Blockchain social "no social"

Social interaction has always been one of the core needs of all human beings and one of the most concerned directions in the Internet field. As traditional Internet social products are increasingly accused, a number of blockchain social products have emerged.

Indeed, blockchain social products can take advantage of the intangible modification and decentralization of blockchain technology to develop some advantages that Facebook and other products do not have. But nowadays, almost all blockchain social products are vacant. Mines are not "social."

However, even if the mining mechanism or the pass-through economic model of a blockchain social product is perfect, if it can not build a long-term relationship chain precipitation mechanism and differentiated social experience, it can only be a good Utopia.

In early June, EOS officially released the blockchain social product Voice, which is based on EOS smart contract deployment and will use the CIS model to motivate users to use it. The specific rules include: users get the amount of attention and praise gained by publishing content. The corresponding Token Rewards can also be rewarded with a Token reward by commenting on the content posted by others. The more rewards you get in the hot post, the more rewards you can get.

In the blockchain social product track, Voice is actually a latecomer, but its investment and ambition may be the largest among the blockchain social products. To truly understand the development ideas and prospects of Voice, we must first understand the past history and current difficulties of blockchain social products.

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01

The background and cause of the rise

Social interaction has always been one of the core needs of all human beings and one of the most concerned directions in the Internet field. Especially in recent years, Tencent and Facebook have gained huge commercial benefits with a large social user group, and their market value and influence have grown by leaps and bounds.

At the same time, mainstream social products such as Facebook are also caught in more and more accusations, including infringement and disclosure of user privacy, mass advertising to harm the user experience, use of user resources to profit but not share any benefits, etc., attracting a large number of users and scholars. Dissatisfaction and boycott, but the vast majority of users have been deeply bound to these social platforms and are difficult to leave.

Last year, Facebook founder Zuckerberg was questioned in the US Congress due to abuse of data and disclosure of privacy.

With the rise of blockchain technology and concepts, the blockchain social platform has gradually become a hot topic among practitioners in the blockchain industry. Blockchain social products are social products that use blockchain technology. From the model point of view, blockchain social products can use blockchain technology to encrypt all the user information and even confirm the rights, and improve the platform and user information. Reliability, at the same time, the user information ownership is truly returned to the user control, to avoid the abuse or violation of private information.

At the same time, the blockchain social platform can use the general economic system to establish a multi-party incentive system, inspire more users to create value and share the dividend of platform development, and make truly high-quality content and users stand out to get more attention and reduce business. Artificial interference behavior such as advertising, to achieve a win-win situation for the platform and users.

More importantly, from the development logic and experience of the Internet social platform becoming the main entrance of various Internet services, the blockchain social platform also has great hope to become the entrance of various blockchain services, and its strategic significance will follow the district. The improvement of the blockchain service is constantly improving.

Therefore, blockchain socialization has always been a development direction of the various forces. Blockchain social products are still common today. The social networking products of various blockchains that are already online are expected to be more than 50, according to the core functions. For instant messaging social products and sharing social products, according to user positioning can be divided into general-purpose social products and vertical social products (mainly blockchain direction), more well-known blockchain social products including fire letter, ONO, One piece, Status, Steemit, etc.

Specifically, the fire letter was launched by the fire coin at the end of the 18th, the main push function is to instantly exchange the community, specifically to release the cryptocurrency red envelope, real-time market, flashing and other functions, trying to help the blockchain project party to build and maintain the community, improve Community user stickiness; ONO is a pan-entertainment social product, the main push function is to share various types of video and graphic, but also has instant messaging, cryptocurrency red packets and other functions; Steemit is a blockchain content social product, the main push The function is about the content sharing of the blockchain, users can get platform rewards by publishing high-quality content and voting.

However, in actual operation, the development of almost all blockchain social products is not as smooth as described in the previous model hypothesis, and there are their own difficulties and drawbacks.

02

Struggling

At present, almost all blockchain social products have developed more difficult, and user activity has been high and low, almost all of them become "empty shells." The chain catcher believes that the current blockchain social products mainly have the following problems:

First of all, the social gameplay is weaker and it is difficult to maintain users for a long time. The most important task of social products is to encourage users to interact and precipitate the relationship chain through various social games. WeChat, Facebook, Weibo and other Internet social products have developed a very rich social gameplay, and users and content are deeply deposited.

If blockchain social products really want to rise, in addition to the innovation of the pass-through economic model, there must be a breakthrough in social gameplay, and form a local advantage in improving content distribution efficiency, friend efficiency and quality, but in fact many Blockchain social products are almost simple imitations in social gameplay without innovative gameplay, and are less attractive to users.

Taking Fire Letter as an example, although it used the influence of fire coins in the early stage of the launch, it promoted hundreds of project parties to come to the fire letter to build a community, and at the same time, using the platform pass incentive to attract a large number of users to use, but its community communication function There is no obvious advantage with the WeChat community. Blockchain-related functions such as cryptocurrency red packets and flash exchanges are not attractive to users and appear to be tasteless.

Today, the user activity of many Firemail groups relies on occasional cryptocurrency red packets. Group messages are also flooded with various flash messages, and a large number of communities are no longer officially maintained.

Another social product, ONO, has similar problems. The main video and graphic sharing and vibrato or microblog are homogenized. A large amount of content handling is obvious, and user activity is generally low.

Second, the model of the certificate of incentives has led to the proliferation of the phenomenon of “small wool” and the lack of an effective management mechanism for the platform. Since the blockchain social platform has established a certificate-based incentive system to encourage users to actively participate in interaction and create content, users' positive comments such as comments and likes will receive certain platform-certificate rewards, which makes a large number of The psychological users of Wool released a lack of nutrition, meaningless tweets and comments, and the quality of the commentary area of ​​many blockchain social products was mostly “disastrous”.

This will not only undermine the experience of ordinary users, but also reduce the desire and interest of platform KOL to interact with users, thus deteriorating the platform ecosystem. The goal of most users using social platforms is to gain outside recognition and more social capital, especially for elite users, which is more important than simple material rewards. Even though the blockchain social platform has this function to a certain extent, the current seemingly out-of-control pass-through incentive system will significantly reduce the utility of this function.

Third, some of the blockchain social products are targeted at all people inside and outside the blockchain industry, but in reality they are very limited to the blockchain industry and difficult to extend to external groups. This is mainly due to the problems caused by the relevant characteristics of the blockchain, and has little to do with the blockchain social products themselves.

Blockchain social products often involve multiple concepts such as blockchain and pass-through economy, which is unfamiliar to most ordinary users, especially when the blockchain and digital currency are “demonized”. Thus forming the threshold of cognition and use of most ordinary users. At present, almost all users of blockchain social products are mainly users of the currency circle, which will limit the development space of blockchain social products to some extent.

Fourth, the development of blockchain social products will also encounter restrictions on the regulatory environment. With the gradual exposure of the development of science and technology, the government's regulatory policies for social products are becoming more and more strict and conservative. The blockchain social products are conflicting because of their security and decentralization.

Of course, it should also be acknowledged that the fundamental reason why most blockchain social products are struggling is not the aforementioned difficulties. The real purpose is not to "make products" but to implement "issuing coins" and "cutting vegetables". the behavior of. The values ​​are wrong, and the right track will be difficult.

03

Voice's attempt

In the midst of the development of many blockchain social products, EOS announced in early June that it will launch a new social product, Voice. From the public information point of view, Voice's main product concept is no different from most blockchain social products, that is, to create a more open and transparent social environment, so that everyone has equal opportunities to be heard, and everyone can Earn rewards that correspond to contributions, thereby protecting the public from hidden algorithms or opaque interests.

"Currently, social platforms are designed to benefit from using their own users. The content we create, personal information, and interest are the most valuable information on social platforms. Now, the platform uses this information to make money, not to give back. The user itself,” said Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one. “The design of existing social products determines that these platforms need to be profitable in this way, and users receive push messages that are full of advertisements. Voices are here to change this. The status quo."

Clearly, Voice has seen Facebook as a major competitor, trying to become one of the most mainstream social products on the global line. Under such ambitions, Voice has indeed proposed a number of highly developed and differentiated development strategies:

First, Voice will implement strict KYC certification to strictly control the abuse of robot accounts. Specifically, Voice will try to cooperate with national regulatory authorities such as the United States to review the user's true identity information, and users can only use it after completing KYC certification.

BM has a strong obsession with real names. He has recently talked about the importance of real-name systems. "It may change the social way, maybe it will become more acceptable. Many people avoid twitter and Reddit because they are subject to There is no respect for the harassment of anonymous sprays.", "If your voice is overwhelmed by the noise of millions of robots, what is the use of freedom of speech? We need more real users for others. Viewpoints are published. If those who do not have masks scare you into wearing masks, it will undoubtedly fuel their arrogance and weaken the power of you (real users)."

Indeed, major social networks have long been plagued by all kinds of false information, rumors and abusive information, seriously hurting the user experience, which is related to the anonymity of social accounts, but can the real name system significantly change this situation? In fact, China's mainstream social media has completed the registration of real-name systems for many years, but now it does not seem to significantly reduce the number of various water forces and rumors, and the level of rumors is still serious.

One inference is that the most important factor affecting the quality of social media content is the user's life literacy, including information judgment ability, emotional grasp ability, and opinion expression ability. In addition, it is related to the crackdown on bad content by government departments and platform parties. Can effectively avoid the emergence of robot accounts, but the quality of social media content and interaction will not be significantly beneficial, BM's expectations for real-name system may be overestimated.

Second, Voice has a huge capital investment budget, estimated to exceed $150 million. These budgets will mainly purchase EOS accounts and RAM resources for ordinary users, and strive for various types of KOL to enter the Voice ecosystem.

Since the gold behind the Voice EOS has received more than 4 billion US dollars in ICO, this will allow Voice to gain more support in the development, promotion and other aspects, and there is almost no budget related to various blockchain social products. Can reach one tenth of the Voice.

At the end of May, EOS has purchased 3.3 million EOS RAM resources for Voice at a market price of $26.4 million, in order to provide users with free EOS accounts and CPU resources. At the market price, the value of a single EOS account is actually more than 20 yuan, which will be more attractive to many new users who do not have an EOS account. At the same time, as the core competitiveness of social media, KOL seems to launch a money offensive against them, attracting more KOLs through large-scale marketing promotion programs, and then promote the attention and interaction of ordinary users through these KOLs.

It will also be said that Voice can use the capital advantage to obtain the number of users and KOLs that are difficult to obtain in ordinary blockchain social products, which is a lot higher at the starting point. However, for any social product, only a continuous source of original production capacity and interaction mechanism can guarantee the long-term development of this product. Voice has not released too much information about social gameplay and certificate model so far, so this article is difficult to make too many comments.

Screenshot of Voice's official website

Third, Voice will be equipped with various decentralized services based on the EOS blockchain network. In the future, decentralized services based on DApp will become more and more extensive. This is the general consensus of the blockchain industry. Many public chains are aiming to become the carriers of large-scale mainstream DApps. EOS is still one of the relatively mainstream public chains in the blockchain industry. The number of DApps is also among the top three, and there are many clusters in the blockchain industry.

The deep binding of Voice and EOS can obviously bring a large number of loyal users and seed users to itself. In the long run, the DApp service on Voice may evolve into a similar WeChat applet, which greatly enriches the function of Voice, thereby increasing the frequency of users' use of Voice. Tool attributes and social attributes complement each other to promote user stickiness.

However, at present, the quality of DApps on EOS is generally not high, and even dubbed the "gambling public chain". In the long run, the add-on effect of these DApp services on Voice may be very weak. In other words, the fate of Voice is closely related to the fate of EOS.

In general, Voice hopes to use the blockchain technology and the CIS model to reshape the product logic and interests of social media, and to enhance the fairness of the platform, in response to the proliferation of fake news and infringement of reputation and privacy on social media such as Facebook. Transparency enables all users of the platform to speak equally and enjoy the benefits of platform development.

Previously, many blockchain social media were aiming here, but due to the difficult development strategy and financial strength, Voice proposed many unique development strategies based on EOS endorsement and support, which made blockchain social products return to the block. Within the mainstream vision of the chain industry, it has become the most watched blockchain social product.

The prospect of Voice is indeed worth looking forward to, but its development is bound to be a long and difficult process, and more exploration and correction are needed in social gameplay and reward and punishment mechanisms. Even if Voice's certificate economy model is perfect, if it can't build a long-term relationship chain precipitation mechanism and differentiated social experience, it can only be a good "Utopia."

But then again, how high is the general public's real demand for blockchain socialization? Even if a certain product has made certain achievements, how can we deal with the competition of traditional social giants such as Facebok to gradually apply blockchain technology? There are many more questions worth considering about the blockchain socialization.

Author / Gong Yuyu

Editor / Pan Yubo

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