People's exploration of Web3.0 social network from DeSo

The Quest for a New Social Network

Original author: Blue Fox Notes

People are unhappy with Web 2.0 social networks

Complaints about social networks in the Web 2.0 era focus on the imbalance created by their overwhelming dominance. In the Internet era, the winner takes all, leading to the absolute dominance of the winning social network, resulting in a completely unbalanced relationship between social network platforms and third-party developers and users.

For example, when a social networking platform sees a third-party developer's project doing well, it tends to develop it itself, foster internal projects, and in the most extreme cases, kick third-party developers out. Due to this lopsided relationship, third-party developers or platform-based content creators receive disproportionate revenue relative to the platform.

In addition, the current social networks dominate their push algorithms, which will control people's information flow and optimize according to the maximization of their advertising benefits, which may not fully meet the needs or interests of users. At the same time, the platform owns user-generated data, and users have no control over their own data.

In a word, social networks in the Web 2.0 era are relatively closed and unbalanced, and people are pursuing open forms of social networks. This is what drives the next generation of social networks.

The search for Web 3.0 social networks has never stopped

With the advent of blockchain, from the exploration of BTC to the gradual development of DeFi and NFT, people see new possibilities based on blockchain, it brings some paradigm changes, it can reshape some traditional industries.

As for the reshaping of social networks, developers have been exploring the possibilities. Block.one(EOS) has previously launched the Voice project, which attempted to explore the path of blockchain-based social networks, but so far has not made significant progress. This is just one case, and there are many more to explore.

Now, DeSo is entering the race track and building a DeSo blockchain specifically for this purpose. Will it bring new changes?

DeSo's social network blockchain launched

DeSo is a blockchain specifically designed to build social networks, and builds on it.

DeSo was launched a few days ago, and it didn't attract much attention in the crypto community. One reason is that, at this stage, it is more of a top-down model. According to its website, its backers are almost all top crypto firms, including Coinbase, A16Z, Polychain, ParaFi, Pantera, Sequoia, Social Capital, and more. In the early days, however, bottom-up models in the crypto space tended to gain the community's attention more easily.

The founder of DeSo blockchain is Nader, the founder of the original Basis project (the original Basis project was abandoned due to regulatory reasons, and later during the development of DeFi, someone in the community spontaneously launched a project similar to Basis).

What is DeSo going to do

As mentioned above, the closed nature of social network data in the current Web 2.0 era leads to a strong moat and a monopoly situation, which is not conducive to the innovation of developers and the further development of ecology. Developers are starting to wonder if there is an opportunity to build an open social network ecosystem, where the data itself is open and anyone can build applications based on their data to meet user needs. Moreover, such development does not require permission or fear of being blocked.

This is not just DeSo, but all social networks in the Web 3.0 era.

In order to build a social network with open data, DeSo started with the construction of blockchain. Of course, this is also because the current scalability of blockchain cannot support the high interaction demands of social networks.

According to DeSo, its long-term goal is to build social networks with open data. It has a separate blockchain platform with architecture similar to bitcoin but with greater throughput, running code on nodes, and all data such as users' information (profile, posts, follow relationships, tips, NFT, etc.) stored on the public blockchain. Any user can publish content by running the node. For example, ESPN could run nodes on Deso to provide sports content to users. In addition to providing content to users, third-party developers can present content to users differently from current social networks based on custom user interfaces and push algorithms.

There is no monopoly. Because data is open, other developers can build new social networks based on existing data at any time, which will activate social network competition and break the monopoly of data moat.

For now, DeSo's social network, based on its own blockchain, can post, comment, like, follow others, and so on, just like traditional social networks. The main difference is that it runs on a blockchain and is permission-free and open. In addition, it introduced a token economy, the most important of which was the introduction of its default "creator token" in addition to its own native token, DESO.

DeSo's "creator" token

Under the DeSo default system, each user has his or her creator token, which is automatically generated when creating a profile, and the price goes up according to the user's purchase and down as the user sells. Creator tokens are purchased through DeSo's native token, DeSo, and the total supply of DeSo tokens is approximately 10.8 million.

Fans can buy tokens if they like a creator. This is equivalent to tokenization of personal influence, and DeSo is equivalent to building a trading market for personal social tokens. This is bound to lead to speculation and bubbles. Before Musk officially entered DeSo, 3,154,339 of his personal tokens have been circulated (as of the time of blue Fox notes writing), with a total locked dollar value of 3,766,000 yuan (the money locked after users buy Musk's tokens), and his personal market value reaches 11,299,000 dollars.

Musk's Creator's token status, Deso's Bitclout

Musk's users hold their creator's token, Deso's Bitclout

One of those users holds a Musk Creator token worth $6.3 million, but that's just the market cap. Musk's Creator token provides liquidity with a locked-in asset value of $3.766 million.

Current ranking of creator token prices for some big V users, Deso's Bitclout site

The price formula for creator tokens on DeSo is as follows:

The price formula for Creator's token on DeSo, DeSo's Bitclout

According to this formula, the more creator tokens are purchased, the higher their price, and the funds used to buy the tokens are locked in that account. If the user wants to sell tokens, the account buys the user's creator tokens at a curvilinear price from the previously locked purchase funds. By selling the token itself, the user destroys the token and lowers the price of the token to release the locked funds. This amounts to an automated market-making protocol, similar to DEX's automated market-making model.

Will the creators themselves benefit from this creator token market transaction? It's up to the creator himself to set up his token reward. In Deso's design, there is a creator reward setting feature. If set to 100%, all tokens purchased by the user are owned by the creator, but this discourages user purchases because the user doesn't get the benefit of increasing the value of the token. If set to 0%, the creator will not receive any reward when their fans purchase tokens. If set to 10%, the creator will be rewarded with 10% of the token each time a user buys that token. Musk's reward has been set at 0%, meaning users will no longer receive revenue from their purchases. However, musk's DeSo account has already been awarded 43.0145 creator tokens.

What can creator tokens be used for? It's up to the creator to decide. For example, only users with a certain number of creator tokens can:

- 查看优质内容（或付费查看）

- 评论其帖子

- 直接发站内信交流

- 帮粉丝转发帖子（或付费转发）

- 优先显示评论

...

However, it means more to celebrities or Big Vs than it does to the average user.

A combination of creator tokens and open data

Due to the openness of DeSo's blockchain data, it has the public nature of infrastructure, allowing content creators or developers to be truly dominant and their relationship with their fans (or users) will not be severed. Furthermore, the vast majority of revenue from fans/users or advertisers goes to developers or creators. This model directly reshapes the distribution of revenue between the platform and the creator/developer. Platforms are no longer companies, but "open source protocols."

Due to the change in distribution model, this has the potential to free up the creative passion of content creators, who will receive the majority of the income from the labor distribution. In addition, with the mechanism of token economy, creators can also use economic mechanism to prevent spam, build unique content system, and build a deep relationship with fans.

In addition to the most important differences above, there are some small new features:

Fans reward them with diamonds

In addition to commenting, retweeting and liking posts, fans can also reward posts with "diamonds." There are six different value classes of diamonds, whose DOLLAR prices vary according to DESO token prices. At the time of writing, they are $0.01, $0.06, $0.6, $6, $60 and $597.

Users can reward "diamonds," Deso's Bitclout

NFT

In the information flow of DeSo social network, in addition to the global information flow, the information flow published by individual followers, there is also the label of NFT Showcase. A variety of NFT works are on display here, and users can comment, retweet, like, tip, and bid on them.

Deso has a dedicated NFT Showcase, and Deso's Bitclout website

Deso users can browse NFT in the feed and bid for Deso's Bitclout site

Native social networks in the crypto age will be a new species

From the current architecture of DeSo, which combines Web 2.0 social networking with blockchain infrastructure and token incentives, it doesn't look like it's completely divorced from Internet thinking, more like a combination of forms rather than a fusion.

Blue Fox notes anticipates the birth of native social networks in the crypto era, a social network completely different from the current Web 2.0 model, which blue Fox notes has not yet seen, perhaps within a few years.

What is the social network native to the crypto age? Blue Fox notes don't know either. However, maybe a more lightweight, more concise social network, it is a bottom-up social network, it is a social network from a new dimension, it has its own primitives, it has its own "Lego blocks", and finally like DeFi, it is a combinable state.

As for what it might be, it's up to the crypto geniuses to figure it out. From our observation, the original social network should be born and make preliminary progress in the next cycle, which is a brand new species different from all current forms of social network. Whether it will be born, only time will tell!

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