I’ve been spending time thinking about how web3 will influence the future of social networks and consumer applications. There are three core areas that are most exciting to me: public social networks, private social networks (eg the real-life communities that exist in messaging applications), and marketplaces. An emergent onchain internet architecture, characterized by protocols, open graphs, and composability, is giving builders another crack at reinventing these categories. I plan to write a series of posts highlighting how these different areas may evolve over time, beginning with public social networks.
Last yearSteve Martocci and I were talking about the future of social networks. We are both obsessed withself-directed healthcare, and we observed that so much of the bottoms-up dialogue that happens in the space occurs in subreddits, and it has reached a tipping point where it deserves its own place on the internet to call home.
This is a theme that will come to define the future of social networks over the next decade. Over the past 10 years, social networks have become less social and more broadcast. I’ve written about it inWTF is Social Media? The playgrounds we used to call our homes have turned into large horizontal media distribution channels and have lost their sense of intimacy. As a result, relationships - both based on real-life connections and around interests - have been pushed to the edge. They have found their home in group chats within messaging applications and in subreddits.
The time has come for these networks to inhabit new spaces that can deliver richer functionality, better UX, and a variety of different business models that benefit both application developers and network participants. I have been particularly interested in how subreddits can be siphoned off the mothership and turn into thriving networks of their own. There is no reason why a message board should be the universal form factor for social networks. We have seen instances of this happening from communities on Discord to sites likePatients Like Me.
Last week I attendedFarcon, a sufficiently decentralized conference organized by people, mainlyTed (not lasso), who are active participants in the Farcaster community. It was small (roughly 500 attendees), but filled to the brim with energy that was reminiscent of SXSW from 2009-2011. Everyone there was eager to experiment with new products, learn from the people using their products, and support the ecosystem. It felt like a very special moment in time and in ten years I think we will look back on that event as a tipping point for web3 social.
Dan andVarun (Farcaster founders) kicked off the conference and they discussed their strategy for growing the Farcaster protocol to 1m+ DAU. One of the pillars of the strategy that they call "cozy corners" rhymes with the idea of giving flourishing subreddits a place to call their own on the internet. Dan alluded to the notion that subreddits with millions of active users can and should actually be their own freestanding networks and businesses on the internet.
This deeply resonated with me. "Creating cozy corners" is an endearing turn of phrase, but there are powerful pockets of the internet that pack a punch and will emerge as independent social networks of their own. Channels on farcaster may very well be the thing that enables the rapid acceleration of this trend, which we can think of as the unbundling of Reddit.
Channels are the perfect conduit for this because as they become decentralized and protocolized, channel creators can spin them off into their own client. They can build their own UX around them. They can monetize them through a variety of different mechanisms. Maybe participants will need to pay a one-time fee to be able to post to the network. This could improve the quality of content and dialogue. Perhaps those that can't afford to pay will have different paths to post, like volunteering to be a moderator. Each network can have its own programmatic reputation system. Maybe it's interoperable with other channels/networks. Perhaps everyone needs to subscribe to the channel usingSTP. Each network may have its own native economy and token used for tipping and payments. Maybe network creators can economically participate in minting fees from the channel as a native monetization mechanism. Maybe every channel participant is also an owner and can accumulate more ownership over time based on a transparent set of rules and dividends are distributed regularly. Maybe users can collectively determine that their posts and various contributions to the network can be sold as data to train an open source AI model and they're each individually and proportionally compensated.
The canvas is wide open. Composability, openness, tokens, reputation, and native web3 monetization models - both existing ones and ones to be invented - along with a whole host of other onchain primitives will come to define emergent social networks. Web3 is opening the aperture to an entirely new UX and business model paradigm and we are going to enter a new age of many smaller but thriving social networks, each special and unique in different ways yet built atop shared infrastructure and information.
I believe this decade will be very special and I feel lucky to be here for it.
I remember buying my first BTC on Coinbase in 2013. It was during one of the first crypto bubbles, and the world was freaking out that BTC had surpassed $300. I happily participated in that hype cycle without really understanding what crypto was.
When I was building Fundera I was pretty heads down for the better part of a decade. I continued to buy BTC over time - I can probably time my purchases to increased mainstream media coverage. I was easily influenced and I never really took the time to do a deep dive and teach myself about blockchains or read the BTC and ETH whitepapers. It wasn’t until I read Digital Gold in 2018 that things really started to click.
After Fundera was acquired in 2020 I finally did the work. I voraciously consumed every piece of literature I could get my hands on. I also tried to play with every product I could. As I was doing this, I would attempt to identify areas of opportunity and investment. What protocols would power the future internet? What was the underpinning of a new financial system? Which NFTs would maintain their value through a market downturn? Of course, this was in the midst of the last bull market. Needless to say, I got rekt.
This was an important learning experience for me. I was fine with losing money as an angel investor, especially because a lot of the investments I made had sound reasoning behind them, they were just poorly timed. They also provided a good opportunity to tax-loss harvest. What I wasn’t fine with was getting caught up in the hype and doing things because of FOMO. It was disappointing to succumb to it, and it taught me that doing things because they are in vogue is not the right reason to do them. I should do them when I have a deep understanding and conviction. I imagine this is a lesson I’ll continuously learn, but I can at least now recognize what it feels like in the moment.
One of my favorite places to hang out in Warpcast is the chess channel. There are a lot of people talking about current events in chess and posting tactics for others to solve. People will respond to the tactics by writing out their answers move by move in a new cast. Usually, the first person who responds correctly will be awarded $degen for their efforts. It's a lot of fun.
I thought it would be even more fun if you could interact with tactics in a Farcaster feed. Frames are the perfect way to experiment with making this happen. I think of Frames as interactive applications that can be embedded into a Farcaster feed and usable in any FC client. The first Frames have been relatively simple, but it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to see how these can evolve into full-blown games and social interactive experiences over time. They are very reminiscent of Zynga's Farmville infiltrating Facebook years ago.
I wanted to create a Frame where you could solve tactics within it instead of having to post a picture in a cast, reply with answers, and wait to hear if you were correct. These types of web applications exist (
I’ve been spending time thinking about how web3 will influence the future of social networks and consumer applications. There are three core areas that are most exciting to me: public social networks, private social networks (eg the real-life communities that exist in messaging applications), and marketplaces. An emergent onchain internet architecture, characterized by protocols, open graphs, and composability, is giving builders another crack at reinventing these categories. I plan to write a series of posts highlighting how these different areas may evolve over time, beginning with public social networks.
Last yearSteve Martocci and I were talking about the future of social networks. We are both obsessed withself-directed healthcare, and we observed that so much of the bottoms-up dialogue that happens in the space occurs in subreddits, and it has reached a tipping point where it deserves its own place on the internet to call home.
This is a theme that will come to define the future of social networks over the next decade. Over the past 10 years, social networks have become less social and more broadcast. I’ve written about it inWTF is Social Media? The playgrounds we used to call our homes have turned into large horizontal media distribution channels and have lost their sense of intimacy. As a result, relationships - both based on real-life connections and around interests - have been pushed to the edge. They have found their home in group chats within messaging applications and in subreddits.
The time has come for these networks to inhabit new spaces that can deliver richer functionality, better UX, and a variety of different business models that benefit both application developers and network participants. I have been particularly interested in how subreddits can be siphoned off the mothership and turn into thriving networks of their own. There is no reason why a message board should be the universal form factor for social networks. We have seen instances of this happening from communities on Discord to sites likePatients Like Me.
Last week I attendedFarcon, a sufficiently decentralized conference organized by people, mainlyTed (not lasso), who are active participants in the Farcaster community. It was small (roughly 500 attendees), but filled to the brim with energy that was reminiscent of SXSW from 2009-2011. Everyone there was eager to experiment with new products, learn from the people using their products, and support the ecosystem. It felt like a very special moment in time and in ten years I think we will look back on that event as a tipping point for web3 social.
Dan andVarun (Farcaster founders) kicked off the conference and they discussed their strategy for growing the Farcaster protocol to 1m+ DAU. One of the pillars of the strategy that they call "cozy corners" rhymes with the idea of giving flourishing subreddits a place to call their own on the internet. Dan alluded to the notion that subreddits with millions of active users can and should actually be their own freestanding networks and businesses on the internet.
This deeply resonated with me. "Creating cozy corners" is an endearing turn of phrase, but there are powerful pockets of the internet that pack a punch and will emerge as independent social networks of their own. Channels on farcaster may very well be the thing that enables the rapid acceleration of this trend, which we can think of as the unbundling of Reddit.
Channels are the perfect conduit for this because as they become decentralized and protocolized, channel creators can spin them off into their own client. They can build their own UX around them. They can monetize them through a variety of different mechanisms. Maybe participants will need to pay a one-time fee to be able to post to the network. This could improve the quality of content and dialogue. Perhaps those that can't afford to pay will have different paths to post, like volunteering to be a moderator. Each network can have its own programmatic reputation system. Maybe it's interoperable with other channels/networks. Perhaps everyone needs to subscribe to the channel usingSTP. Each network may have its own native economy and token used for tipping and payments. Maybe network creators can economically participate in minting fees from the channel as a native monetization mechanism. Maybe every channel participant is also an owner and can accumulate more ownership over time based on a transparent set of rules and dividends are distributed regularly. Maybe users can collectively determine that their posts and various contributions to the network can be sold as data to train an open source AI model and they're each individually and proportionally compensated.
The canvas is wide open. Composability, openness, tokens, reputation, and native web3 monetization models - both existing ones and ones to be invented - along with a whole host of other onchain primitives will come to define emergent social networks. Web3 is opening the aperture to an entirely new UX and business model paradigm and we are going to enter a new age of many smaller but thriving social networks, each special and unique in different ways yet built atop shared infrastructure and information.
I believe this decade will be very special and I feel lucky to be here for it.
I remember buying my first BTC on Coinbase in 2013. It was during one of the first crypto bubbles, and the world was freaking out that BTC had surpassed $300. I happily participated in that hype cycle without really understanding what crypto was.
When I was building Fundera I was pretty heads down for the better part of a decade. I continued to buy BTC over time - I can probably time my purchases to increased mainstream media coverage. I was easily influenced and I never really took the time to do a deep dive and teach myself about blockchains or read the BTC and ETH whitepapers. It wasn’t until I read Digital Gold in 2018 that things really started to click.
After Fundera was acquired in 2020 I finally did the work. I voraciously consumed every piece of literature I could get my hands on. I also tried to play with every product I could. As I was doing this, I would attempt to identify areas of opportunity and investment. What protocols would power the future internet? What was the underpinning of a new financial system? Which NFTs would maintain their value through a market downturn? Of course, this was in the midst of the last bull market. Needless to say, I got rekt.
This was an important learning experience for me. I was fine with losing money as an angel investor, especially because a lot of the investments I made had sound reasoning behind them, they were just poorly timed. They also provided a good opportunity to tax-loss harvest. What I wasn’t fine with was getting caught up in the hype and doing things because of FOMO. It was disappointing to succumb to it, and it taught me that doing things because they are in vogue is not the right reason to do them. I should do them when I have a deep understanding and conviction. I imagine this is a lesson I’ll continuously learn, but I can at least now recognize what it feels like in the moment.
One of my favorite places to hang out in Warpcast is the chess channel. There are a lot of people talking about current events in chess and posting tactics for others to solve. People will respond to the tactics by writing out their answers move by move in a new cast. Usually, the first person who responds correctly will be awarded $degen for their efforts. It's a lot of fun.
I thought it would be even more fun if you could interact with tactics in a Farcaster feed. Frames are the perfect way to experiment with making this happen. I think of Frames as interactive applications that can be embedded into a Farcaster feed and usable in any FC client. The first Frames have been relatively simple, but it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to see how these can evolve into full-blown games and social interactive experiences over time. They are very reminiscent of Zynga's Farmville infiltrating Facebook years ago.
I wanted to create a Frame where you could solve tactics within it instead of having to post a picture in a cast, reply with answers, and wait to hear if you were correct. These types of web applications exist (
Ride It to the Sky
Ride It to the Sky
Fast forward to today and something is very different for me in the world of crypto. I am fully red-pilled, as Nick likes to point out. When I first started to really dig in in 2020, a lot of the products I used felt like they were enabling me to participate in the global casino. They were speculative in nature. It was fun, and there were definitely foundational developments that emerged, but a lot of the UX for me was oriented around trading and swapping and buying and collecting and hodling. Today so much of the UX is wrapping my hands around products I can regularly use and immediately get utility and joy from. They’re social in nature and familiar, yet novel and experimental.
There has been much talk and writing about the theoretical power of onchain applications in the context of rebuilding consumer networks and services, but now we are seeing those theories become reality. Every day my eyes light up when I see the power of composability and headless application architecture and open graphs manifest in the form of a new product and experience. Entrepreneurs are connecting the dots in real-time, and they are enabling consumers to experience a better way of doing things on the internet.
and a caster responded to it with a quick and dirty version of a Frame. We worked together over a couple of days to refine the experience, and ultimately got to a good place.
While it's not perfect, my goal was to make something that was fun for people who like chess on FC to use, and to hopefully inspire people to push the envelope of what Frames can do. Can we build real interactive games inside them? Can they be social or multi-player experiences? When can I play chess against another FC user in a separate client but an audience could follow along in real time in a Frame? Are these ideas even possible?
This was a fun experience for me because it helped push my thinking around two areas. The first is the idea of Frames as interactive applications, or "programmable anythings" as I call them in my head. We are really at the very beginning of what is possible here. I haven't seen many instantiations of Frames that have actual inputs other than pressing a button. The Frame we created through this bounty has a text prompt, but there will inevitably be other modes of interaction within them over time. The skeuomorphic expression of this is Farmville in the FC feed, but something weird and native to the onchain experience will emerge and be very special, and it will happen after a lot more collective experimentation.
The second area is around the future of headless applications. When I created a bounty on bountycaster, I did not use a bountycaster client. Everything was done entirely within the Warpcast feed. I simply crafted an initial post, someone responded, and a job spec was fulfilled.
This experience reminded me of a post I wrote about agent native applications. The premise is that in the near future, agents will act on our behalf and existing marketplaces or services that require your eyeballs to visit their website or specific client will not be compatible with them for a whole host of reasons, but headless ones will and they'll emerge to fill this need. These headless applications are already emerging onchain. Sometimes they are referred to as headless marketplaces. Using them is pretty magical and the implications are profound when we think about the future architecture of internet services and marketplaces.
Bountycaster is an example of a headless application that has emerged in the FC ecosystem. You can think of it like Fiverr or Upwork, but instead of having to do everything through a specific website, I can initiate or fulfill a job request from anywhere within Farcaster. This means that as a job-doer my reputation is not tied to Fiverr or Upwork. It's portable across any onchain application and I can bring it with me. And when I want some work to be done, in this example the creation of my chess tactics Frame, I can post it anywhere onchain and it can be distributed and responded-to through any client built on FC. Being headless enables a job post to proliferate and be accessed everywhere onchain, and any job-doer now has a portable and self-owned profile, work history, and reputation. This is an architecture that is also compatible with an AI agent-centric future. I invested in an iteration of this Bounty concept years ago with a project called Ahoy, but bountycaster pushes this several steps further into the future.
There are some obvious holes I encountered in the bountycaster experience, but those will all be patched (eg escrowing payment at the outset of a job and having a network of arbiters that can subjectively determine when a bounty has been fulfilled to spec). The whole process felt familiar but entirely novel. It was a taste of things to come in the future and yet another reason to be excited about the pace of rapid experimentation onchain that's creating fun and useful consumer experiences in entirely new ways.
Fast forward to today and something is very different for me in the world of crypto. I am fully red-pilled, as Nick likes to point out. When I first started to really dig in in 2020, a lot of the products I used felt like they were enabling me to participate in the global casino. They were speculative in nature. It was fun, and there were definitely foundational developments that emerged, but a lot of the UX for me was oriented around trading and swapping and buying and collecting and hodling. Today so much of the UX is wrapping my hands around products I can regularly use and immediately get utility and joy from. They’re social in nature and familiar, yet novel and experimental.
There has been much talk and writing about the theoretical power of onchain applications in the context of rebuilding consumer networks and services, but now we are seeing those theories become reality. Every day my eyes light up when I see the power of composability and headless application architecture and open graphs manifest in the form of a new product and experience. Entrepreneurs are connecting the dots in real-time, and they are enabling consumers to experience a better way of doing things on the internet.
and a caster responded to it with a quick and dirty version of a Frame. We worked together over a couple of days to refine the experience, and ultimately got to a good place.
While it's not perfect, my goal was to make something that was fun for people who like chess on FC to use, and to hopefully inspire people to push the envelope of what Frames can do. Can we build real interactive games inside them? Can they be social or multi-player experiences? When can I play chess against another FC user in a separate client but an audience could follow along in real time in a Frame? Are these ideas even possible?
This was a fun experience for me because it helped push my thinking around two areas. The first is the idea of Frames as interactive applications, or "programmable anythings" as I call them in my head. We are really at the very beginning of what is possible here. I haven't seen many instantiations of Frames that have actual inputs other than pressing a button. The Frame we created through this bounty has a text prompt, but there will inevitably be other modes of interaction within them over time. The skeuomorphic expression of this is Farmville in the FC feed, but something weird and native to the onchain experience will emerge and be very special, and it will happen after a lot more collective experimentation.
The second area is around the future of headless applications. When I created a bounty on bountycaster, I did not use a bountycaster client. Everything was done entirely within the Warpcast feed. I simply crafted an initial post, someone responded, and a job spec was fulfilled.
This experience reminded me of a post I wrote about agent native applications. The premise is that in the near future, agents will act on our behalf and existing marketplaces or services that require your eyeballs to visit their website or specific client will not be compatible with them for a whole host of reasons, but headless ones will and they'll emerge to fill this need. These headless applications are already emerging onchain. Sometimes they are referred to as headless marketplaces. Using them is pretty magical and the implications are profound when we think about the future architecture of internet services and marketplaces.
Bountycaster is an example of a headless application that has emerged in the FC ecosystem. You can think of it like Fiverr or Upwork, but instead of having to do everything through a specific website, I can initiate or fulfill a job request from anywhere within Farcaster. This means that as a job-doer my reputation is not tied to Fiverr or Upwork. It's portable across any onchain application and I can bring it with me. And when I want some work to be done, in this example the creation of my chess tactics Frame, I can post it anywhere onchain and it can be distributed and responded-to through any client built on FC. Being headless enables a job post to proliferate and be accessed everywhere onchain, and any job-doer now has a portable and self-owned profile, work history, and reputation. This is an architecture that is also compatible with an AI agent-centric future. I invested in an iteration of this Bounty concept years ago with a project called Ahoy, but bountycaster pushes this several steps further into the future.
There are some obvious holes I encountered in the bountycaster experience, but those will all be patched (eg escrowing payment at the outset of a job and having a network of arbiters that can subjectively determine when a bounty has been fulfilled to spec). The whole process felt familiar but entirely novel. It was a taste of things to come in the future and yet another reason to be excited about the pace of rapid experimentation onchain that's creating fun and useful consumer experiences in entirely new ways.
