Launching a new social-media network is a daunting task, because the web2 Big Tech incumbents are already established and we have to compete with their network effect.

Web3 has some advantages that might help us compete with that, though. One of them (which I think is already well-understood; I just want to mention it explicitly here) is that web3 makes it super-easy to make tokens representing ownership of the network, and to allow users of the network to own those tokens. Token upside is inversely proportional to network effect; the growth of the network can be accelerated by having an ever-growing army of users who are financially-incentivized to publicize it. (This also has the potential to be very annoying, as we’ve seen with the blockchain holy wars.)

Question: does it make sense to try to create a Big Collective Web3 Social Media Network Token that is decoupled from (i.e. shareable by all of) the myriad individual web3-social-media projects?

That is, rather than (or in addition to) each individual project having its own token, maybe it’s worthwhile to have a project-agnostic token that allows many web3 social-media projects to “join forces” and all be part of the same network (and thereby all contribute to, and take advantage of, the same network effect)?

For example, imagine a smart contract representing a token that confers a share of ownership of a collective treasury. And imagine that a content creator can choose to say, “Sure, X% (some small percentage) of my (donation/ad/whatever) revenue will automatically be redirected into this collectively-owned treasury,” and in return that creator is considered to be a member-in-good-standing of the network (and therefore included in recommendation algorithm results, etc., for that network).

The idea would be that this opens up the playing field for the members of all sorts of different social-media projects to be part of this network. Anyone holding the token (and thereby earning a small share of the revenue from all of the participating content creators) is incentivized to spread the word about this new network, and to create useful peripheral utilities for the network (like recommendation algorithms, top-100-creators websites, etc.).

Seems like this might be a way to take advantage of the strengths of web3: tokens, user-owned networks, open data. A coalition of a whole bunch of web3 projects, all sharing the same network effect, might have an easier time competing against the established web2 incumbents.

(Crossposted on /r/Web3SocialMedia; feel free to comment there.)