Web3 Social: weekly round up #2

Reddit sunsets blockchain-based Community Points

During the peak of the last crypto summer Reddit had introduced a number of blockchain-based enhancements to its platform, from digital collectibles, to vaults as well as Community Points. Community Points, which will be phased out by early November, were promoted as a chance for Redditors to “own” a piece of their community. First launched in 2020, Community Points were awarded to users who positively engaged in select subreddits in order to incentivize better content and conversation. The points were essentially interchangeable Ethereum tokens stored in Reddit’s Vault, which operated as a cryptocurrency wallet.

As a measure of “reputation,” Community Points were displayed next to usernames in participating subreddits to mark the community’s biggest contributors. Since the points were on the blockchain, the program aimed to allow users to display their “reputation” anywhere online, and could be embedded in other sites or apps. If users were banned from Reddit, their points would still exist on the blockchain, but they would lose access to their Vault — rendering the points useless.

Scaling Community Points proved to be an immense challenge for Reddit. The pilot program originally used Ethereum, which had high transaction fees and limited bandwidth. Reddit then moved Community Points to Arbitrum Nova in 2022, an Ethereum Layer 2.

“We’re still working on ways to improve community governance and empower communities and contributions,” Rathschmidt said. “Part of why we’re moving past this product is that we’ve already launched, or are actively investing in, several products that accomplish what the Community Points program was trying to accomplish, while being easier to adopt and understand.”

Sauce: Tech Crunch

Farcaster counts 4500 paid signups in its first week

Are people willing to pay for social media? Since going fully permissionless a week ago, the "sufficiently decentralized" social media protocol Farcaster has amassed 4500 new users willing to pay $7 USD for an account in the network. The fee is charged recurringly on an annual basis.

Sauce: DWR on X

Orb sees success with its community product

When you hear the word Orb you probably think of Worldcoin. But that's not the only orb in town. In this case, Orb refers to a web3 social app built on the Lens protocol.

Orb who had just recently announced a $2.3M fundraising round published the following stats on X: - 1,400 posting users + 6,800 commenting users - 4,300 posts + 17,000 comments - 160k likes, 41k reposts, and 22k collects

Sauce: Nilesh on X

Frond launches paid communities with Stripe integration

Frond isn't necessarily what you'd call a web3 social app but they've left a mark in the space by offering among others a community template for web3 communities. Frond is a straight-forward no-frills place to run an online community. Now, they've launched a new feature that allows communities to monetize memberships through Stripe. They're calling this feature "Paywalls".

Sauce: Frond

Post-fork NounsDAO calls for candidate proposals for treasury nouns

Punk4156, one of the founders of NounsDAO, has asked followers on X to submit proposals for acquiring a Noun NFT from the DAO's treasury. After the DAO had forked a few weeks ago and paid out the pro-rata share of the treasury to about half of the total nouns holder base, the DAO's treasury is filled with Nouns NFTs that are looking for a new owner.

Creating a nouns candidate proposal costs 0.01 eth. There are currently ~300+ nouns in the treasury. Propose something bold (that you can credibly follow through on) and one of them could be yours.

Nouns Candiate Proposals: https://www.nouns.camp/?tab=candidates Sauce: Punk4156 on X

Wicked Craniums keep on rocking

Wicked Craniums is an NFT project that continues to deliver value to its holders. Every week, members of their Discord enjoy an exclusive live concert by heavy metal bands from all over the world.

BABYMETAL is a Japanese kawaii metal band that will melt your fucking face

This week the Wicked Cranium Discord live stream features Japaense kawaii metal band BABYMETAL. A fan attests: "They have the lowest floor but the value you get from access to heavy metal concerts and shows is absolutely insane. I keep buying these every few months because i think they are purely foocused like u said on a niche and are killing it. Discords a vibe"

Sauce: Lawofthesaw on X

X communities start to look more like Facebook Groups

X much neglected communities feature starts to get some love from the developers. This week they launched a new feature that allows group admins to require new members to answer some questions before being allowed to join - a feature that's been popular in facebook groups for years.

Sauce: Tech Crunch

What PWAs can do today

Progressive Web Apps - or PWAs for short - are becoming increasingly popular for web3 social use cases. There are a number of key benefits of PWAs compared to traditional mobile apps as we know them. For developers, the main benefit is to "write once, deploy everywhere". PWAs are fundamentally just fancy websites and thus run on any device that knows how to render HTML. Common Ground famously is also a PWA and we've heard of people running it on an Xbox 👀 (why fam, why).

For users, the main benefit of a PWA is the circumvention of restrictive App Store policies, in particular those of Apple. With these restrictions out of the way, web3 social apps have the ability to deliver completely new experiences to users relating to digital assets. Friend Tech is among the first social apps to leverage this into a highly profitable business. Many more will follow.

An overview of all the things PWAs can do today.

To understand how powerful PWAs already are today, there's a handy website that allows you test all these features on your phone: https://whatpwacando.today/

The end

That was it for this week. If you found this interesting, be sure to check back here once a week where I'll be sharing the latest and greatest in web3 social.

Peace out ☮️