In the Twitter space hosted by Wu Shuo, Vitalik stated that many Crypto Social products fail because they “start from finance first” rather than “start from social issues.” He criticized the common misconception: treating “adding tokens/trades/speculation” as the primary solution for socialization, which results in serving traders rather than content and relationships. He emphasized that if one wants to create decentralized social platforms, they should start from “the pain points of social interaction itself” (content quality, incentives, governance, identity/relationship migration, etc.) rather than stacking a financial layer first. Creator incentives should address a sharper question — whether to make existing social capital more profitable or to support high-quality but unknown individuals. He compared some “personal tokens/social coins” attempts with Substack: the latter often concentrates resources on influential people or trading content, making it difficult to establish mechanisms for discovering and supporting truly “high-quality authors.”
He mentioned that common failures in on-chain social/chain games are treating “profitability” as the product value; when the bear market hits, users leave, indicating that the core is “not very useful/not very fun.” A more feasible approach is to start from real product needs, treating blockchain as “more boring infrastructure” (data boards/trusted ledgers/identity/composability), rather than as the narrative core.
Vitalikが語る、なぜ分散型ソーシャル製品は今なお成功しないのか
In the Twitter space hosted by Wu Shuo, Vitalik stated that many Crypto Social products fail because they “start from finance first” rather than “start from social issues.” He criticized the common misconception: treating “adding tokens/trades/speculation” as the primary solution for socialization, which results in serving traders rather than content and relationships. He emphasized that if one wants to create decentralized social platforms, they should start from “the pain points of social interaction itself” (content quality, incentives, governance, identity/relationship migration, etc.) rather than stacking a financial layer first. Creator incentives should address a sharper question — whether to make existing social capital more profitable or to support high-quality but unknown individuals. He compared some “personal tokens/social coins” attempts with Substack: the latter often concentrates resources on influential people or trading content, making it difficult to establish mechanisms for discovering and supporting truly “high-quality authors.”
He mentioned that common failures in on-chain social/chain games are treating “profitability” as the product value; when the bear market hits, users leave, indicating that the core is “not very useful/not very fun.” A more feasible approach is to start from real product needs, treating blockchain as “more boring infrastructure” (data boards/trusted ledgers/identity/composability), rather than as the narrative core.