Vitalik discusses why decentralized social products have yet to succeed

In Wu Shuo’s hosted Twitter space, Vitalik stated that many Crypto Social products fail because they “start from finance” rather than “start from social issues.” He criticized a common misconception: treating “adding tokens/trades/speculation” as the primary solution for social problems, which results in serving traders rather than content and relationships. He emphasized that if we want to build decentralized social platforms, we should address “the pain points of social itself” (content quality, incentives, governance, identity/relationship migration, etc.) instead of layering a financial layer first. Creator incentives should answer a more pointed question—are we making existing social capital more profitable, or supporting high-quality but unknown individuals? He compared some “personal tokens/social coins” attempts on Substack: the latter often concentrate resources on influential people or trading content, making it difficult to establish mechanisms for discovering and supporting truly “high-quality authors.”

He mentioned that a common failure in on-chain social/chain games is treating “being able to make money” as the product’s core value; when the bear market hits and users leave, it indicates that the core is “not very useful/not very fun.” A more feasible approach is to start from real product needs, using blockchain as “a more boring infrastructure” (data layers/trusted ledgers/identity/composability), rather than making it the narrative’s core.