The direction of Web3 reform after Musk acquired Twitter

On October 28, Eastern Time, after several twists and turns, the world's richest man Elon Musk finally completed the acquisition of social media giant Twitter for $44 billion. After the acquisition, Musk fired Twitter's former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and other senior executives, and Musk's Twitter profile was changed to Chief Twit, and he posted that he would become the company's CEO. Against the backdrop of poor performance of social media such as Meta (formerly Facebook) and Snapchat this year, the acquisition of Twitter shows Musk's ambition to make major changes to the social media industry. Twitter is the most important communication medium in the Crypto circle, and Binance also occupies a place in this acquisition. In addition, Musk himself has always paid attention to cryptocurrencies such as BTC and DOGE. Twitter's future reform direction must have directional references to Crypto social media marketing, Web3 social networking and SocialFi. This article will explore the general direction of Twitter's reform based on some of Musk's previous remarks.

Building a public forum

First, the platform should encourage dialogue and accommodate different voices. Similar to centralized social media at this stage, Web3 social users can participate by creating an account (wallet address), and everyone can speak out. At this time, the platform should become what Habermas calls the "public sphere". As a public forum for public opinion, different users can make critical comments. The platform's encouragement of freedom of speech is an important condition for these behaviors, rather than arbitrarily interpreting community rules and banning accounts. Secondly, the platform should remain neutral and not become a tool of politics or capital. As Musk said in his tweet "Dear Twitter Advertisers", there is a great danger that social media will split into two echo chambers of the far right and the far left, which will generate more hatred and divide society. In the past, social media pushed users' views and interests to extend their retention time on the platform, but it narrowed the user's vision and also contributed to group polarization, just like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica used algorithms and databases to manipulate the US election in 2017; and earlier Monaco Planet blocked the use of Chinese language in order to prevent wool-pulling behavior, which caused confrontation between Chinese and foreign language communities. Web3 social projects should maintain platform neutrality. The premise of maintaining neutrality is to delegate governance rights to the community, and let the community supervise whether the platform or managers (project parties) use their status as managers/founders to do evil. The community also has the right to choose platform managers and let platform managers strengthen their management responsibilities.

Become a platform to filter out false news and spread the truth

The low threshold and anonymity of social media, coupled with the large number of information publishers and the mentality that the law does not punish the masses, have promoted the rampant growth of false information. Social platforms promote and expand the dissemination based on quantitative data such as clicks and readings, which has also promoted the further spread of false information. For a long time, whether it is Web2 or Web3, false information has been a problem for social media platforms. The main problem is the imperfect review mechanism. For example, AI's judgment of information is too rigid, and "smart" users can always bypass it through methods such as homophones and pinyin; manual review has limited energy, etc. In addition, in terms of source governance, decentralized projects are censorship-resistant. For example, messages created on Mirror do not need to be verified for authenticity before publication.

At present, the more ideal method may still be "post-event resolution", where the owner of the social media platform, the DAO community, formulates chapters and forms a special group in the community to review them. Users report them after they discover them. Based on the report, the group makes a judgment and deletes the speech, thereby reducing the reputation score of the address. In the case where false information that has not been reported is still the mainstream, the platform can use the "algorithm + manual" model to check the authenticity of the content. For the follow-up of rumors, the DAO organization can select a group of high-reputation individual users or institutional users in the field to publish content to refute the rumors and pin them to the top of the topic to prevent the further spread of rumors.

Expanding service scope beyond text and image social networking

Musk said in an interview that if Twitter is acquired, the WeChat model will be copied, that is, not only will it be satisfied with being a graphic social media, but it will also expand the scope of film, television, and game services. At present, many Web3 social projects simply copy the social media model, and then add incentive systems such as Read To Earn, Write To Earn, or Comment To Earn, resulting in on-chain projects being tokenized off-chain projects. Although the X to earn model can help these social projects increase DAU in the short term, it is not attractive to users in the long run, especially after the token falls, it is more likely to cause community FUD. The main purpose of users using social DApps is not for financial relationships, but to maintain social relationships, so the user stickiness of the top social media has a "28 phenomenon" where the stronger the stronger.

Functional innovation is a key factor in attracting new users to retain them for a long time. Although adding film and television services may be difficult to implement due to limited project operating costs, the sale of NFTs based on Web3 social projects and the commission on the circulation of artists' PFP may make up for part of the cost. In addition, NFTs as community gates are actually creating private traffic for specific users, so functions such as live broadcasts, short videos, or creating "private traffic" similar to WeChat Moments may also be presented in a more decentralized form. Web3 social projects should think about returning to social value, that is, whether this social dapp is innovative and fun enough to attract user retention, bring in new users with the old, and solve which pain points of Web2 social media, rather than thinking about how to copy others' successful models and add certain economic benefits to keep users.

Mainly real users

Like Twitter, Web3 social networks currently have many robots or fake accounts. This is related to the low cost of creating wallet addresses, as well as "scientist" scripts, wool parties, airdrop parties, etc., which generate a lot of meaningless content, which makes the content area and comment area watered down. For example, a large number of fake accounts pursuing the economic benefits of Write to Earn appeared on Monaco Planet, which generated a lot of invalid redundant information and disrupted the entire page. Cleaning up fake accounts can, on the one hand, raise the entry threshold. For example, users can connect to Gitcoin passport identity authentication and do multiple identity authentication before they can unlock multiple usage functions; the project party increases the airdrop or "X to earn" rewards for real users, or reduces the reward weight of non-identity authentication. On the other hand, the project party anti-witch attack review expectations, reduce the enthusiasm of wool parties, and reduce the pollution of fake accounts to the project.

Pay attention to the celebrity effect to attract traffic and bring goods

According to CoinMarketCap data, after Twitter was acquired, MEME Dogecoin, which is highly related to Musk, rose sharply for two consecutive trading days, once rising to $0.1494. Although Twitter previously supported users to reward creators with BTC and ETH, and there were rumors that DOGE would join Twitter's reward program in the future, the huge rise of DOGE should actually be related to Musk's celebrity effect. Take the high-quality NFT project BAYC as an example. With Curry, Bieber, Madonna and Neymar as the endorsements, it can not only bring traffic to the platform OpenSea, but also allow a number of high-quality NFT projects to rush to settle in OpenSea to gain market attention, which also allows the platform to obtain a virtuous circle. Web3 social projects take social media examples such as Twitter and INS as examples. They should pay attention to the role of celebrities in attracting traffic to the platform, find brand spokespersons that match the project positioning, and in addition to having celebrities stay on the platform, they can also try to incubate grassroots KOLs on the platform. For example, Indonesian youth Ghozali Everyday became popular after selling NFTs made from selfies on OpenSea, attracting other people to try their hand at creations on OpenSea. The success of grassroots KOLs has made ordinary people believe that they can achieve something in the Web3 world, and has also attracted other passers-by to participate in SocialFi/NFT projects.