Cold Start Problem

In web3, the data being stored on chain against a wallet is mostly financial like buying/selling tokens & NFTs.

Web3 wallets are nothing more than a bank account for now

However, if we compare this behavior with web2 platforms, we can see that there is a lot more context about the user stored against the user profiles. Using this context, the platforms provide a personalized experience to the user. For example:

1. If a user regularly listens to songs from a certain artist, they will see suggestions of more songs from that same artist

2. If a user has done projects in Typescript, they will see more gigs related to Typescript

3. If a user has joined a certain kind of community, they will get recommendations to join other similar communities

etc.

These interactions with a platform increase user engagement and enable them to have a meaningful experience on a platform. But, this is only possible if the platform has this information that it can use to tweak the experience for a certain user.

Web3 currently does not store any such data and due to this, it does not have the means to provide for such a personalized experience.

The current yearly user retention rate on web3 dApps is merely 7%

One way could be to create web3 platforms that store such data and then wait for people to come and interact with the platform and then after that will it be able to provide a good experience.

But this is a cyclical problem, also known as the Cold Start Problem.

Cold start problem occurs because the system needs a certain amount of historical data or user behavior to function effectively, but at the beginning, it doesn't have enough data to draw from.

Platforms cannot provide a good experience without users using the platform. And users would not use the platform unless there is a good experience. And this is one of the biggest challenges of web3 dApps right now.

One approach to handle this would be to create reusable and portable contexts that could be taken to any dApp on any blockchain, which is what Plurality aims to do.