On Oct. 28, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, completed the acquisition of social media giant Twitter for $44 billion after several twists and turns. After the acquisition, Musk fired Twitter's former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and other executives, and changed Musk's Twitter profile to Chief Twit and posted that he would become the company's CEO. The acquisition of Twitter demonstrates Musk's ambition to make big changes in the social media industry against the backdrop of a poor year for social media such as Meta (formerly Facebook) and Snapchat. Twitter is the most important communication medium in Crypto circles, and Binance has also taken a seat in this acquisition, and Musk himself has always paid much attention to cryptocurrencies such as BTC and DOGE, so the future direction of Twitter's reform must be a reference for Crypto social media marketing, Web3 social and SocialFi. In this article, we will figure out the general direction of Twitter's reform based on some of Musk's previous comments.

1、 Construction of public discussion square

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 voice their opinions, which should make the platform what Habermas called "public sphere". As a public forum for public opinion, different users can offer critical opinions. The platform's encouragement of freedom of speech is an important condition for these behaviors, rather than being able to arbitrarily interpret community rules and ban accounts.

Second, the platform should remain neutral and not become a tool for politics or capital. As Musk said in his tweet "Dear Twitter Advertisers," there is a great danger that social media will split into far-right and far-left echo chambers, and they will generate more hatred and divide society. In the past, social media tweeted based on users' views and interests to extend their retention time on the platform, but caused narrowing of users' horizons while also contributing to group polarization, as in 2017 when Facebook and Cambridge Analytica used algorithms and databases to rig the U.S. election; and earlier when Monaco Planet blocked the use of Chinese language in order to eliminate coupon clippers, causing confrontation between the Mandarin and foreign language communities.

Web3 social projects should maintain platform neutrality. The premise of neutrality is to delegate governance to the community, and let the community monitor whether the platform or the manager (project owner) is acting in an evil way by virtue of being the manager/founder. The community also has the right to choose the platform manager, and also to have the platform manager reinforce their own management responsibilities.

2、 Become a platform for filtering false news and spreading the truth

The low threshold and anonymity of social media, coupled with the large base of information publishers and the psychology that the law is not to be blamed for the masses, have contributed to the brutal growth of false information. Social media platforms promote and expand the spread of false information based on quantitative data such as clicks and readings, which also contributes to the further spread of false information. All along, regardless of Web2 or Web3, false news is the problem of social media platforms, among which the problem is mainly the imperfect audit mechanism, such as AI's determination of information is too rigid, "smart" users can always bypass through such ways as harmonics, pinyin, etc.; manual audit energy is limited. In addition, in the source of governance, decentralized projects are resistant to censorship, such as the publication of messages created on Mirror without first verifying their authenticity.

At present, the ideal method may still be the "after-the-fact solution", in which the DAO community, the owner of the social media platform, sets the chapter and forms a special group in the community to review it, and users find it and report it, and according to the report, the group then makes a decision and removes it. According to the report, the panel will then make a decision to delete the comments, thus reducing the reputation score of the address. In the case that false information that is not 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, DAO can select a group of highly reputable individual or institutional users in the field to publish content to dispel rumors and top the topic to prevent further expansion of rumors.

3、 Expand the scope of services, not only graphic social

Musk said in an interview that if he buys Twitter, he will Copy the Wechat model, which is not only satisfied with graphic social media, but also increase the scope of film and game services. At present, many Web3 social projects simply copy the social media model, and then add the incentive system such as Read To Earn, Write To Earn or Comment To Earn, resulting in on-chain projects are only tokenized off-chain projects. While 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 term, especially when the Token drops, which can lead to community FUD. The main purpose of users using social DApp is not for financial relations, but to maintain social relations.

Functional innovation is a key factor to attract long-term retention of new users. Although adding film and television services may be difficult due to the limited operating costs of the project, the NFT distribution based on Web3 social projects and the share of the artists' PFP circulation may cover part of the cost. In addition, as community gating, NFT is also creating private domain traffic for specific users, so functions such as live streaming, short videos or creating "private domain 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 the social dapp is innovative and interesting enough to attract users to retain, bring the old to the new, and solve the pain points of Web2 social media, rather than how to copy the successful model of others and then add certain token economic benefits to make users stay.

4、Real users are the main users

Like Twitter, Web3 social projects currently have a lot of bots or fake accounts, due to the current low cost of creating wallet addresses, and "scientist" scripts, deal-hunters, airdrop parties, etc., generating a lot of meaningless content, flooding the content section, comments section, etc. Monaco Planet, for example, has seen a number of fake accounts pursuing Write to earn economic benefits, generating a large amount of invalid redundant information and disrupting the entire page.

On the one hand, the clearance of fake accounts can raise the threshold of access. For example, users can unlock multiple functions only when they connect to Gitcoin passport authentication for multiple authentication. Projects increase airdrop or "X to earn" rewards for real users, or reduce the weight of non-identity rewards. On the other hand, the project owner should prevent witch attacks and reduce the enthusiasm of the deal-hunter, while reducing the pollution of the project by fake accounts.

5、  Pay attention to the celebrity effect to lead the flow of goods

According to CoinMarketCap, MEME Dogecoin, which is highly correlated with Musk, pulled up sharply for two consecutive trading days after Twitter's acquisition was completed, once rising to $0.1494. Although Twitter previously supported users to reward creators with BTC and ETH, and there were rumors of DOGE joining Twitter's reward program in the future, the huge rise of DOGE should actually be related to Musk's own celebrity effect.

Take the blue-chip NFT project BAYC as an example, with Curry, Bieber, Madonna and Neymar a number of celebrities with endorsements, not only can bring traffic attention to the platform OpenSea, but also let a number of high-quality NFT projects to rush into OpenSea to gain market attention, which also let the platform get a virtuous cycle.

Web3 social projects should follow the example of social media such as Twitter and INS, pay attention to the drainage effect of stars on the platform, and find brand spokespersons matching the positioning of the project. Besides allowing celebrities to stay in the project, we can also try to incubate grassroots Kols on the platform. For example, Ghozali Everyday, a young Indonesian, made an NFT made of selfies on OpenSea, which became popular and attracted other people to try to create on OpenSea. The success of grassroots Kols has convinced ordinary people that something can be done in the Web3 world , and attracted other passersby to participate in SocialFi/NFT projects.

Follow us

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain

Telegram: https://t.me/wublockchainenglish