Compared to previous technological innovations incubated in management-driven proposals, rarely escaping corporate utero-- with the viable few inevitably swallowed up by the Meta née Facebooks & Amazons of the world-- blockchain technology has manifested unprecedented autonomy in its decentralized ecosystems and presents an extraordinary opportunity to developers, communities, and entrepreneurs alike.
Self-sustainability is inherent to both the ethos & internal mechanisms which move Web3 forward. When TradFi or Web2 firms invest into blockchain tech, in most instances they will integrate into an existing system, rather than create a new system themselves. That being said, outside of the underlying infrastructure of a blockchain, much of what makes Web3 “autonomous” is an unspoken dependency upon Web2 tooling & infrastructure.
You would be hard-pressed to find a person or firm related to cryptocurrency, NFTs, DAOs, dApps, or anything adjacent to blockchain technology who doesn’t utilize Discord for crucial infrastructural communication, and Twitter for outreach & engagement. This generates two fatal issues:
A single point of failure for time-sensitive internal communications by over-reliance on Discord
Psychological manipulation by attention-driven algorithms by Twitter’s AI
Usually reliable and overflowing with open-sourced tooling & bots beneficial to fostering token-based communities, Discord recently suffered from a two-hour outage on January 26th as well as another thirty-minute outage on February 15th. They are generally rare, but they should be deeply concerning to anybody who uses Discord servers as primary points of communication within a DAO or token-based community. The value of such entities could hinge on time-sensitive decision-making only made possible through communication fostered by services like Discord. If a community is trying to coordinate a quorum vote or gather signatures on a Gnosis Safe, an outage could prevent it from executing within the necessary timeframe. Imagine a scenario where ConstitutionDAO had raised enough money to win the auction, but Discord was down the day of the auction.
Given current gas prices & transaction throughput, decentralized alternatives have not yet breached the centralized SaaS moat. For a networking or communication dApp to even come close to the server-side capabilities necessary to the speed, user-friendliness, and success of these services, Web3 projects competing with existing Web2 implementations must incentivize decentralized CPU-sharing within their ecosystems by building it out themselves or by utilizing protocols like TheGraph. But as of now, I’m not familiar with any CPU-sharing protocols primed for communications servers in the way that TheGraph is primed for blockchain data indexing.
The disillusioning side-effects of Twitter’s algorithms became most apparent during the recent ENS/Brantly Millegan controversy. While my opinion on the matter is tangential to this article, we all saw CryptoTwitter devolve into Web2 tropes, where sides immediately formed along identitarian & ideological lines, predictably accusing the other side of being a mob, all while displaying every characteristic of a mob themselves. Most can agree that the situation wasn’t handled in an ideal fashion, and there is much to be learned from it-- but that discussion wasn’t being had by the vast majority of participants. Peoples’ opinions were more informed by the tribes closest to their pre-existing ideologies than the situation itself, which shaped the discourse into harassment-slinging & scapegoating.
While mob mentality has existed long before Twitter, one of the most noticeable effects of attention-driven algorithms is the prioritization of content that enrages us, thereby generating a disproportionate sense of the prevalence of such content to those it enrages. In rewarding divisiveness over consensus far beyond the natural limits, we see an exponential increase to the factor by which our collective IQ drops. What could have been a valuable discussion on decentralized governance, covalent powers within a DAO versus a centralized entity like True Names, Ltd., and responsibility & recourse for public representatives of these covalent entities, became the same infuriating & reductive discussion we’re all tired of repeating: mob v. mob, woke v. anti-woke, or anti-woke v. woke depending on your predilections.
A certain amount of tribalism is inevitable when it comes to free discourse, but the communication breakdown we all saw was enflamed by a vestigial reward schema blind to its own externalities. This schema is not a bug, but a feature of the Twitter platform. With decentralized & self-governing alternatives, not beholden to blind profit-at-any-cost for external beneficiaries but rather towards generating the most value to the system for those who use it, by those who use it, Web3 has the potential to create a better replacement to Twitter that rewards contribution to the discourse, rather than rewarding distraction *from* the discourse.
For those of us in Web3 who want to simultaneously benefit from mass adoption & capital inflows from Web2 & TradFi while not repeating its mistakes, we must recognize the Faustian bargain we make while using its tooling & infrastructure. We must remain vigilant and continue to build at all costs. As long as these vestigial reward schemas pollute our collective psychologies, we will be trapped into our Web2 tropes, dooming Web3 towards its current trajectory: regressing into an aesthetically decentralized appendage of Web2 & TradFi.