Zima Red ep 142: Nick Confrey - Seam: The evolution of social media
Primer: Web2 social media platforms thrive on clickbait for their revenue. Nick Confrey proposes a better future with Seam, an ad-free social media platform powered by Web3 for gaming. Find out more about his project in this episode of Zima Red.
Background
CEO and co-founder of Seam, the social layer for Web3 gaming
Formerly from Meta. Built out music for Facebook stories
Got disillusioned with Facebook’s monetization and ad-driven revenue model
Met his co-founder, Katy Atherholt, who is deep into the DAO ecosystem
What Did Facebook Do Poorly?
For Facebook to be profitable, they have to figure out how to gather data on you to do target advertisements
There’s a misalignment of incentives between the platform and the user
“You have the doom-scrolling scenario where people are just sort of like clickbait. That's what, unfortunately, the business model incentivizes.”
- Nick Confrey
Web3 enables him to flip the script and change the way people pay for these kinds of platforms
Likes free-to-play games where people do not have to pay for anything. Instead, the revenue comes from the customizations
People need to care enough about the platform that they are willing to customize it or add extra functionality
Seam
An ad-free social media platform
Will be stitching the internet together (e.g. your Twitter feed on your Steam profile, etc.)
Will be opening up their platform to user-generated content, which could be sold on a marketplace
NFTs could be leveraged for revenue and creative attribution
Interesting User Behaviours He Has Seen
EDM artists put out weekly podcasts all over the internet
There’s an EDM weekly Seam card that stitches everything together as a one-stop shop
The Role Of Web3 In Seam
There’s an ethos-driven alignment (interoperability, building on the blockchain)
The future vision of a user-generated marketplace/decentralized app store
Is starting to look at splitting revenue automatically in smart contracts
Creating On Seam
Was inspired by the Neopets HTML guide, which was aimed at kids from ages 8 - 10
Neopets was a web game with pets that were popular in the early 2000s
“We're hoping that Seam is approachable from that early stage, not like other Web3 projects where you have to be a hardcore dev to rebuild the whole social graph or all that kind of stuff.”
- Nick Confrey
Starting to see code being written more easily with AI chatbots
How Do People Monetize?
Still tweaking and figuring it out
Need to get people excited about building these blocks before focusing on the financial side of things
Financial incentives can often mask product-market fit
Right now, when users complete quests on their platform, they can earn some points (e.g. upload a profile photo)
10-Year Vision For Seam
A customizable social space
Friends on Seam can have a shared connection card, where both parties can drag in blocks that matter to them
While at Facebook, one of the challenges he had was context collapse — people stopped using Facebook as the social graphs have gotten so large with many different contexts (e.g. your grandmother, friends, exes, bosses, etc.)
Each of the cards in Seam can have context specific to the person and the groups that you care about
Exciting News To Share?
Heavily exploring the gaming side
Gamers could make different Seam cards for each game they play
Users can have different facets of their identity
Thoughts On AI Feeding Us Content
Distinguishes it into 2 separate groups: social media and influencer media
They both have different audiences, mindshare, privacy expectations, and how the content is consumed
Views On Web3
Has 2 lenses to look at new consumer behaviors enabled by Web3:
The technological side (e.g. what claims do people make about the tech?)
Does anyone care?
The term owning your data is a myth:
What does it mean to own your data?
If it means controlling access, it also includes removing it
However, a blockchain is immutable and you cannot delete anything from it
How Does This Change The Way They Build Seam?
They are doing centralized data storage with a decentralized feature set
Web3 Business Models
The only way Web2 platforms do well is because of the number of users
Does not make sense to bring the Web2 advertising model into Web3 as there is not enough money per user
From Seam’s perspective, they think that the customization/cosmetics angle is more lucrative than the advertising model
Thoughts On The Points System
As a gamer, he loves gamification
Have to be careful about not mixing incentives with social platforms (e.g. Facebook users slammed with invitation requests from friends for Farmville)
Their initial quests are very simple
In His Mind, What Is The Objective Of Social Media?
Human connection
It’s a way for him to stay in touch with people
Thoughts On AI Tools
Is amazed by it
Has used it to debug a frontend bug
AI will lower the barrier of entry into Web3
Surviving In An AI-Dominated World
It comes down to curation and picking value out of the noise
Will be a hard job weeding out content
Stack Overflow has blocked ChatGPT answers
The craziest things are going to be phishing schemes and deep fake videos
Bullish And Bearish On?
Bullish
There are a lot of cool decentralized data storage projects
Bearish
Token prices
Realized that the ability of any individual contributor to contribute enough value to meaningfully sway token prices is not as much as he would have hoped
Best Piece Of Advice He Has Received
Don’t let people rob you of your happiness
What Motivates Him?
Making the internet better every day
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