Here's how Web3 social could topple Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

What would you do with $36 billion? Hopefully you'd have more fun than the users of Meta's Horizon Worlds metaverse platform, whose price tag has reportedly already surpassed the $36 billion mark.

Meanwhile, Elon's attempt to pivot Twitter toward a subscription model has yet to pick up any meaningful traction. Instagram, once a simple site for viewing your friends' photos, has been overrun with ads, influencers, and algorithmic posts elbowing their way onto your feed.

And that's not to mention the litany of abuses and scandals wrought by these companies. In an ideal world, none of us would have to know what "Cambridge Analytica" was. But we live in this world, where Instagram has a devastating effect on the mental health of teen girls, intrusive ads follow us around the Internet, and content moderators are overworked and underpaid.

It's not like we users have a say in how these social media sites are run. But what if we did?

That's the promise of Web3 social media. By creating decentralized and transparent social graphs (basically the equivalent of a social media site's private database of your posts and connections) these Web3 social projects can be used to create an open equivalent of the privately owned Web2 social media sites we're familiar with.

This means no one can take your data away from you, and targeted advertising is opt-in — possibly even rewarding you for interacting with the ad. These sites also aim to solve the "cold-start problem" by rewarding early users of their platforms.

In this episode of Coinage, we explain why Web2 social media is flailing and how Web3 social media wants to overthrow the sites we know, creating next-generation user-owned content platforms. We spoke to leaders across the Web3 social media world to learn what it's like developing these products on the ground, like Stani Kulechov from Lens Protocol and Joonatan Lintala from Phaver. Check out the full episode above.