If you recall Delphi's article on gaming, there are some concepts I want to revisit around the magic circle and more that I think are now also applicable for socialfi.
Social media in loose terms is the new "sports". Twitter is a league, for yappers. As is TikTok, brainrot league. The list goes on.
Take sports such as as soccer which is a skill based game in its purest form. Players can't pay to win. Monetization model of sports like soccer revolves around metagames or products/services that act as derivatives to the skill based game of soccer itself.
As seen with the monetization of sports, I believe there is a large opportunity around building metagames around the social media layer of the internet.
Here's a loose analogy comparing sports to social media
playing sports = producing content
athletes = creators
plays = content
scores = attention
If you think of content production as the core game here you can start to visualize the different metagames that can be built on top of this. For fantasy social you have products like Fantasy Top built around creators. For social media betting, Kizzy can service this type of demand. Apps like Upside can act as a social prediction market because it enables people to assign value to any piece of content which in turns serves as a signal on what people care about.
Again, sports has constraints: physical, frequency of games, etc. Social media being digitally native has an order of magnitude greater number of variables that can influence the game.
In the below example, simple actions like "kicking a ball into a net" can be elevated by the magic circle into having much more meaning like "scoring a game winning goal". I feel this same way after playing fantasy top and how I view tweets from creators. These are now plays. When Farokh tweeted out about his interview with Trump, that was not a tweet, it was a play. It was tournament winning banger piece of content.
Again why are fantasy sports and gambling so popular? Not only are they fun but they give people a chance to monetize their hobbies and further augment their experiences around the core game of sports. The similar lens can be applied to social media. We already know there's an enormous amount of creators with fanbases all across the world. The rise of socialfi (or whatever better name that arises) will enable multiple metagames to be built on top of these fandom networks.
I am pretty certain that nearly everybody on the internet at some point has identified a creator or piece of content that they thought would at some point take off (see below). How many countless examples have you seen on other social media platforms where people jokingly "invest" in the early popularity of a piece of content with a comment claiming clout? The problem is there were no meaningful metagames built around this insight. Sending a like or follow means nothing.
Socialfi is the bridge that helps fans to better monetize their hobbies and for creators to get rewarded.
This is a far from complete piece as I quickly spun it up but it's an iteration around why I've been even more excited about this category since my initial thoughts on fantasy social. I'd like to a do a deeper piece on this in the near future and the challenges that will need to be overcome in scaling this socialfi (aka metagame angle) into an absolutely massive category. As always, happy to jam with anyone also thinking about this topic or building here.
