Stereocaster went through a lot of changes this week, which you can view at stereocaster.com!

The main change is a redesigned player and queue feature, so it’s easier to discover and play shared audio while scrolling through the casts feed.

It was really motivating to see how people responded to my initial post last week, even with my fairly rough prototype. I received some really helpful feedback and even a mention in This Week in Farcaster.

What did I get done this week?

1. Making Stereocaster more user friendly

I implemented pagination, the queue, and part of the auto-playing feature this week based on feedback from v1 and my own notes. I’ve realized it makes more sense to focus on making Spotify links work well first before branching out to other audio links, especially since I’m still figuring out the Spotify API’s capabilities.

For next week, implementing a fully-functional auto-play experience and fixing bugs are some of my top priorities. Right now, audio auto-plays after clicking “Play” on a cast, but the queue doesn’t automatically play through, which would be a big UX improvement.

2. Migrating to React + refactoring

Stereocaster v1 relied on a NodeJS script that generated an HTML file, which made it very difficult to make changes to my code. I ended up migrating the codebase to React, which drastically improved the readability of my code but also introduced some new challenges. I also tried out Tailwind and Vite for the first time, and I like both.

3. Progress on the backend: still a work in progress

I didn’t get a chance to work more with Hubs this week, but I did try using the Searchcaster API to pull in casts in real time. While it worked smoothly, it felt a little slow, so I ended up writing a script that would fetch casts using the Searchcaster API and create JSON files for me to manually upload instead. This isn’t an ideal solution, but it’s working out while I continue to work on the backend.

Coming soon…

Stereocaster Digest #1 is in the works, along with some minor bug fixes and hopefully a better auto-playing experience.

I am always open to feedback, so if there’s anything you’d like to see with Stereocaster, please let me know! You can find me on Farcaster, Twitter, or comment on this post.

If you’re unfamiliar, nights & weekends is a huge, asynchronous build-a-thon that ends in a competition for $100,000 and a final IRL event. This season has over 4,000 people developing apps, making music, writing novels, and more.

One of the main aspects of n&w is to ship and iterate quickly, which means that I posted my idea to Twitter and got off localhost within the span of one week.

In the spirit of building in public, I’m sharing progress updates and things I’ve learned while building Stereocaster.

The original idea

The idea behind Stereocaster originated from an interest in the Farcaster ecosystem and surfacing music and podcasts. I’ve been using apps on the protocol for a while and was really interested in developing my own.

Music and podcast discovery is something I've always been super interested in, and I felt like there was a lot of opportunity to combine social networks with audio sharing.

Lessons from building

Funnily enough, my experience so far with building Stereocaster has given me a new appreciation for the goals of the Farcaster protocol and a better understanding of how permissionless and decentralized protocols actually benefit developers. I was able to pull casts (Farcaster’s equivalent of a tweet) easily and do whatever I wanted with them. On the other hand, I also used the Spotify API for my version 1 and saw that functionality was more limited.

So, what did I get done this week?

I got Stereocaster off localhost! You can check out v1 here: stereocaster.com.

My v1 is still fairly rough, but I wanted to experiment with bringing the experience of actually listening to audio into a social feed of audio links. Right now, that’s translated to being able to scroll through casts with Spotify links and open a Spotify player within Stereocaster to listen to a preview of the audio.

The backend isn’t automated yet (more on that below), so I created the current feed using the Searchcaster API to pull 200 casts with Spotify links and displayed them manually.

Progress on the backend: I connected to a mainnet Hub.

Farcaster is in the early stages of transitioning the protocol so all cast data is stored on different “Hubs” that anyone can run. The end goal of Stereocaster is to pull real-time data from the Hubs to display on the website, so as an intermediate step, I managed to connect to a Hub and see real-time casts.

I connected with some other n&w builders, gave and received feedback, and thought about next steps for Stereocaster.

I have a list of feature ideas, some outstanding issues to address, and a lot of excitement to keep building Stereocaster!

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I’m a little late to the party, but I wanted to write a little about my first ETHDenver (and crypto conference) ever! I flew in Wednesday and left on Saturday, and the whole experience was 4 days of nonstop events, meeting people, and learning about new protocols and companies.

A few of my big takeaways…

Even in a bear market, web3 is alive and well for crypto-natives.

We still have a ways to go to make web3 understandable and appealing to the vast majority of people. I had multiple Uber drivers who either didn’t know that ETHDenver was happening at all or thought I was going to a Bitcoin conference.

But for crypto-natives, the use cases and opportunity seem to be endless. There was a lot of buzz about innovation in the space — I heard many conversations about scaling with L2s, account abstraction and EIP-4337, and the future of DAOs. I also got the sense that in the long-term, these changes and conversations would make web3 a better experience for everyone.

There were so many talks at ETHDenver, and I attended two talks that really stood out to me. The first was Kevin Owocki’s talk “New Form Factors for Quadratic Funding” at Schelling Point.

A lot of the thesis of this talk is in this forum post, and the social network application of quadratic funding really resonated. I’d heard a lot about quadratic funding in association with Gitcoin Grants, but hadn’t really considered how the mechanism could be applied for other use cases. This isn’t exactly the same as microtips, but I have enjoyed collecting open editions, whether that’s art or content NFTs. These are often free or low cost mints that I typically mint to signal participation and interest in something, whereas for higher cost mints I’d probably spend more time considering utility. Microtips strike an interesting balance between measuring how people value content by introducing real, monetary stakes while still remaining accessible enough for people to participate in the network.

The second talk was a panel, “Scaling Ethereum for Global Adoption with L2” featuring Eva Beylin, Liam Horne, Molly Mackinlay, Jesse Pollak, and Stani Kulechov.

There were a couple key insights that I heard during this panel. First was a discussion on what has made it possible to scale Ethereum — low enough fees on L2s, improved wallet UX, and account abstraction, as well as commentary on L2 interoperability and security concerns. A lot of the panel discussed concepts that I was tangentially familiar with, but my biggest takeaway from this panel was that L2 infrastructure and scalability are super interesting problems and I want to learn more about this area of web3!

I also wanted to learn more about Optimism/OP Labs, since my college’s blockchain club was selected to become an Optimism delegate by a16z. Hearing about the OP Stack was interesting, and I thought the discussion on Coinbase’s approach to decentralization through Base was insightful as well.

IRL interactions

Meeting people in-person is awesome! There’s a synergy when you’re talking face-to-face with someone that can’t be replicated online, and I really leaned into the spontaneity of conversations and networking during the week.

I met many wonderful people, including finally meeting Mari, Merve, and Nima from the Women in Web3 team, Frisson and Tommy from Tally, and Diana from Rehash in-person. I also had amazing conversations with new friends at the Boys Club, Variant Fund, SheFi, and Farcaster events (shoutout to Jamie, who I saw at pretty much all these events!).

It was very surreal to run into people, introduce myself, and have them recognize me from Twitter, or Article Club, or some other avenue. I was really intimidated by approaching people a lot of the time, but I’m really glad I did.

The post-ETHDenver blues

Like many people, I got sick after ETHDenver, and therefore had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to take away from this experience while going through bags of cough drops and cups of tea. The main thing is that there is so much in web3 that I don’t know about and want to dive deeper into — big areas that piqued my interest included L2 infrastructure and understanding more about practical decentralization for DAOs. The conference could be overwhelming at times because I didn’t have a specific focus or goal in mind. I was talking with everyone and learning about everything, and I think that was great for my first conference but likely less ideal in the future.

On the people side of things, everyone I met was kind and generous with their time and energy. It was especially awesome to meet people that I had already interacted with online, and I gained a better understanding of the web3 community at large.

The next time I go to ETHDenver, I’ll be a lot more prepared for what to expect and set goals for the conference ahead of time. But until then, goodbye for now ETHDenver!

If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe for more posts and to support my work!

Twitter, Farcaster, and Discord are full of links to genuinely interesting articles, but it’s hard to have deeper conversations about the articles on these platforms. I’d find myself collecting articles, only to end up never getting around to reading them. Or, if I managed to read them, I’d have tons of questions and thoughts and no one to talk to.

The idea for Article Club was to bring together people on a regular basis to talk about web3 articles, with the understanding that reading a single article for each discussion would make it as easy as possible to participate.

emma kwan

@emmekwan

So @seemcat and I are starting @womeninweb3 Article Club, open to anyone who is interested in reading and discussing cool articles together! We'll suggest and vote on articles to read as a group and then meet to talk about them! If you're interested in joining, drop your ENS!

54

1:41 PM • Oct 15, 2022

The first season of Article Club was my first time hosting events and building a community in web3, and I learned a lot from that experience that I’m taking into our second season.

From October to December of 2022, we hosted 4 article clubs covering the following articles:

• Session 1 - Decentralized Media In web3 Is Not What You Think It Is by Steph (cryptohun3y)

• Session 2 - Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse by Caroline Mimbs Nyce

• Session 3 - Why Web3 Needs Mindfulness NFTs Now More Than Ever by Eric James Beyer

• Session 4 - The Day The AGI Was Born by swyx

During season 1, we tried out various approaches to fostering discussion and encouraging community building, and here were my biggest takeaways:

1. We had way more initial sign ups through posting on Twitter and Farcaster, but many of our Article Club regulars are people who I’ve met in web3 through various channels. I invited a few people to join after having awesome intro chats with them, and I think connecting with people on a personal level made the discussion group setting feel more comfortable.

2. Our members responded better to less formal ways of suggesting and voting on articles to read for each session. Our current flow is a Telegram group where people can send links and react to them to vote. This seems in line with Article Club being a fairly low maintenance but high value community, although I’d be interested in exploring other kinds of voting methods in the future.

3. Consistency is more important than intensity for our community. Article Club is a biweekly, one hour session, which I think helped maximize the ability for people to participate without taking away from other commitments.

4. There is so much to learn in web3, and hearing other’s firsthand experiences gave me new perspectives on the space. I also appreciated hearing opposing ideas and having healthy debates; it made our conversations infinitely more interesting.

Season 2 of Article Club has already started! We read The New Creator Playbook: Jumpstarting Communities Through Tokens recently, and we’ll be discussing a new article tomorrow, February 4 and Tuesday, February 7! If you’re interested in joining Article Club, send me a message on Twitter.

You can read my article here on the Tally blog! Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter.

UFO

@ufo__club

what if it’s more than a podcast?

24

8:13 PM • Dec 1, 2022

UFO is not just a podcast, it’s a club.

When I first came across the podcast on Twitter a few weeks ago, I was intrigued by the rapid growth that UFO’s Lens account was experiencing. There were collectible NFT drops for the earliest 1000, 3000, and 5000 subscribers (proof on-chain that you were early to UFO), and these milestones were being hit in a matter of days. I checked out the podcast, was interested in the available episodes, and ultimately, I was very curious about what being in the club would entail.

It’s still early days for podcast NFTs. One of the more mature uses I can think of is Rehash, which has NFTs that grant governance rights, are collectibles, and support the podcast. But the vast majority of podcasts don’t have NFTs, and there's no best practice or standard that has emerged yet.

The potential for on-chain podcast communities is huge. On crypto native social networks like Farcaster, I can easily see other UFO NFT holders and follow them. NFTs can serve as proof of listenership, proof of how early you were to a community, and unlock special perks. I often follow or connect with people online because of what they’re building, as this information is fairly accessible since it’s often prominently featured in social media bios. But what if I want to connect with people because of what they’re consuming? That information is really hard to find, but podcast NFTs are a solution. I’m excited to see what UFO and other podcasts do to continue building and innovating their communities.

Today’s recommendation part of the roundup features the first two episodes from UFO. With newer podcasts, I always enjoy listening from the very beginning — it helps me get a sense of the creative direction of the pod and the intention behind the format.

1. Art + Media for Extinction Rebellion — Charlie Waterhouse

UFO | September 28, 2022

About the podcast

UFO is a podcast where (in their own words) “artists, musicians and web3 builders talk about the future.” UFO is hosted by Nick Hollins and produced by voyager. Holders of the UFO Genesis Pass NFT will get access to special content and experiences.

The episode tldr

Episode guest Charlie Waterhouse is the co-founder of the Art Group and Media team at Extinction Rebellion.

1. Extinction Rebellion, also known as XR, is a decentralized movement aiming to catalyze government action in response to the climate crisis across the world. The decentralization aspect is key to the movement’s proliferation, but also makes it difficult to coordinate across countries.

2. Historical counterculture movements were constrained by the speed and distribution of word of mouth and print networks. Today’s technological advancements have created new mental models for gathering and dispersing information to create quicker responses to issues.

3. It’s easier to determine what a movement does not want to see, but harder to create a concrete vision for what people want to achieve. XR has created a central philosophy towards climate action that people have responded to — this interaction is emblematic of what we’re seeing with many DAOs today.

Thoughts from me: decentralized movements, and inspiring action from passion

My perspective is admittedly U.S.-centric, but it seems that the last couple of years have in part been defined by movements of people engaging in collective action towards specific goals. Whether that has translated to non-violent demonstrations, showing up to the polls, or coordinated social media campaigns, it’s become clear that technology is key to generating awareness about issues and injustices, but it’s also key to creating widespread action. The emergence of DAOs as a paradigm for organization and coordination is interesting because the model has led to genuine impact — think of ChoiceDAO or UkraineDAO. But, it’s also constantly evolving.

XR operates on two planes, and this is enabled by their decentralized nature. There’s the philosophical backing of the movement to motivate governments to address the global climate emergency, and there’s the localized groups taking action in the spirit of the movement. XR has groups in over 80 countries, and there’s even a group in Antarctica.

I’m optimistic that as decentralized coordination models continue to mature, our ability to engage in collective action will become easier and more effective.

Listen

Listen here.

2. Making Art, Code, & Lore for Crypto Coven - Nyx

UFO | October 6, 2022

About the podcast

UFO is a podcast where (in their own words) “artists, musicians and web3 builders talk about the future.” UFO is hosted by Nick Hollins and produced by voyager. Holders of the UFO Genesis Pass NFT will get access to special content and experiences.

The episode tldr

Episode guest Nyx is a co-creator of Crypto Coven, which originally began as a PFP collection of WITCHES and has evolved into a world building and lore project with additional NFT collections.

1. Nyx talks about the origin story of Crypto Coven and early work on the aesthetics and code behind the project. One defining aspect of the project is the different WITCH archetypes, which have traits reflected in the metadata of the NFTs as well as generative, unique descriptions.

2. From the original collection of WITCHES, a vibrant community has emerged — The Tree of Echoes solicits stories from community members who further the existing lore. The founding team is also exploring audiovisual and storytelling NFTs, with their newest project The Narrator’s Hut.

3. In the web2 era, creators relied on ad revenue and millions of views to be able to monetize, which led to projects that appealed to generalities and the lowest common denominator. web3 and NFTs have enabled creators to bring more niche and unique projects to life, because people support creators more directly, which makes monetization more feasible even with lower numbers.

Nyx [around 1:05:26]: There’s like a billion people out there on the Internet. You can find 9,000 people that are into your weird thing.

Thoughts from me: IT’S TIME TO GIVE IN TO THE ARCANE!

I’ve been a fan of the Crypto Coven universe for a little bit, but I hadn’t acquired a WITCH because I was looking for one that really resonated with me and was within my budget. A few weeks ago, I finally made the leap!

The conversation that Nyx and Nick had towards the end of the podcast about creator monetization and niche projects reminded me of a great piece by Li Jin called “100 True Fans,” in which she builds off an essay by Kevin Kelly called “1,000 True Fans.” The core premise is that a creator only needs 100 dedicated fans in order to make a living off of their work.

I’m really excited about a future where creators can get weirder and more specific about the kinds of content they want to create, even if it’s unexpected. I don’t think many people’s first associations with crypto or web3 are lore, attuned artifacts, or witches, and yet the success of Crypto Coven is proof that people with all kinds of interests exist in this space.

Listen

Listen here.

Thanks for reading this edition of my podcast roundup series! If you have any recommendations or thoughts on this post, feel free to leave a comment or send them to me on Twitter or Farcaster.

Curating good recommendations has been one of my biggest challenges as a writer because I rely heavily on word-of-mouth and an opaque Twitter algorithm to surface interesting podcast conversations. This works, but it's not as comprehensive as I'd like.

I have been looking for a better approach, so I was excited to come across Alertcaster in a cast by creator Andy Jagoe through my Farcaster feed. The app sends an email alert any time a keyword or phrase you have specified is casted.

Alerts are grouped together with replies, with an email chain consisting of casts from around the same day.

I use Alertcaster to track two keywords: "podcast" and "podcasts." The results have been pretty interesting — over the past two weeks of alerts, the main types of podcast-related casts that I've seen are:

• asking for podcast recommendations

• recommending podcasts or episodes

• discussing the almost 8 hour Balaji Srinivasan conversation on Lex Fridman's podcast

The first two are pretty expected, although I would guess that Farcasters are disproportionately interested in podcasts compared to other communities based on the casts I've seen. The third, however, is fascinating because it's not something I would have noticed within my regular Farcaster feed without Alertcaster aggregating those conversations for me. It's both a reflection of Farcaster's users and the respect they have for the kind of in-depth conversation that Balaji and Lex engage in. These insights are really useful for my writing since I largely write about what I observe, and the amount of interest in the Balaji and Lex episode has given me some ideas for future pieces.

The nature of Farcaster is also key to making Alertcaster work with its current implementation — there are relatively few casts and most of them are high quality. For example, I received 10 emails today for casts that contained "podcast" or "podcasts." I'm curious about how Alertcaster will continue to handle scaling since receiving individual notifications for tens or hundreds of casts a day would be really overwhelming, but it's cool to see steps being taken to solve for this issue such as the recently released daily digest feature.

Going forward, I would love to see more customization options for alert frequency (there are some topics where I'd want to get every cast versus others where I'd be happy with a weekly digest) and the ability to track casts that contain multiple keywords. For the daily digests, I think exploring other ways of prioritizing casts besides comments/recasts/likes could be interesting. For example, I'm especially interested in podcast-related casts that have engagement by web3 media and podcast builders, since it's typically good signal for novel projects or approaches. If I was able to specify certain users and receive a digest that surfaced these types of casts, that would be very useful.

I'm very excited about Alertcaster and appreciate how Andy is constantly looking for feedback from users. If you're interested in checking out Alertcaster, you can direct cast @andyjagoe on Farcaster to get access and visit alertcaster.xyz.

Despite being interested in Paragraph, however, I couldn't justify a switch to the platform for emma's newsletter because I was in the early stages of building the newsletter. Since I was focusing on writing over anything else, token-gating my newsletter seemed like something to implement later down the line.

Paragraph's game-changing feature for me (and why I'm writing here now) is the Farcaster integration. The hardest part about building a community through writing is that there's a gap between where people read my work and where people talk about my work.

emma kwan

@emmekwan

I wrote a post inspired by @She__Fi about why curated educational content that demonstrates crypto's clear, immediate utility is key to successfully onboarding the next one million people into web3. Read it here!

emmakwan.substack.com

Less is more: why information curation is key to web3 onboarding

What I've been thinking about during SheFi cohort 5

148

5:08 PM • Apr 5, 2022

I wrote a piece earlier this year about my experience in SheFi and the importance of curated education in web3 that garnered some great responses on Twitter. People were replying and quote tweeting me talking about their own experiences learning in web3. None of this was reflected in the post itself, and it made me kind of sad because the responses of people reading my article provided perspectives that strengthened my original thesis.

Seeing this feature in action on other people's Paragraph publications still blows my mind, and I am excited to see what the Paragraph team does next.

As for me, I'm looking forward to experimenting with short form content and continuing to exercise my writing muscle with marginalia. I enjoy crafting longer pieces and cramming as much as I can within 280 (or 320) characters, but I've been looking for a home for writing that falls somewhere in the middle.

If you're interested in following along, feel free to subscribe!

My name is Emma, and I’m a college student and an aspiring product manager. I'm very interested in web3, community building, technology, and media, and this newsletter is a place for me to write about current interests, explorations, and work-in-progress thoughts.

You can find me on Twitter, Farcaster, or at emma's newsletter on Substack.

Podcast discovery is so broken

I have been listening to podcasts for over 6 years, and I still can’t really pinpoint a good way to find new podcasts. My method over the years has mostly consisted of hopelessly searching through the Spotify catalog, taking recommendations from friends, and, since joining Twitter, listening to episodes that catch my eye from my feed.

Podcast discovery is really broken, and while it’s not an easy problem to solve, it’s one that’s especially interesting to me. In web3, podcasts remain a criminally underrated medium for intimate and insightful conversations and interviews, and yet I don’t see the same kind of hype for them as articles or tweets.

So, I’m starting this podcast recommendation series to begin distilling what I like in podcasts and what makes a podcast a one-time listen versus a regular part of my week. As I listen to more episodes, I also want to start mapping out the web3 podcast space and understand the dynamics of sharing, recommending, and community.

In the spirit of the medium, I’m recording these newsletters as podcasts so if you prefer to listen to them you can. And, you can listen to the episodes in the roundup on Spotify directly in this newsletter, or if you’re reading this as an email, you can click through to listen.

One note on quotes from the episodes: I try my best to include an accurate timestamp for the Spotify embeds, but the timestamp might not be exact on other platforms.

Today’s roundup has two episodes centered around media and content creation in web3.

1. Media as the fourth estate w/ Steph Alinsug (cryptohun3y)

On The Other Side | September 16, 2022

About the podcast

Host Chase Chapman chats with people from across web3 and explores “the intersection of society, culture, and crypto.”

The episode tldr

Episode guest Steph Alinsug leads media at DAO network and accelerator Seed Club.

Some of my key takeaways:

1. Decentralized media is not decentralized content creation. Developing a brand for a DAO requires a media strategy that is heavily aligned with the value proposition and goals of the DAO. This tends to work better on smaller, centralized teams.

2. Community members can participate in media at the distribution level. If we consider a decentralized media pyramid that involves content creation → content curation → content distribution, the widest opportunity for participation lies in distribution — allowing for people to share and react to content on various channels.

3. The fourth estate refers to the role of the media and press to provide checks and balances on government and legislative powers. In DAOs, media arms can provide context and support for governance and decision-making.

4. Media is at the center of propaganda, polarization, and agency. Any time we engage with a piece of media, we’re engaging in a curated view of the world. However, being aware of this interaction allows us to be more conscious of the narratives and perspectives we are consuming and choosing to incorporate into our own views — and this applies both broadly and in web3.

Thoughts from me: this episode lives rent free in my brain

There are a lot of reasons why I think everyone (especially DAO builders and operators) should listen to this episode, but I initially approached it from the perspective of being interested in the dynamics of content creation and curation. Media is so influential, and I think a common theme that has popped up around DAOs and projects in this space is the struggle of messaging and creating relationships with a community. Like it or not, everything is a brand, and we have dynamic, evolving relationships with every brand we come across.

For DAOs, messaging alignment is so important because in its most ideal form, it encompasses and crystallizes the motivations and aspirations of the community. I’ve been interested in the role of curation in learning and connecting for a while, and I really liked Steph’s perspective on curation as a bridge between community input and media output from a core team. People want to be heard, but people also look for consistency in communication to reinforce ideological alignment. I strongly believe the most powerful DAO media arms will encourage creation and curiosity, and also support their overall vision through curation.

Lastly, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite quotes from the episode. It made me think a lot about my own media consumption and my agency in that process.

Steph [around 29:45]: If we can lean into this idea that everything is story, everything is narrative, and that we can create a sense of consent and agency and choice around how we participate in those narratives, it’s a beautiful thing.

Listen

Listen here.

2. Experimenting With New Media Models in Web3 w/ Daisy Alioto

Rehash: A Web3 Podcast | September 22, 2022

About the podcast

Rehash is a podcast DAO, hosted by Diana Chen. The DAO is made up of Rehash NFT holders, who either acquired their NFT through a crowdfund in April or by purchasing an episode minted as an NFT. Rehash DAO members propose and vote on guests for the podcast.

The episode tldr

Daisy Alioto is the cofounder of Dirt, “a daily(ish) newsletter about entertainment online” that uses NFTs to fund the publication, gather community input for the editorial process, and offer other perks to NFT holders.

Some of my key takeaways:

1. web2 media models are not working — see web3 solutions. Ad supported platforms and algorithms aren’t sustainable for publications. Instead, focusing on community owned models such as Dirt’s, which utilizes NFTs, can help media get funding from multiple sources rather than being solely reliant on subscriptions. Additionally, a person’s on-chain activity can paint a much more accurate picture of their consumer behavior, versus guessing from demographic data.

2. Media and other projects do not need to be about web3 to benefit from web3 infrastructure. Dirt is a web3 native brand, but the content Dirt publishes is largely about pop culture and digital phenomena. web3 tooling can be super useful for all kinds of applications. One example Daisy brings up is web3 music, as the intersection of music and NFTs is talked about a lot. But web3 music is already happening in a substantial way — the song SNAP by Rosa Linn, which gained traction at Eurovision and later charted globally, came out of Nvak Collective, a web3 native record label.

3. All NFT projects need to become media companies, but not everyone can. It takes a certain amount of expertise to know what makes a good story and how to craft compelling narratives. Successful pivots to media will create stronger connections between NFT holders and the project they support.

4. Curation is the key to decentralized media. Through Dirt DAO, Daisy learned that people in the DAO for the most part prefer to be taste-influencers as opposed to creators. The Dirt team presents a handful of curated story ideas and people use weighted voting to pick the piece that gets commissioned.

Thoughts from me: it’s web3, but it’s not web3

First, for full transparency, I’m a Rehash NFT holder.

I subscribed to Dirt after listening to this episode, and I think it’s super cool! I’m very much a pop culture analysis person so their niche is pretty up my alley, but what really stuck out to me about this conversation is Daisy’s views on the role of web3 technology for projects not explicitly about web3.

I had heard SNAP on TikTok before I listened to this episode, and I had no idea that the artist was signed to a web3 native record label. Knowing that now might make the song stand out more to me since I’m interested in the intersection of web3 and culture, but the original reason I knew about the song was simply that it was a catchy song. Labeling your project as ‘web3’ inevitably brings certain connotations for different people, and it’s often as used as a kind of signifier — that the project is part of the cutting edge of innovation, or on the flipside, that it requires more advanced knowledge than the average person knows, or wants to know, about tech. It’s worth considering, especially in the media and web3 space, whether content is quality before getting too caught up in a web3 label.

There are also really cool connections between this episode and Media as the fourth estate because Daisy and Steph both talk about the difficulties of decentralized content creation and how curation solves this problem. Creating connections with community is essential at the curation and distribution layers, but successful community building requires a deep understanding of how media influences narratives and what relationship consumers want to have with the media they consume.

Product-audience fit is so essential, and this quote from Daisy is super interesting when thinking about the community dynamics of Dirt.

Daisy [around 37:34]: This is the core organic behavior that we figured out was the product-audience fit for Dirt, which is people who like to have their taste influenced and people who like to see their taste reflected in what they consume.

Listen

Listen here.

Thanks for reading the first edition of my podcast roundup series! I really enjoyed writing and recording it, and I’m excited to listen to more podcasts. If you have any recommendations or thoughts on this post, feel free to leave a comment or send them to me on Twitter or on Farcaster (@emma).

Based on my personal experiences and conversations with DAO practitioners and contributors, I wrote an article about improving DAO onboarding processes and contribution workflows through the DAO Contribution Funnel, a framework for segmenting the contributor journey into stages to build more engaged communities. You can read it in Tally’s blog here!

Tally

@tallyxyz

DAO builders know...

Cultivating an active contributor community is CRUCIAL to DAO success, but it is NOT easy to do.

Today on the @tallyxyz blog, @emmekwan gives us a handy new tool we can use to grow our communities: The DAO Contributor Funnel.

Read: bit.ly/3rznEGE

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11:47 AM • Oct 4, 2022

This article was published through the Tally Content Guild, a DAO associated with DAO operations platform Tally that facilitates the pitch, publishing, and payment process for articles.

The Content Guild is a really cool example of a decentralized way of approaching content creation. For my article, I submitted an off-chain proposal with my pitch and information to the Content Guild on Tally, and my pitch was voted on and approved. If you look now, you can see my pitch on the Content Guild page!

The media DAO model is becoming more popular with other publications and organizations in web3, and I believe it’s so promising because it’s well aligned with the web3 ethos of transparency, open opportunities, and decentralization. I’m excited to see how this model develops in the future!

You can read more Tally Content Guild articles here.

The thing that struck me most when I was first starting out in web3 was how many avenues there were for learning and consuming information. Take my first time on crypto Twitter — I spent my first 5 minutes on the app scrolling through my feed, frantically bookmarking thread after thread that linked to essential resources for beginners, recommended reading, and countless tips and tricks for evaluating NFT projects. At the time, it felt like knowing everything was essential. If I wasn’t simultaneously reading whitepapers, researching protocols, and learning a little Solidity on the side, what was I even doing? I remember distinctly feeling like if I just buckled down and powered through all of the information I was seeing, I’d go from crypto confused to crypto confident in no time.

Well, things didn’t exactly work out like that. As I found more resources and tried to figure out how I wanted to approach things, I quickly discovered I had more questions than answers. Was I interested in development? DeFi? Did I have enough basic knowledge of crypto to even start on more advanced topics? I was totally overwhelmed.

At the beginning of this year, I decided I needed to take a different approach to my web3 onboarding experience. Instead of wading through an endless pool of resources, I planned to focus my learning on one or two things that interested me the most. I knew this would come with some tradeoffs. I’d have to give up many topics I was interested in, at least for the time being.

Around the same time, I was serendipitously introduced to SheFi, an educational community focused on onboarding women into web3. I was really intrigued. The program was far more structured than anything else I’d seen in the space, and the vibes of the community felt very purposeful and intentional. Still, I was hesitant to put myself out there, and I didn’t apply until the very last day — I decided to just go for it and wrote my answers on the fly that afternoon. In retrospect, this actually helped me not overthink things and speak more authentically about my experience and motivations.

When I received an email letting me know I had been accepted to SheFi’s 5th cohort, I was thrilled.

emma kwan

@emmekwan

so excited to be joining @She__Fi cohort 5!!

shefi.eth (💫,💫)

@She__Fi

We've sent out 200+ acceptances into our 5th SheFi cohort starting at the end of February . Please check your inboxes if you applied. The passion in the applications was palpable. Bullish on this cohort, bullish on the passion coming into web 3.0, bullish on the future

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1:57 PM • Feb 4, 2022

There are many educational web3 communities that focus on onboarding as many people as possible through independent, low commitment, and asynchronous learning experiences. I don’t want to discount their value, but I also think that synchronous, seeing-other-faces education is critical for successfully onboarding people into web3, especially for those who are underrepresented. I think that the more you can curate the initial roadmap for learning, the more effective the experience is for everyone.

If we want to successfully onboard the next one million people into web3, then I believe we need to develop more opinionated curriculums, scope down the resources we deem necessary for newbies, and better understand who is curious about this space and what obstacles they face.

This is my case for information curation, and why less is more when it comes to crypto onboarding.

web3 moves fast

If you’re coming into web3 from a traditional or web2 background, it probably feels like the space is moving faster than you can comprehend. That’s been my experience so far — initiatives I’ve worked on have rolled out comparatively slower than what I’ve seen in web3. In web2, a larger portion of the industry is made up of well established, public companies with thousands of employees. As a result, decisions go up the chain of command, codified processes are followed, and the sheer amount of people that work together means you have a lot of stakeholders and opinions to consider throughout the development lifecycle.  

I don’t view this as a universally negative trait of working in big tech (it definitely depends on the company). I see it more as a reflection of just how fast web3 moves and why we desperately need curated educational content in this space. web3 doesn’t have consensus on how things should be done, and without curation, it’s easy to get lost in the many options available.

A few weeks ago, I had a great coffee chat with a fellow SheFier where we discussed our backgrounds and how we got into crypto. Coincidentally, we both come from web2 product management, and although we both are crypto curious, one of the obstacles we faced coming into web3 was feeling like we couldn’t keep up. Our backgrounds probably exacerbated this — as an aspiring web2 PM, I have never felt the need to get on Twitter and immerse myself in the 24 hour tech news cycle to stay on top of big changes in product trends. On the other hand, with web3, it sometimes feels like there’s something new I need to be aware of every minute, whether that’s a protocol, DAO, NFT project, wallet app, or contract exploit.

Learning with purpose

Based on conversations I’ve had with friends and online discourse I’ve seen, one of the key reasons people aren’t interested in web3 is they don’t understand why they should care about it. Crypto, in non-crypto circles, has a reputation for being harmful to the environment, play money for the uber-wealthy, and riddled with scams and false advertising.

Part of the problem is that web3 as a whole doesn’t value marketers and community managers as much as they value developers, which means that thinking about messaging and accessibility has come much later than building out blockchains and protocols. For non-crypto natives, there are very few clearly communicated reasons to buy crypto beyond speculation, let alone engage with DeFi protocols. The learning curve here is steep, and dedicated efforts to change the narrative about crypto for people unfamiliar with it are few and far between.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that NFTs have such mass appeal — successful projects have entered pop culture and optimized their messaging to convert existing fanbases — think of Jimmy Fallon’s Bored Ape and Dapper Labs’s NBA Top Shot. Among the various subgroups of web3, the NFT space is probably the most successful in onboarding people completely unfamiliar with crypto. But I don’t think this kind of approach can only be used for NFTs.

One aspect of SheFi that I think is really crucial to its success is their focus on Decentralized Finance. With the slogan “Financial freedom is feminine,” much of the program is getting people to understand the basics of DeFi in order to feel more comfortable using a wallet, investing, and ultimately achieving greater economic mobility. As I’ve worked my way through weekly lectures and TA sessions, it’s abundantly clear that Maggie, Porter, and the rest of the SheFi team have created a curriculum that focuses on making crypto immediately accessible and useful. This focus is a key differentiator for SheFi. 

Many of the educational initiatives I’ve seen are focused on teaching the technical basics in order to increase the number of web3 engineers. People are encouraged to participate in hackathons and write smart contracts as a part of their web3 onboarding experience. These educational opportunities are great for people wanting to transition full-time into web3 roles. But, for the vast majority of the general public, without clear and immediate utility, crypto will continue to be a hard sell.

The future is curation

I love the word curation. Curating content isn’t about adding or limiting information, it’s about thinking deeply about the whys instead of the whats. When we curate, we have to consider who is going to be consuming our content and why it will be valuable to them.

Teaching someone something new means ruthlessly prioritizing knowledge you believe is absolutely necessary, giving them enough to fill in the gaps later. It’s about managing expectations while still empowering people, so they can keep up and feel like they belong. I am really excited about web3, and I truly believe that investing in curated onboarding initiatives is key to paving the way for a better, more inclusive crypto community.

I got into crypto in April 2021, which is to say that I was not an early adopter. I don’t even think crypto registered as a concept in my brain until early 2021, when it bled into popular culture and everyone started talking about it. A lot of exciting events were happening at the time — Bitcoin hit an all time high, Coinbase was going public, and when the price eventually crashed, I bought crypto for the first time, completely oblivious to its greater implications.

A year later, I am definitely in a different place than I was last April. I understand more about blockchain, crypto, and web3. I made a Discord account and joined a bunch of servers. I’ve minted a few NFTs. I have a non-custodial wallet. I’ve made a few baby steps on Twitter. I’ve shifted away from thinking about crypto as solely an investment opportunity and more of an entire paradigm shift in how we interact with power and economic structures. But I still feel like a total newbie who hasn’t quite found my “people” in web3 yet, and I think that’s mainly because I have spent my first year in crypto pretty passively participating.

To be honest, even as a digital native, I haven’t always felt very comfortable sharing on the Internet. But I want to change that. There is a lot I don’t know about web3, and a lot that I know I can learn from people and communities if I engage with them. I’ve made a commitment to myself to finally start contributing to this space, even in the smallest of ways via this blog.

I know there are a lot of people new to web3 who are like me, who might be nervous to put themselves out there and haven’t quite figured out how they fit into the web3 puzzle. If that’s you — hello, I’m Emma! And if that’s not you, hello as well! I’m striving to continue learning, listening, and writing this year as I keep exploring web3, and I’d love to connect if you’re also in the space!

Why writing and what the future for me looks like

I’ve always really liked writing, and even dabbled in journalism in high school. But I found a lot of other interests in college, so writing and telling my own stories have taken a backseat to my other ventures, until now. I really enjoy speaking with people, going through the drafting process, and reading (news articles, books, newsletters, you name it!), so it feels pretty natural for me to start here in terms of active contribution to the space.

I’m really excited about reflecting on my own experiences in web3, and also sharing the experiences of the communities I’m a part of. One project I want to take on is documenting the power of community building and shared learning in web3 for underrepresented people, starting with the super cool initiatives that I am a part of. I’ve joined a few women-led initiatives that are aimed at getting women and non-binary people into crypto and they’ve been crucial to making me feel like I belong here.

And further down the line, I want to start contributing to web3 in a product or engineering capacity. Outside of the crypto craze of the last year, I’ve also begun building my career in product (in web2) and gaining more confidence in my development skills. I am super interested in the technical side of web3 (as well as the community development side!) and I’ve already seen so many awesome resources.

But for now, I’m going to focus on the path right in front of me and continue writing and learning. I’m so excited for what’s to come!