Using Affordance to Understand Usability of Web3 Social Media

Research Background and Issues

• What problems or challenges did the authors identify?
  In recent years, Web3 social media, as a decentralized platform based on blockchain technology, has garnered increasing attention. However, how users perceive the usability of these platforms and how Web3 features influence user experience remain largely unexplored. Previous studies have mostly focused on monetary incentive mechanisms, neglecting a comprehensive analysis of the overall usability and user experience of Web3 social media.

• Why is this issue important?
  Web3 social media aims to provide users with greater control over their data and interactions, differing from the centralized management approach of traditional Web2 platforms. This emerging technology has the potential to redefine the social media ecosystem. A deeper understanding of its usability can reveal how blockchain technology drives platform optimization and meets user needs.

• Research Motivation and Related Work
  The authors focus on issues such as users' perceptions of usability in content creation, content consumption, and community interaction, how Web3 and Web2 features influence this usability, and how design can enhance user experience.

Solutions

• What methods or solutions did the authors propose?
  The authors adopted social media affordance theory as a framework to analyze the functional differences between Web3 and Web2 social media. They integrated and extended existing affordance frameworks to capture Web3-specific functionalities, such as distributed storage and tokenization. Subsequently, they conducted semi-structured interviews with 32 experienced Web3 users to investigate their perceptions of platform usability.

• What is innovative about this solution?
  The study not only leveraged existing social media affordance theory but also identified new types of affordances by analyzing ten different Web3 social media platforms (e.g., Steemit, Minds, Lens Protocol). These new affordances include community-driven content moderation and data interoperability.

• What are the implementation steps and key technologies used?

  1. Integrate existing affordance frameworks and analyze the functional characteristics of ten Web3 social media platforms to expand the framework.
  2. Develop an analytical framework involving nine types of affordances.
  3. Conduct in-depth interviews with 32 participants to collect their usage experiences and perceptions.
  4. Use thematic analysis to organize the interview data and extract key themes.

Research Findings

• What specific findings were obtained?

  1. Web3 social media platforms offer greater editorial freedom and content persistence in content creation but challenge users' ability to control content (e.g., the inability to delete permanent records on the blockchain).
  2. Community-driven content moderation reduces the biases of centralized platforms but often results in inconsistent content quality.
  3. Tokenization significantly alters the motivational mechanisms of community interactions, steering user behavior towards economic incentives but also leading to unstable community relationships.
  4. Web3 platforms exhibit significant advantages in data interoperability, allowing users to seamlessly migrate data across different applications.

• What advantages does it have compared to existing solutions?
  Compared to Web2 platforms, Web3 platforms:

  • Provide greater autonomy (e.g., content management and data control).
  • Offer more flexible community-driven approaches, reducing biases in centralized content moderation.
  • Leverage tokenization mechanisms to encourage user participation, though this can lead to short-term behavior.

• What are the experimental or evaluation results?
  In the interviews, users acknowledged the decentralized nature of Web3 platforms and the benefits of content persistence and data interoperability. However, they also pointed out issues such as low search efficiency, reduced content quality due to token economies, and the pressure of self-presentation caused by content permanence.

• Limitations and Future Directions

  • Limitations include a small sample size primarily focused on experienced users, with insufficient analysis of novice users; additionally, there is a lack of direct observation of Web2 data.
  • Future directions suggest optimizing the search functionality of Web3 platforms, creating hybrid storage solutions to address file size limitations, and adjusting token mechanisms to balance economic incentives with content quality.

Conclusion

This study focuses on the usability of Web3 social media, combining interviews and an affordance analysis framework to reveal the differences and characteristics of Web3 platforms in content creation, content consumption, and community interaction. The research highlights the profound impact of decentralization and tokenization technologies on the social media ecosystem and provides multi-level design recommendations to improve usability. These findings offer valuable guidance for the future design and functional optimization of Web3 social media platforms.