Opportunities in Consumer Social

What’s the role of a social network in a user-centric web3 world? No longer platform-centric venues, social networks become portals into a metaverse, full of opportunity. Users own the value they create and carry the credibility they accrue. Social Investing 2.0 promotes meaningful connections that lead to platform agnostic, liquid collaboration be... See more

On the other side, new social spaces will continue to emerge and bring with them new rulesets, dynamics, and discovery algorithms to connect new people in new ways. We argue that this is the primary value of social networks and should be their sole focus: developing and providing different “flavors” of content and algorithms

The next wave of social systems will likely emphasize breadth and depth differently than the last–and may not look much like social networks at all. With the current networks, the horizontal nature of the platform is the product. Users come for the community. But it may be that with the next, the community is what keeps users long term engaged but ... See more

Social as a model works when people have about as much to offer as they want to receive along a given axis. But no trait is distributed uniformly; there are are outliers in the nice-to-look-at, nice-to-listen-to, nice-to-read, nice-to-get-stock-tips from axes, there's a population that can offer a respectable performance with these traits, and ther... See more

To your point, I think if you’re building a vertical social network, you need verticals that are inherently social—that people like to talk about. Otherwise, it’s too hard to force connections and conversation around it

We’re already seeing this unbundling of consumer platforms starting within communities that have a deep affinity and sense of identity, and are not well served by general purpose social networks – for example, gaming communities assembling in virtual worlds such as Minecraft and Roblox and using Discord to communicate, communities that coalesce aro... See more

platforms have an opportunity to build an underlying social graph of unique data and then to self-cannibalize by letting other platforms draw on it: the real financial opportunity for every platform, in other words, is to become a protocol that others build on top of.

Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting p... See more