3-based projects have managed to achieve.
- Sustainable tokenomics – Web3 platforms often implement tokenomic models that favor their teams or encourage quick inflation of the token price without any long-term goals. These unsustainable tokenomics don’t create actual value within the ecosystem, seeking to leverage the immediate hype and then abandon the native token when the inflow of funds stops. Unfortunately, some new protocols are nothing else than Ponzi schemes that find their victims on traditional social media sites like Twitter and Reddit.
How this Web3 social media ecosystem does it the right way
One of the Web3 social media platforms that address these challenges while working to build a sustainable model is Pop Social. It is a decentralized ecosystem that aims to empower content creators and provide a venue where people and businesses can share experiences in Web3.
Users can easily create an account on Pop with their email, phone number, or crypto wallet. Thanks to an intuitive interface, Pop Social offers seamless onboarding. Users don’t have to understand all the intricacies of Web3 in order to use the app. Pop uses relayers to pay network fees behind the scenes, so users don’t need to deposit network tokens.
The social media ecosystem is fueled by the native Popoo Token (PPT), which can be used for in-app purchases, governance, and rewards.
PPT is the main currency within the ecosystem, and it’s easy to use. With PPT, Pop users can purchase and mint nonfungible tokens (NFTs), level up their user status, participate in the governance process, buy subscriptions, and more.
The platform implements a fair revenue share model, offering engagement rewards from day one and excluding any arbitrary or minimum thresholds. This encourages users to create and share content. What’s more, Pop Social relies on the AI-driven Social Protocol Engine, which is engineered to launch builders and help creators push their content to bigger audiences.
The Pop Social team stated:
“Creative content forms the foundation of this self-sustaining economy. Earned through content creation, consumption, sharing, and engagement, these events are transformed algorithmically into Pop Social’s native token PPT, ensuring that every action within the platform has real and tangible value.”
Pop Social also addresses the ownership problem by providing users with a unique decentralized ID on its base layer. By holding the decentralized ID, users have true ownership of their profiles, social graphs, and content. They can confidently manage and control their creations without external interference, ensuring more autonomy.
Additionally, thanks to the Pop Name Service (PNS) that holds users’ decentralized ID, creators can easily transfer the content they publish on traditional social media to Pop Social’s decentralized platform. In essence, the PNS is an identity-centric stablecoin that allows users to bridge fragmented centralized identities from traditional platforms to a single DApp that unites decentralized global communities and leaves control in the hands of users.
Last but not least, Pop Social focuses on economic sustainability by establishing a balanced tokenomics model for its PPT token in partnership with Prysm Group. The Pop system is designed to recycle the revenue into the project treasury and distribute value equitably. It has an issuance cap of 200 million PPT tokens and implements halving mechanisms to avoid the pitfalls of traditional Ponzi schemes and provide a solid foundation for the platform’s economic sustainability.
Pop Social’s approach to seamless onboarding, equitable monetization, true ownership, and sustainable tokenomics is setting new standards in the social media landscape, accelerating the migration of the next billion users to Web3.