Sometimes, its only when you forcibly remove yourself from a bubble that you realise you were in one to begin with.

Its been just over a month, about six weeks in fact that I announced I was stepping away from NFTs and Blockchain Art. Since then, I have noticed something rather dramatic in my daily routine.

How little time I now spend on platforms like X, Bluesky, Farcaster and Discord.

I genuinely have such little desire to do so anymore… because the purpose, the driving factor is no longer present. I no longer fear missing out.

In that time, I’ve read two books, I’ve been doing DIY, I’ve really enjoyed catching up on shows like Upload, 1883 & Fallout. I’ve been writing more and switched my browsing habits to more longform content from Substack, Medium, LinkedIn and Tech Blogs.

I’ve gotten much, MUCH better sleep.

It’s so bloody refreshing.

I’ve written about the creative process a few times now, and in each reflected on the aggressively time consuming and pressurising nature of marketing, especially for Crypto artists. Barely 1/3 of that time is spent crafting the art itself.

The remainder found me hawking my digital wares daily across multiple platforms, posting in community groups, creating trailers for projects, and even sitting in X spaces for up to two hours or more, for mere minutes in return to elevator pitch my work to the rest of the “crab bucket”, desperately hopeful for an interested collector amongst the claws. It’s a draining process that often bares little fruit.

And yet we subjected ourselves to it, because that was the process.

Shifting away from cryptoart has peeled back the performative layer of social media, revealing how much of it was tethered to visibility, validation, and the exhausting rhythm of “GM culture.” The daily ritual of engagement, often masquerading cult-like behaviour as community, felt more like a treadmill than a gathering.

It’s only when the incentive (marketing, exposure, influence) disappears, the inherent compulsion, and indeed the platform itself loses its grip.

It does just affect people looking to collect the next big thing. It also extends to artists afraid to miss out on a potential sale / revenue stream.

Social media platforms are engineered to reward compulsive interaction, especially for creators. Therefore the opposite is also true. We are conditioned to fear that not showing up daily and “engaging” with the online community will lead to lost opportunities and being ostracised for not being “active” enough. In addition, the dopamine loop of likes, retweets, and algorithmic relevance becomes a proxy for artistic worth. Stepping away exposes how artificial that loop really is.

So why do we subject ourselves to this?

The major problem is just how engrained and entwined these web2 “social” networks are in the web3 ecosystem. Which is also one of the main reasons, in its current state, that web3 will not eclipse web2. It’s far too reliant on it.

If Web3 is meant to be a decentralized, trustless paradigm, then its dependence on Web2 infrastructure (Twitter for community, Instagram for visibility, Discord for coordination) is a contradiction. Verification through blue checks, engagement through centralized algorithms, and reputation through influencer clout—all of it undermines the ethos of decentralization.

Twitter and Discord are used by many web3 platforms and profile systems as a form of user verification, including Foundation, Rodeo, and even TZ Profiles for Objkt.com. Blockchain celebrates itself as the next step, yet it always feels like one step forward, 2 steps back. It’s like building a utopian city but still relying on the old empire’s roads, currency, and police force.

Until Web3 develops its own native social architecture, one that doesn’t just mimic Web2 but reimagines interaction, identity, and trust, it risks being a philosophical façade.

Dan | BloqDigital is a lighting designer and digital artist based in the UK, who writes about Art, Technology, Web3 and Culture.

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