I write primarily for myself, to help me sort my thoughts. I've never been able to keep a diary or maintain a journal, I don't know there's something about putting ideas into the world which forces me to try and refine my thinking and focus my position on something. I'm not always successful, but when I try to do that in a private forum I can never turn the scattered bits in my head into something cohesive and understandable. I can't always do that when I write in public either, but I try and I'm ok with at least trying. This goes back to my early days of zines and such, knowing there's a point where it's going to get distributed to the world is a forcing function. I think that's part of why I instantly got blogging before we called it blogging in the 90's. Writing online so anyone could read it just work for me.

That's not to say I don't enjoy and appreciate the opportunities I've had to get paid to write something, I absolutely do and I'm deeply thankful to the friends and believers who have on occasion opened those doors for me. I just know I couldn't write as my primary day job because that turn a thing that I do for me with no pressure into something I had to do for others with a bunch of pressure, and then I'd lose the thing I do that keeps me sane. I'm not taking a new position here, the world is full of countless artists and musicians who detest the "sales" side of their work because it turns this powerful creative outlet for them into something else. The list of amazing bands that have broken up over disagreements around business decisions is horrifically epic.

Web3, for all my love of it, has a really bad problem with this because at this point there's still such a tight interaction between the technology and the finance, that you have financial speculators and technology experimenters sharing space, and often it's not clear who is who, and easy to assume the other people in the room with you are there for the same reason. This is really hard for artists who often have speculators demanding they do something to raise the floor price of their collection, so that people can sell it for a profit. I've written a lot about that in the past so I won't repeat myself too much here beyond saying fuck those people. Obviously if you buy something and then later decide you don't want it or need to sell it, it's lovely if you can sell it at a profit, but that's not a guarantee nor is it the artists responsibility. An artists job is to make art. What the market does with it later is someone else's problem.

But in web3 theres a lot of conflation and confusion around that, and I know many artists who found the space exciting, tried to do something in it and basically got chased away by randos attacking them for the value of their work not 10x-ing over night. Many such cases. I know artists who continue to mint work because they deeply believe in the technology, but no longer sell any of it publicly because they don't want to get mixed up in that speculation and pressure to regularly raise prices. I don't blame them honestly.

Where am I heading with all this? Longtime readers will remember the early days of The Crowd on Tinyletter. It worked, but the business model for Tinyletter of just letting authors like me use their system for free was not sustainable. I get it. I started this before the new wave of newsletters was a thing. When I had to look for a new home for it, the options were slim because new upstarts like Substack were convincing authors to monetize their newsletters and taking a cut of those sales rather than charging for the service. More sustainable that "just let people use things for free" for sure, but I knew I didn't want to go anywhere near that for myself. I didn't want the pressure of adding subscription layers, which would come with expectations from subscribers. I get why it works for other people, and it's awesome some people make their living off it, but it would change the thing I'm trying to do, and kill the thing I love about it. For me.

I eventually landed with Paragraph for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I wouldn't be locked in, and there was a bit of decentralization to the framework at least. Building on web3 foundation is powerful and even if on the front end readers never saw any of that, I was glad it was there just in case. Over the years I've thought about token gating something or offering something to subscribers, but my experiences elsewhere always helped me decide against it. This is just for me, for writing, and I'm delighted that you - dear reader - have joined me on the adventure. But make no mistake, I write for myself first and foremost.

Recently Paragraph announced Writer Coins. I was pretty negative on it right away. I won't get into explaining all the mechanics, but it basically turns every publication into a memecoin, allocating a bunch to the writer and letting them airdrop a bunch to their subscribers. Since the announcement a number of people I know who also use Paragraph have embraced Coins and done airdrops and then had to spend time apologizing to people who didn't get the airdrop or who didn't as much of the airdrop as they thought they would or that value of the airdrop they got went down when other people who got the airdrop sold it. Etc. I've also seen people say that now that this coin is attached to their publication they feel the need to write more often, to justify it, and in most of the those cases the quality has dropped. It's not surprising, writing because you have something to say is different than writing because you think you are supposed to write something and want to be able to say you wrote something. Of course it gets billed as a way for writers to reward their subscribers and for subscribers to support writers, but for everyone except the top most popular people it doesn't play out that way.

Since then I've also gotten a bunch of new subscribers, almost all of whom have wallets connected to their accounts. And I've gotten random messages from people asking me if they missed the airdrop, or when I'm planning to do it, or if I took a snapshot already. So these are not people who subscribed to The Crowd because they were curious what I'd spend 100 paragraphs rambling about, but people who were airdrop farming and just hoping to have someone through free money at them. These are 100% positively also the same people who would complain the minute after they got an airdrop that it wasn't quadrupling in value every 10 minutes.

This is a very long winded way of saying that I will not be doing a Writers Coin, and have already started the process of moving off Paragraph. I don't want to pick a fight and I get that different people have different motivations and companies need to find things to be sustainable, but it's just not my jam, not for me, and I don't want the main place I put this stuff to have the baggage or pressure or expectations. I don't want to answer questions about it every day. I don't want to meet people in public and have them tell me they subscribe to The Crowd and how great it would be if I dropped a coin. I just don't. No thanks.

As always I hope the migration will be seamless, and I'll talk more about it when I officially throw the switch but I'm pretty happy with the new plan, and there may actually be a few new options. No one should just stop getting the letter, it's possible some people might get dups. We'll see. More in a bit. Anyway, as always if you are still here I appreciate it. The adventure continues.

-s

The Crowd Has No Coins [283]