Chainfeeds Summary:
You cannot transform one medium into another without changing its fundamental nature.
Article source:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/197096917
Article Author:
Hans89
Opinion:
Hans89: SocialFi's vision, on paper, is actually very elegant. Its core logic is that social capital itself is a real economic value. People create it every day, but the platform is the one that truly profits. If these social behaviors can be directly put into the market, then those who truly create value should also be able to capture this revenue. Thus, every follow becomes a share; every post becomes a tradable asset; every social relationship has a price. Theoretically, this would form a "social is economy" network: reputation has a market, and creators can profit from attention in real time. Friend.tech declined. Many copycat projects never even reached a real growth stage. The token price plummeted and never recovered. The most common explanation is: "It was just a speculative cycle; people came only to make money, and naturally left when the profit effect disappeared." This is certainly true, but too superficial. Because the real problem is not that transactions disappeared, but that the entire social behavior itself disappeared. People not only stopped buying and selling keys, they even stopped posting, reading, interacting, and going online. Why? The biggest misjudgment of SocialFi was that capital and cold media are not incompatible, but they are only compatible under certain specific conditions. Capital must be: local, infrequent, illiquid in a sense, and structurally separated from most social behaviors. Once you try to capitalize on every behavior, you are no longer building a social media, but an economic system. In fact, a generation of projects has quietly understood this logic, although they may not name themselves that way, and this model is gradually stabilizing. They usually have several things in common: the underlying layer is some kind of social or cultural product, and its meaning accumulates through participation. If you had to summarize the lesson of SocialFi's collapse in one sentence, it might be: liquidity is heat. If SocialFi showed what happens when you build a hot medium but call it a social network, then NFTs show something even more interesting: what happens when a deeply cold medium that has been operating for hundreds of years begins to gradually heat up in reality. Collecting is actually one of the oldest cold media. Browsing record stores, lingering in antique shops, exchanging Pokémon cards on school playgrounds, displaying stamp collections at philatelic clubs—in these activities, the items themselves only carry half the meaning. The value of collectibles is essentially low-resolution, ambiguous, and context-dependent. This is not a flaw, but rather the very mechanism by which collecting exists as a cultural practice. Early NFTs from 2020 to early 2021 actually retained this logic.
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