I've been trying out a lot of mini-apps on Farcaster lately, just noticing things and hoping to discover something of value somewhere along the way.

One takeaway from my mini-app hopping so far is that modals (and tooltips, which are small modals to me) are my favourite design element in mini-apps at the moment. I'd like to expand a bit on why I think that is.

But first, if by some miracle you're not familiar with mini-apps on Farcaster, then here is a short explainer video before you go on.

Okay, now, I think there are two reasons why modals (and tooltips) come in very handy when designing mini-apps.

The first reason is the nature of the mini-apps themselves. They're meant to be simple, lightweight user interfaces centered around a specific action. Buy a colour on Basecolors, Bid for a QR code on QRCoin, Buy likes and recasts on Amps, and so on. Mini-Apps are not like websites with their complex navigation menus, multiple page spreads, and numerous options for numerous user goals. When I open a mini-app, I'm immediately trying to find out two things:

1. What is this mini-app for?

2. How can I use it for what it's for?

This is where a nice modal comes in. Websites can afford to have the luxury of fully functional, sprawling about pages; mini-apps cannot. Therefore, one of the most common uses for modals in mini-apps is to immediately tell the new user what the mini-app is all about, without disrupting the flow for a user who already knows what they want to do.

A good example of this is the Bracket mini-app shown below. When a user who already knows their way around opens it, they can proceed without interruption. However, if you know nothing about the mini-app, then there's a nice little info button which opens a modal to get you up to speed.

The second reason is something I realised while browsing the Checkr mini-app. Let me put it like this: there are a number of terms that need explaining in these web3 mini-apps, and you typically want a way for the user to get the information they need without disrupting their experience too much.

Checkr is a social analytics tool that tracks "token attention" across Farcaster and Twitter. Already, "token attention" is a term that needs to be explained. What does it mean? How is it calculated? And once you start going down that road, you come across the metrics Checkr measures — metrics like "mindshare," "pulse," "attention," and "influence."

These terms are not hidden away either. A cursory glance at the first page you see when you open Checkr shows that these terms greet you immediately you arrive. And they're everywhere as you explore the mini-app, which makes sense; they're the foundations on which Checkr is built.

But of course, these terms are not limited to the homepage; they're everywhere, and expectedly so.

That leaves us with the question: when a user arrives at Checkr's homepage, a total noob, what is the easiest way to provide them with more knowledge about these terms, thereby empowering them to use Checkr effectively? And how do you do this without interrupting them as they browse the mini-app?

The answer, in my humble opinion, is tooltips. And as you might recall, tooltips are just tiny modals to me.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I hope I have been able to convince and not confuse you with these few arguments of mine that modals (and tooltips) are wonderful when designing mini-apps on Farcaster. And now, some random screenshots of modals in mini-apps.

Lately, I’ve been reading Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom. 

The premise of the book is that modern man faces a serious challenge on account of the fact that he is free. The great problem for modern man, as Fromm sees it, is learning how to live with the burden of freedom. This might come as a surprise to many because we all tend to think of freedom as something positive, something to strive for and experience in all its glorious fullness. 

However, for Fromm, freedom is both a great gift and a great challenge. 

The gift is that you are free, free from the societal expectations and the fixed roles of traditional hierarchies that were prevalent in premodern times. In the modern world, there is no role into which you are born that must define your life, no set path that you are expected to follow simply on account of being born into this family or that family. 

The challenge is figuring out what to do with your life now that you know you are free. This freedom from traditional roles and hierarchies also thrusts all responsibility for your life on you. You must now decide, you must now find your own identity, your own meaning, your own purpose. This is an immense task, and also a very terrifying one, as the individual now realises that everything rests on him. It is in this light that Fromm sees freedom as something burdensome. The task of deciding who you are and what you believe in light of your freedom and so many competing opinions is indeed no easy task and a great burden to bear.

Unfortunately, most people find the burden of freedom too much to bear, and instead of embracing it, they escape from it, so to speak (hence the name of the book). In essence, people trade their freedom in exchange for submission to some ideal or cause or power outside of and higher than themselves. In exchange for freedom, they are provided with a sense of self, purpose, security, identity and meaning by the higher power they’ve chosen to abandon themselves to. Most people reading this will probably immediately realise that this sounds a lot like religion, and of course, this phenomenon is very common among the religious. But it is by no means restricted to the religious. Even among the irreligious, some people look to culture, or peer groups, or social media influencers, or some political ideology to tell them who they are and what to believe and how to live. Just open Twitter and see. 

Fromm would say that these people have found freedom unbearable and have chosen to escape from the burden of freedom by sacrificing their authentic, individual selves. 

II

Fromm spends much of the book discussing all the ways in which people seek to escape from freedom, and something in the section on authoritarianism jumped out at me this morning. Here’s a long-ish quote:

“These considerations refer to an important difference between neurotic and rational activity. In the latter, the result corresponds to the motivation of an activity —one acts in order to attain a certain result. In neurotic strivings, one acts from a compulsion which has essentially a negative character: to escape an unbearable situation.

The strivings tend in a direction which only fictitiously is solution. Actually, the result is contradictory to what the person wants to attain; the compulsion to get rid of an unbearable feeling was so strong that the person was unable to choose a line of action that could be a solution in any other but a fictitious sense.

The implication of this for masochism is that the individual is driven by an unbearable feeling of aloneness and insignificance. He then attempts to overcome it by getting rid of his self (as a psychological, not as physiological entity); his way to achieve this is to belittle himself, to suffer, to make himself utterly insignificant. But pain and suffering are not what he wants; pain and suffering are the price he pays for an aim which he compulsively tries to attain. The price is dear. He has to pay more and more and, like a peon, he only gets into greater debt without ever getting what he has paid for: inner peace and tranquility.” (emphasis mine)

Here, Fromm is describing the reality of those people who try to escape freedom through masochistic avenues with relation to authority. That is, people whose means of escape is to not only turn to a greater power but to belittle themselves and utterly reduce themselves to insignificant gnats compared to this power. 

Like everybody else, these people are trying to find ways to deal with the burden of loneliness and insignificance that arises on account of freedom. They want to gain inner peace and tranquillity and live full and meaningful lives. But, instead of approaching this task positively as Fromm would suggest, they take an approach that I think most would recognise as dehumanising and degrading. 

If you have ever dealt with a relative or loved one who got involved with a cult, you may have noticed this in action before. Oftentimes, the members of a cult belittle and denigrate themselves and practice rituals that cause them to suffer in unbelievable ways to please the leader. They have abandoned the burden of freedom and sought to find meaning, safety, purpose, tranquillity, and inner peace by subordinating themselves totally to the leader and the cause of the cult.

And yet, note that what these people are searching for is common to all human beings. Everyone wants a sense of meaning and purpose, and everyone would love inner peace and tranquillity. The problem is indeed a universal one. The real issue is not with the problem; it’s with the solution that these people have adopted for the problem.

III

This is where I find Henrik Karlsson very useful. In his most recent essay, he writes about an approach to problem-solving that he has touched on now and again in his other writings. The idea is quite simple (and also the title of the essay in question): when facing a complicated problem, don’t try to solve it, try to understand it.

Or to flesh it out a bit more: When faced with a difficult problem, don’t try to solve it. Instead, make sure you understand it. If you understand it properly, the solution will be obvious.

Even just on the surface, this runs counter to the way in which I imagine most people approach problem-solving. It certainly runs counter to the way I approach problem-solving. Typically, when faced with a problem, my immediate reaction is to start thinking of possible solutions and generate a couple of different ideas. Then, eventually, I settle on and attempt to execute what seems like the best solution. 

Rarely do I stop to think about the problem itself and try to understand it. Why does this problem exist? What is the nature of the problem exactly? How did the problem arise? To what class does this problem belong?

In essence, I am not considering what Christopher Alexander would call the context of the problem. Here’s an excerpt from Henrik’s essay on Alexander’s approach:

“It was in Notes in 1964 that Alexander introduced his now-famous idea of form-context-fit. These days, I mostly see it referenced in the phrase product-market-fit—meaning you’ve found a product that consumers are hungry to pay for—but it was originally a broader, deeper, and more interesting idea. Alexander proposed form-context-fit as a way to objectively judge if a design is good. Or, to phrase it differently, form-context-fit is a way for us to judge if a specific solution to a problem is good. And what Alexander said was that a design is good if and only if the form (of the solution) fits the context (of the problem).”

In other words, it is not just enough to arrive at a solution to a problem; the solution needs to be a good solution, it needs to fit the context of the problem. That having a solution to a problem is not enough, and you need a good solution, is actually pretty easy to demonstrate. For example, if my best friend has a headache, I can come up with a couple of solutions. I could decide to behead her, and that would be one way to fix the problem, rather permanently. I could also buy her drugs so that she can get high and not feel the pain anymore. I don’t imagine that any headache is strong enough to stand up to the right dose of cocaine or heroin. Notice that both of these solutions do indeed address the problem (the headache is gone), but nobody reading this — I hope — would consider them good solutions to the problem. 

And the reason they are not good solutions is that they do not fit the context of the problem. We want to cure her headache, but we also want to keep her alive and in good health. We do not want her to become a drug addict either. In other words, the problem is: cure her headache. But the context of the problem is something like: cure her headache in a manner that leaves her whole and with the greatest capacity for living out her life wholly post-headache.

You arrive at good solutions to problems by considering the context of the problem. 

Now, to go back to the masochistic people from Fromm’s analysis above. They have a problem indeed, but they are trying to adopt a solution to the problem that is bad because it doesn’t consider the context of the problem. The so-called solution simply ends up engendering more problems.

What is the problem? It is that they have found themselves to be free individuals. Human beings who can do whatever they want, but with a craving for human things like meaning and purpose, safety and security, inner peace and tranquillity. And because they are free, they have to provide themselves with all these things, no small task.

Now, what is the context of the problem? It is that they are human beings. In order to thrive and flourish, human beings need solutions to these problems that acknowledge their humanity at every level and provide for the seemingly paradoxical nature of some of these needs. We need both community and autonomy, meaningful connections and individual freedom, meaning and dignity, a sense of belonging and individuality.

Given the context of the problem, it is clear that any solution that offers you one thing at the expense of another is going to be a bad solution. And this is precisely what we find with the solution of the masochists as it relates to authority. The external authority offers them a sense of meaning and purpose, but at the expense of their individuality, their freedom, and indeed their sense of dignity. The form of the solution does not fit the context of the problem.

But, more than being a less tedious way of washing, using a machine is also a way of getting back time for myself. You see, this is something technology tends to do very well. Instead of spending hours washing clothes by hand, I can use a machine and be done in 15 minutes. In a sense, every great technological leap has given back time to human beings to reinvest in other areas by making some activity less time-consuming to do.

Take transportation, for example. Horses cut down transportation time by eliminating walking. Cars, trains, and ships eliminated horses, giving us back even more time. And now you can fly from Nigeria to London in less time than it takes to get from one point in Nigeria to another by road. With each of these advancements, people have been able to spend less time on the activity of getting to one place from another, and reinvest that time doing other things.

One idea that I keep hearing these days from proponents of unfettered AI (and technological) advancement is that these things will free up more time for humans, as technology tends to do. But, on a much larger scale than the technologies that have come before. The ultimate hope goes something like this: With robots to do all the menial work and AI to do all the thinking for us, we will have unlimited time on our hands to do whatever we please. A utopia if ever there was one.

Or is it?

Enter: Phones And Social Media

I’m very wary of where we are headed as a species technologically. Yes, the advancement of AI will undoubtedly give us back time as we offload several cognitive tasks to AI. But, perhaps the most important question is this: what are we going to do with all that time?

You see, getting back time is not good in itself. It’s what we do with the time that matters. The people who spend their lives playing video games in a dank basement have a lot of time on their hands. But I suspect that most of us don’t think that they are using it particularly well.

I worry because the last decade or two has seen unprecedented technological advancement. And yet, it seems to me that we have spent a good amount of all the time freed up by those advancements in servitude to our screens and especially to social media. Doomscrolling is a widely recognised phenomenon now, and everyone and their aunt is on Instagram creating picture-perfect, aesthetically pleasing, carefully curated online personas.

We wake up, brush our teeth, and hit the screens (iykyk). And yet, we mostly default to using the worst parts of the online world. There are so many useful and stimulating resources on the web, and it would be great if we all defaulted to consuming those kinds of content, but the reality is that we don’t. Things like porn addiction and online gambling, for example, seem to be at an all-time high, everywhere you look someone is caught in those webs. 

To make matters worse, the problem isn’t limited to clearly harmful things like porn and gambling. Take Social Media, for example, People no longer know how to communicate courteously or live in community with people of differing opinions because social media is conditioning us for extreme speech and behaviour every day (looking at you, Twitter). Social bonds are breaking down, reality and truth are fracturing, and even basic human kindness/decency is fast being thrown out the window.

Admittedly, there is a sense in which you could say that all this is down to agency. After all, anybody can choose what to do with their time. And that is true. You can choose to scroll Instagram or read Shakespeare in your free time, it’s completely up to you. This is true, clearly.

But, as a designer, I’m always thinking about the fact that people tend to act in the ways the systems they’re involved in have been designed to incentivise them to act. For example, it’s easy to say, “just don’t use social media,” but in a world where career opportunities and advancements seem to accrue to the more socially visible people will continue to use social media despite its adverse effects. Could we design a better internet that promotes healthier behaviour? I believe so, I really do, but that is not what we have right now. What we have right now is this internet of hyperreal and vitriol.

And the algorithm makers — the overlords of this new regime — realise that this dysfunction is profitable, and so they pump it into our feeds by the bucket load. Twitter is toxic, yes, but have you considered that maybe that place is optimised for toxicity because toxicity is lucrative and they know it? 

So, yes, people could decide to do better things with their free time. But it’s not surprising that so many people choose to do these self-destructive things, it’s the way the world we live in and the internet we have has been designed, unfortunately.

A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I walked into the church behind a young man, and so we sat next to each other. As soon as he settled into his seat, he brought out his phone, cleaned the screen, opened Twitter and began scrolling. That young man’s behaviour really surprised me. I would have assumed that there were still sacred places left, places where we walk into and immediately realise that our doomscrolling is off limits here because we are in the presence of something important. And I’m not just talking about religious institutions, even classrooms are suffering the same fate. Ted Gioia’s essay, What’s Happening to The Students, features a desperate plea from an American teacher, and in it she says:

First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in…. They’re not there.

And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work in this area and is constantly pointing out the pitfalls of giving children smartphones when they’re young, especially given the adverse effects that constant smartphone usage can have. If I were to summarise Jonathan’s work, I might do it with this short video. An entire generation sacrificed at the altar of doomscrolling for parental convenience.

Now, before I get too off course talking about phones and social media, I want to remind us what I think the problem is. The claim is that as we offload more human activities to AI, we will have more time to do whatever we want. The problem, as I see it, is that the way we spend our free time right now is incredibly unhealthy. So, there is every reason to imagine that should we have more free time on our hands, we will end up spending that time on unhealthy things, and that’s not a good thing. Having free time is not de facto good, having free time and spending it well is.

In essence, the AI believers are saying: “Once we have time on our hands because we don’t need to work anymore, we will enter a utopia of sorts where people can do whatever they want.”

And I’m saying: “Well, there’s no reason why this doesn’t lead to a dystopia instead. Because, when we’ve had time given back to us lately, we’ve ended up spending that time on bad things. Who says we won’t spend all our AI-generated free time doing even more unhealthy things and eventually ruining ourselves?”

But this is not the only problem.

But What Will People Do?

As we have seen, one problem with the “AI will give us time to do what we really want” rhetoric is that we are not making the best use of the time we do have right now. There are no guarantees that we will make better use of the free time AI will free up.

The other problem, and perhaps the more important one, is how we get to this utopia of endless free time. What needs to happen, as I understand it, is that AI needs to get sufficiently good at all the things humans do currently, in order to leave us with nothing to do. Or as Paul Graham recently so eloquently put it in a recent exchange with Garry Tan:

Paul Graham

@paulg

Weeel, the difference is that inventions like the steam shovel performed just one task that had been done by humans. If you invent something that can perform every task done by humans, the results may be different.

1,786

11:17 • 9 May 2025

The question is pretty straightforward: if you invent something that can do everything humans do, what will humans do? I’m yet to come across a convincing answer.

And perhaps worse is that there are people in places of power who have a say in the development of this technology who don’t think it’s even a question worth asking. They just take it for granted that things will keep chugging along as they always have. People like Garry Tan.

Disclaimer: I like Garry a lot.

Ultimately, I think that Garry makes a mistake that a lot of AI enthusiasts seem to be making right now: they think of AI as an enhancer, like all the other tech that has come before. Improving one or multiple areas of life, but never usurping the uniquely human component of doing things completely.

For example, the digital calculator was a massive upgrade on the abacus as a device for manipulating numbers. It made it possible for anyone to do relatively complex calculations on the fly, it enhanced the mathematician’s ability to do calculations, but it did not completely usurp the mathematician’s role and start doing math by itself.

Generally speaking, if you think about any technology we have created until now, it falls into this category of enhancer. They enabled us to do much more in conjunction with the technology than we could have done on our own. The combination of smartphones and Google is one of my favourite examples. Google practically indexed all the world’s information, and smartphones made it possible to carry that index in our pockets while walking around. It’s like having a second, gigantic brain in your pocket, making it possible to find out almost anything on the fly. But Google did not replace thinking. You could access information relevant to whatever question is on your mind, but you still had to think about it, to synthesise it yourself, with your own brain.

Your brain + Google = Superpowers.

AI is not like that at all. AI is not an enhancer, it’s a replacer.

In Katie Hafner’s book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which documents the development of modern computing from its earliest days, she writes:

The SAGE system inspired a few thinkers, including Licklider, to see computing in an entirely new light. SAGE was an early example of what Licklider would later call the “symbiosis” between humans and machines, where the machine functions as a problem-solving partner.

Implied in this symbiotic relationship was the interdependency of humans and computers working in unison as a single system. For instance, in a battle scenario, human operators without computers would be unable to calculate and analyze threats quickly enough to counter an attack. Conversely, computers working alone would be unable to make crucial decisions. 

J. R. C. Licklider was one of the pioneers of the modern computing paradigm at ARPA (now known as DARPA), he was also an eminent psychologist before he switched his interests from human behaviour to computers. There is perhaps no one better placed to explain how the relationship between humans and computers was viewed at the time, and that is how he saw it: interdependency, symbiosis, a man-machine partnership. 

But that quote also explains what is going to be different about AI if you look closely. For the most part, Licklider has been right: computers can’t make crucial decisions. Even today, in modern warfare, where the role of computers has grown and grown, it’s still human beings who make the final and crucial decisions, albeit heavily influenced by what the computers say.

But. AI is going to be able to make crucial decisions. Eventually, I imagine that it will not just be possible but more efficient to hand over more and more of the decision-making processes in warfare to AI. Just as everywhere else, we will hand over more and more of most — if not all — kinds of processes to AI. Computing, engineering, marketing, you name it. Humans will, I think, mostly be replaced by this thing. 

However, I think I understand the Garry Tans of this world. We’re currently at a stage of AI development where it does act like an enhancer, and I think that is part of the confusion. Right now, the most common uses of AI are alongside human beings. As copilots in the process of writing code, for example, or, my personal favourite, as a research assistant while studying some topic or writing an essay (like this one). AI assistants are everywhere, and it might be lulling us into the idea that that is all this tech will ever be.

But we know that is not true, and there are signs already on the horizon. The Studio Ghibli mania a few weeks ago was a case in point. ChatGPT’s ability to generate Studio Ghibli type characters completely takes the animator out of the process. What might happen if we get to the point where an OpenAI model can create feature-length Ghibli-style animated movies from start to finish? At that point, it’s not just the animator being replaced, but the entire apparatus necessary for making a Studio Ghibli film today. Everyone, from animators to directors, will be completely replaced.

But this will not happen only to the good people at Studio Ghibli; it will happen to all of us eventually if the AI prophets are to be believed. It’s already happening to software engineers, soon AI doctors, nurses, customer service reps, product managers, graphic designers, and on and on.

And this won’t be a glitch, it’s all part of the plan. Listen to the language of utopia hopefuls: “AI will give us infinite free time because it will free us from ever having to do anything.” 

YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO DO ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. NEVER.

Isn’t that just wonderful?

It seems like a great vision, but to me, that just reads like a threat. What are human beings if they do not do things? To do is an integral part of what it means to be a person. To try, to fail, to be challenged, to be stretched and pushed beyond your limit by a task, all these are not accidental to being a human being; they are essential.

To quote Dorothy Sayers here:

I have already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.

And if Dorothy is too preachy for you, here is secular minimalist Joshua Becker expressing pretty much the same sentiment:

Whether by creation or evolution, humans are designed to work. This is an important part of our nature. It explains our drive to grow as individuals and as a society. It explains the internal satisfaction we experience when completing a task. It makes sense of the positive emotions we experience when resting after a hard day of work.

Maybe my inability to see what humans do in an AI-saturated future is a failure of imagination on my part. Maybe with all the things we do now taken over by AI, we will find new things to do. I don’t imagine humans just lazing about in leisure forever after all. There are so many possibilities right now and the future is not clear at all.

However, just like we now have an internet that might have been better designed if we’d pursued a different set of principles years ago, so we now have an emerging technology that will definitely define the future, and the set of principles we choose in developing it now have to be the best we can possibly choose. I do not think that approaching human happiness by trying to make it unnecessary for human beings to do things is the best approach to take.

In Conclusion

Let us pray.

I think that the point of design is to take something people want and make it intuitive and delightful for them to use.

Paul Graham always says, "make something people want." It's a great maxim. Where design comes in is in the making, so to speak. Design takes certain principles and applies them to the making of the product to make sure that when the user gets it, they find that they can use it, and that they enjoy using it. After all, something people want can be made shoddily and put off the very people who might have otherwise used it.

The reason to place a premium on this in a highly competitive world is quite obvious to me. Take a random example: say bats. Everyone can sell bats, but if I make the best bats, and I have the best bat-selling process, I'm likely to have a better bat-selling business because the odds are that customers gravitate towards the better product and process.

The classic example of this is Apple of course. We all know why Apple became the most valuable technology company in the world. Other companies made phones, but when you hold an iPhone, it feels different, better, like it's more than a phone. The designers at Apple HQ did all they could to make the best phone, to make something they knew users wanted, and to make it easy and delightful for them to use. Samsung makes phones, Nokia did, even Google makes phones now. And yet, none of these companies have been able to recreate that special feeling that comes from holding an iPhone.

Okay, enough design yapping for now.

What is first principles thinking? It is simply an approach to problem-solving that begins with the most fundamental facts or principles about the problem space and goes from the ground up in constructing a solution to the problems.

I could attempt an explanation of first principles thinking but I think Elon Musk does a better job than I could do here.

So, Design From First Principles?

Here's a definition of Design I found on the Strate website:

Generally speaking, it is the process of envisioning and planning the creation of objects, interactive systems, buildings, vehicles, etc. It is user-centered, i.e. users are at the heart of the design thinking approach. It is about creating solutions for people, physical items or more abstract systems to address a need or a problem. 

So, basically, design is about making the best possible solution to a particular problem that a particular user has (or a particular group of users have).

Of course, here I am especially concerned about digital design, or what is usually referred to as product design (or UI/UX design). The definition above still applies but this time there is a constraint. It's about designing digital products that are the best possible solution to a user's problems.

So, how can I approach designing digital products from a first principles approach? Well, I imagine that a number of things need to go into the process of designing for a digital audience.

First, you have to actually identify what the user's problem is. Then, you have to create something that you think solves that problem (using, I imagine, certain principles about how to create such solutions). Then, you have to give it to the user to use and see if it solves their problems. And rinse and repeat if it doesn't solve their problem as well as it should.

This is of course, another way of summarising what is usually known as the design thinking process, and I did not even realise that until I was halfway into the paragraph.

If I'm right, trying to get a foothold in the world of digital design would encompass thinking about certain questions over and over.

How do I determine what the user's problem is?

How do I create solutions to that problem?

How do I get the user to use the solution I've create?

How do I get feedback from the user to see how I can further improve the solution?

Oddly enough, I can't quite remember one of them. But the other was talking to Kenny about how communities make decisions and execute the results of those decisions onchain. Somehow, we started out talking about AirSwap and ended up talking about decentralised decision making.

Chukwuka Osakwe on Warpcast

airswap is decentralised and it wasn't about wrapping tokens. what is going on?

Farcaster

I realised it was a deja vu moment when Kenny sent me his essay on the launch of the Pics Or It Didn't Happen v2, and why that launch matters for the future of onchain communities. I knew I'd read this essay before, and seeing as Kenny only shills it when discussing this particular issue, I figured we'd had this conversation before.

poidh v2

Happy New Year! For us, 2023 will forever be remembered as the year that poidh went from an idea to a fully formed dapp with users, fans, and real ec...

https://paragraph.xyz

Pics Or It Didn't Happen

Pics Or It Didn't Happen (POIDH, henceforth) is a web3 bounty platform. People post bounties that they want someone to do, and anyone can carry out the bounty and get paid by uploading a picture proving that they've taken the required action (hence the name).

Here is a simple example.

Imagine that I want someone to eat a green apple while standing in the Eiffel Tower.

I post a bounty on POIDH with the appropriate description, and some amount of money that will be the reward, let's say 0.1ETH. Anyone, anywhere, can take a picture of themselves eating a green apple in the Eiffel Tower and upload it to the bounty page as proof of completion. The bounty creator, on verifying that the picture meets all the necessary criteria then releases the funds to the person.

Other people who are interested in the apple-eating endeavour can also add funds to the reward pool to increase the total amount of money payable to the eventual winner. Those who add funds to the pool also get to be involved in the voting process to pick the winner in this scenario. Since there are more people involved than just the bounty creator, everyone who has put in funds gets a say in deciding the eventual winner.

Vamos Atleti

So, I made a bounty.

Pretty much everything I do in web3 these days is somewhat football-oriented and this bounty was as well. It was simple enough, I just wanted someone to post a picture of an Atletico Madrid jersey with their Farcaster handle on the back of it.

I reasoned that the bounty had to be somewhat difficult to complete because the longer it ran, the more opportunity I had to get people to add funds to the rewards pool and increase the payout to the eventual winner.

Chukwuka Osakwe on Warpcast

per last conversation with kenny, a /poidh bounty for the football channel. post a picture of an atleti jersey with your farcaster handle at the back of the jersey to win some bounty money. > anyone can add funds to the rewards pool to increase the total reward and make it likelier that this bounty gets claimed. let's go and vamos atleti! https://warpcast.com/kenny/0xc0acbc72

Farcaster

Finding an Atletico Madrid jersey seemed hard enough, but one with a Farcaster handle on it? That is something that has to be made from scratch. As difficult a football-related bounty as I could think of.

In retrospect, I should have gone with just an Atleti jersey. Requiring the jersey to be made from scratch meant that there had to be enough reward money to cover the cost of making the jersey and then some more left over. Otherwise, it would make no economic sense for someone to go out of their way to make this jersey.

In the end, we had to go with just an Atleti jersey and the person's name on the back, no Farcaster handle. But, you know, you live and you learn.

Some Thoughts Then

LOOPHOLES. The first thing that surprised me was that immediately the bounty was posted, a couple of entries came in. Apparently, some people had created AI-generated images and submitted them to the bounty page.

I thought about it for a few moments and decided, hey, this is actually legit. Nowhere in the bounty did it say that the jersey had to be an irl jersey, and these guys tried to take advantage of that loophole. Of course, I meant for it to be an irl jersey, but my description didn't sufficiently capture that intent, and these people tried to seize on that loophole. Fair play to them.

This made me think about smart contracts as law. The appeal of smart contracts, I'm told, is that it is code and it will always execute when the criteria are met, no need to trust a middleman when you use a smart contract. And yet, I've always thought about how this means that you have to nail down even the slightest details when describing what criteria need to be met for a contract to be executed. And in an age of AI, LLMs, prompting, and NLP, that is even more important, I imagine.

I think about a possible future where POIDH claims are automatically evaluated by AI. You'd better be extra careful when wording your bounty (or prompting AI to write it for you). All your prize money could be captured by a smart guy somewhere, ready to exploit loopholes. Maybe we will see MEV bots for POIDH bounties at some point.

DECENTRALISATION. If you read the cast thread above, then you know that one of the things Kenny and I talked about was the kind of centralisation that comes about in DAOs when funds are concentrated in a multisig and the DAO depends on a few people to execute their decisions with funds from the multisig.

POIDH circumvents that centralisation by making it possible for groups of people to pool funds and get things done onchain together. Kenny and I put funds into the pool (but anyone could have joined) to incentivise people to complete the bounty. When a valid entry comes in, the bounty creator can trigger a vote which everyone who has put in funds can participate in to determine if the entry passes muster and wins the bounty.

Everyone who puts funds in is entitled to a vote proportional to how much funds they have put in. Say we have a total of $100 in the bounty reward pool and 5 people have contributed $20 each to the pool. They all receive equal voting rights (20%) based on the proportion of their contribution to the entire pool.

Once the bounty creator triggers the voting process for a verified claim, there is a voting period for the contributors to vote on the claim. All a claim needs to pass is to receive greater than 50% of the votes that are cast in this period. That means that even if certain contributors don't vote, it doesn't matter, as long as the claim receives more than 50% of the votes that are cast.

I don't know if this is the final boss of decentralising community action onchain, but it's a start. And it's a great start because I do agree with Kenny. The multisig model of communal action always seemed very trusting to me. It's the same old centralised, let's-absolutely-depend-on-a-small-group-of-people-with-the-real-power model all over again. We need to evolve.

SCALE. I'm very interested in seeing how POIDH handles scale as it gets bigger. I suspect that one of the reasons that DAOs eventually default to the multisig model of decision-making is scale. When you have hundreds of people in a DAO (or any kind of group, really), it is usually the case that some people are way more active than others and that decision-making and execution tend to eventually end up in the hands of the few.

Will it be the case, maybe, that as larger groups of people start to use POIDH that it becomes a lot more centralised than it is at the moment? Imagine a Farcaster channel posting bounties and all members of the channel chip in to fund the pool, which gives them voting powers. But when it comes time to actually vote, how many people will be involved in that process? Especially if evaluating the validity of claims requires some level of focus, attention, and expertise. If you have hundreds of people in the channel and the channel needs to decide on something design-related, it makes sense to leave the details of that decision in the hands of a few people who have extensive design expertise.

I imagine that eventually, it will only be some people who are invested enough to go through claims and validate them, and it is they who will vote, and eventually, we're right back where we started: centralisation.

In Conclusion

Few things irk me as much as a web3 product re-inventing the wheel. We desperately need to go in new directions, to invent new paradigms, to try out new ideas, to see how we can get closer to enabling the kind of world this technology promised to deliver on those cypherpunk mailing lists.

I'm always excited to run into and support anyone trying to do something new, and Kenny is trying to do something new with POIDH. Check him out, check POIDH out, support him, give him feedback, and godspeed to us all.

kenny 🎩 (@kenny) on Farcaster

intersubjective mechanism design @ poidh.xyz - come chill /poidh + follow @poidhbot

Farcaster

Commit is, in the words of its founder, "an onchain accountability protocol." The idea is for people to commit to things onchain openly and transparently, but also for these commitments to cost you something if you fail to keep them.

rev on Warpcast

reintroducing /commit — an onchain accountability protocol your commitments should mean something and there should be a cost to not keeping your word.

Farcaster

Think of commitments like the Ethereum Proof-Of-Stake mechanism. In PoS you stake some money to get the opportunity to validate Ethereum transactions and earn rewards, but, if you default on your duties as a validator you lose some of the funds you've staked as a punishment. The staked funds are incentives for you to follow through on your commitment to be a validator.

Likewise, with Commit, you can create or join a commitment onchain by putting up some amount of a token decided by whoever created the commitment, and should you not follow through on your commitment, you lose your funds. So, I can make a commitment and set an entry fee of 300 Higher for anyone who wants to join the commitment. There is a set timeframe to fulfil the obligations of the commitment and failure to meet those obligations within that timeframe means you lose the money you put up to join the commitment. Pretty straightforward

Last week I created a football channel focused commitment to try and get people to watch La Liga games. I think the channel is too EPL-centric (and the conversations tend to center on the Big 6 teams), so I'm always trying to diversify the conversation. I want the channel to be a home for all football discussions, La Liga, MLS, Serie A, whatever league!

The commitment itself was pretty simple. Stake 300 Higher (about $3 at the time of writing) and commit to watching at least one La Liga game during matchday 25 of the ongoing La Liga season (this past weekend).

Commit App

Commit Protocol is an accountability protocol designed to incentivize participants to join and commit to various activities such as showing up at events, fitness challenges, product milestones, and more.

https://www.commit.wtf

Unfortunately, it didn't catch on this weekend. Only Ash joined the commitment for the weekend, and I'll have to try again. Maybe I need to play around with some variation of some of the commitment parameters to see if this is a viable route to getting more people to watch non-EPL leagues. For example, if the reward pool were potentially larger (say an entry fee of 10,000 Higher), would people be more interested? I don't know, we'll see.

If you're reading this and you are part of the Football channel and interested in watching more La Liga games (or Serie A or Bundesliga etc), by all means, let me know what you think.

My La Liga commitment may not have taken off but, I did enjoy the process and I have some thoughts about Commit and what they're trying to achieve.

I think that Commit is going to be another interesting tool for like-minded individuals and communities to coordinate around shared goals onchain. Communities especially, I think will eventually find this a useful tool. Right now, it's mostly individuals creating commitments and getting other like-minded people to join them.

But, I can imagine commitments created by a channel on Farcaster with funds from the channel wallet, and other channels can join the commitment if their members vote to do so (voting done with Ponder of course). It's really up to anyone to imagine what can be done using this tool as long as more than one entity wants to collaborate on something and keep each other accountable for their end of the bargain. It's basically an onchain escrow for shared goals.

Of course, the process of making and executing a commitment is far from perfect right now.

One problem right now is how to verify that people have fulfilled the terms of a commitment.

Right now the verification mechanism is centralised. It depends on the creator of the commitment to manually verify that the participants fulfilled their commitments. Not only does this leave a lot of work on the creator's table, but it also makes it easy for people of ill intent to falsify credentials and claim to have done things they didn't do. (There is also a self-verification mechanism, but again, there's no way to ascertain that people did the things they claimed they did).

One way to address this problem might be to use the "pictures or it didn't happen" approach and require people who commit to provide pictures proving that they followed through on their commitments. Some commitments have already been created that require this kind of proof, but the functionality is not baked into the Commit website's tooling as of right now. 

This doesn't solve situations where one might need to verify commitments for which getting pictures as proof is not exactly feasible.

A good commitment where this problem shows up is the Higher Self commitment. The brief is to pick a skill you want to get better at and get better at it over a certain period. I read that brief and it immediately occurred to me that there are ways to get better at a skill by doing things you can't exactly provide pictorial evidence for. Say I want to get better at reading, for example, I can read books but how do I prove that I read them? Especially if, like me, you like reading physical books. I could just take a picture of a stack of books I read and upload that but how can anyone be certain that I read all those books?

And even in the case of pictures, there is also the problem of verifying that the pictures are not fake, possibly AI-generated or copied from elsewhere (maybe this is where the Roc camera comes in?).

I do believe that we will get better at figuring out how to verify real-world actions onchain in a decentralised and trustworthy manner, and I'm excited to see how that happens.

There is also the issue of incentives.

Right now the incentive for joining a commitment is simply that you are on board with the goal the commitment is aimed at and you'd like some mutual accountability as you pursue the goal. There is, of course, the possibility that some people default on their commitment and that those who follow through receive shares of the stake put up by the defaulters.

There is also the fact that anyone can add funds to the reward pool of a commitment to further incentivise people to commit along those lines. So, if KMac creates a commitment, say, to get people to eat four candy bars every day for two weeks. Even if I don't join this commitment, I can add funds to the reward pool to further incentivise excessive candy-eating on the Farcaster network.

In essence, there aren't some crazy, speculative, potentially incredibly enriching token incentives to commit to things. It's just intrinsic motivation + the possibility of extra rewards from generous donors or commitment defaulters. I like this model because it bucks the current trend in crypto of gravitating towards products with outsized financial returns but incredible volatility (aka memecoins).

In a time when everyone seems to be looking to make a ton of money, it's refreshing to see a product that's aimed at solving something that is a real problem in a non-speculative way.

Commit to something today.

Higher. ⬆⬆⬆

I am currently trying to get into a proper design career, and I am finding it terrifying because I am always afraid of doing new things. I like staying on the beaten path and doing things I am familiar with. With new things there is a very good possibility that you end up failing, or worse, looking like a fool.

But this year I am trying more and more to go after the things that I find interesting, to try stuff. With this attempt to make a career out of designing, I feel so much anxiety, more than anything else I've done this year. I worry about everything, I worry that I will fail eventually. I worry that whatever I am working on right now is crap. I worry that I will embarrass myself, and so on. 

But I find that I feel a lot more anxious when I'm doing nothing. I feel a lot more anxious when I'm on my bed, tossing and turning, and dreaming up all the different ways I could fail. My anxiety is at a fever pitch when I'm away from the work itself and doing anything and everything except working. And what's so interesting is that this anxiety makes it harder to do anything. You worry that you will fail —> so you don't work —> then you worry more that you will fail and that you aren't working —> so you don't work —> and on and on.

These days I find that all it takes to quiet those voices is to do some work. That's all. Whenever I open my laptop, and break out Figma (or whatever tool is relevant to the work at hand), and begin to do the work, step by agonising step, the voice of anxiety fades away. Maybe it's because I'm too focused on the task at hand to worry about anything else, but whatever the reason, I find that if I put in a certain amount of work in a day, I find it a lot more difficult to be in that constant anxiety. It's so amazing, literally. The hack is to do something, just do something. 

I now regret every idle moment I spent worrying instead of working. That's precious time I will never get back, but not to worry, I hope to do better at navigating this in the future. And you can too.

Do something today. Whatever it is, try, do something.

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect

There is a principle in design known as the aesthetic-usability effect.

In a nutshell, this effect posits a strong correlation in a user's mind between how aesthetically pleasing a product is perceived to be and its functionality. When users encounter a product, they are likely to consider the more aesthetically pleasing products as more functional and easier/better to use. This perception exists regardless of how easy using the product is.

For those who work in Design, there are, broadly speaking, two takeaways from this effect when building products.

Firstly, when testing products it is useful to keep in mind that the user might be giving feedback about your product based on its aesthetics and not its usability. You want to eliminate this. When you're testing, you want to surface possible issues with the product. If the users are more focused on the colour scheme than the user experience, then that interferes with their ability to give you meaningful feedback about what using the product is like.

In this instance, for example, the designers would be wrong to think that everything is okay with the website because the participant complimented the colour scheme. When testing products, you want to ask questions that make the user think about their experience and not necessarily about the aesthetics. This is important, because, it is often easier for users to give feedback about the visual design than about their experience as visuals are easier to evaluate. To avoid this, you can do things like structure your questions to elicit an answer about the experience. For example, instead of asking general questions like, "how did you find using the website?" Ask something more specific like, "did you find the information you wanted to find easily?"

Secondly, when you roll out the product, you want to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. Once a product is in the wild, it needs one thing more than anything else: user retention. If there is anything that can make the user more likely to keep using the product, do it. And as we all know intuitively, humans are drawn to visually pleasing things, and websites are no exception.

My favourite example of this effect is probably SoundCloud. I will keep using the SoundCloud app no matter how bad it gets because I love its aesthetic. I can't listen to lots of the songs I love on SoundCloud because they aren't available in my region. And over time, the vibrant community of underground musicians who I mainly used the app to keep in touch with have either gone mainstream and moved on from the platform or stopped making music altogether. But, I think SoundCloud is pretty, so I keep it around and now and then I open it and give it a spin.

So, there you have it — the aesthetic-usability effect.

But, this essay is not about this design principle, at least not directly. It's about a similar effect that I have noticed in web3. An effect I could not fully articulate until I started reading about the aesthetic-usability effect. It's something I'd like to call: the financialisation-usability effect.

Anyone who has been in web3 for any length of time knows that the user experience of products in this industry is not good. Or, at least, it's not yet as good as the user experience of web2 products. If you're familiar with web3, then you're probably thinking about one of those experiences right now, a specific experience with some dApp, maybe an NFT platform, or possibly a web3 game. As Samantha Marin wrote in this essay for Bankless DAO, "we've made the internet hard again".

When I first got into this industry a few years ago, I remember being very interested in DeFi and trying to use a couple of the DeFi services at the time. And the user experience was so bad I eventually abandoned DeFi altogether. My web2 brain (at the time) could not believe the amount of complexity I had to handle to, say, become a liquidity provider for the average DeFi project.

This is a screenshot of the typical DeFi landing page I landed on while trying to understand the inner workings of DeFi. Picture being a total newbie to the space and landing on a page like this. What are you supposed to understand by looking at this page? Okay so I need to swap some tokens, why? Which tokens? What comes next?

Everything about that page assumes that I know something about the way tokens work before I arrive there. That is an awful user experience, your homepage is literally supposed to hold the hands of your visitors and walk them through your product.

In contrast to that, look at the landing page for the AirSwap OTC trading service. Immediately you land on this page you know it's for one purpose only: trading tokens. All the information you need to successfully execute a trade is spelt out clearly on the page

Even something as basic as setting up a wallet, without which you cannot function in web3, is a tedious experience for newbies.

And even for those who have been in this industry for a while, we discover new user experience inefficiencies every other day. For example, I don't use Metamask for Hypersub subscriptions. Why? Because when you subscribe to a Hypersub, you get an NFT that represents that subscription (basically a receipt in NFT form). This ensures that when the owner of the Hypersub adds new items (drops) to their collection, they automatically show up in the wallet of subscribers. But, as I came to realise, Metamask is bad at surfacing NFTs. You have to manually "import NFTs" to view them in Metamask, never mind that these are NFTs that you already own! So, if I subscribe for a Hypersub, and the owner sends out five NFTs this week, I have to go to my Metamask wallet and manually import these NFTs by filling in some info before they can show up in my wallet. Insane.

And, yes, I know no one should be using Metamask anymore, but Blockworks reported that Metamask had about 30 million monthly active users in January 2024. That's a pretty significant number for such a bad wallet.

But, all is not doom and gloom, at least not in my opinion.

I think that we have come a long way in trying to solve these UX problems since I first joined web3. For example, I now use Rainbow for Hypersubs and Rainbow arranges my NFTs neatly for my consuming pleasure. (Overall Rainbow is a better wallet experience than Metamask and it's not close).

However, the fact remains that using the average web3 product is much more challenging than using its web2 counterpart (if one exists). It's far easier to set up a new Twitter or Reddit account than to set up one on Farcaster for example. (These days I can get a new Reddit account up and running in less than five clicks).

Now, with the bad state of web3 UX in mind, we can attempt to try and understand what the financialisation-usability effect is. To explain it, I would like to restate the aesthetic-usability effect more crudely as follows: to a certain extent, users tend to overlook the functionality issues a product has if they find it aesthetically appealing.

In the same vein, the financialisation-usability effect can be defined like this: to a certain extent, users tend to overlook the functionality issues a product has if they find it financially rewarding enough.

In the same way that people overlook UX problems if they find the website pretty enough, users in this industry can (and do) overlook whatever issues may exist with the product if the promise of financial reward is high enough. A very good place to see this in action is to lurk in the Discord servers of new projects, especially when the market is in a bull run and there is capital sloshing around. Without fail, most of the people who start using a product and become active on Discord tend to be people who are positioning themselves to benefit from the product eventually by being an early adopter. Whenever I was on one of those channels, I frequently found myself asking: how can these people tell who their users really are? Are they doing interviews with this play-for-pay crowd? And if yes, how can they trust the insights from this crowd?

Or, consider the business model behind NFTs. Why did people pay insane money for pfp NFTs at some point? Was it because a new digital art revolution that would undo the chokehold of physical art on the art market had come into its own? Or was it because people realised that they could easily make money buying and selling these pictures? Your guess is as good as mine.

I remember reading statements by founders of pfp NFT projects promising that they would find a way to create "value" for NFT holders. The value? Well, Moonbirds sent some branded merch to people who held on to their NFT for certain lengths of time. Other NFT projects sent their holders free NFTs when they launched a new collection and so on. Very little value for the amount of money spent on these NFTs all things considered. The only value the holders cared about was making bank when they sold them at much higher prices than they bought them. End of story.

The same questions arise: if the people in the NFT industry are mostly in it to make profits and go home, why should they care about the experience if they can make money despite that? If everyone is so focused on making money, aren't they going to ignore whatever problems exist as long as they are making money?

During the NFT mania, I read several essays detailing existing problems with NFTs like this one by Koos Looijesteijn and this one by Moxie (ironic I know, there's a coin named Moxie on Farcaster now). Both of them raised serious technical issues with NFTS as they existed then like:

Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.

Or:

NFTs (as they’ve been popularized) don’t even have any data in them about the object they’re referring to. Used in the context of artwork sales, they only contain an URL to the artwork, but not even a hash of the original file. The owner of the server that the URL points to can change the file behind that URL at any time. If the domain owner decides to doing something else with their site, the NFT just contains a link to something else than at the time of sale, which, in time will be a 404 page at best.

But did anyone care about these concerns as long as they could make money from NFTs? Of course not.

I think the problem is this: because web3 is built on the foundation of financialising just about everything (hello Friendtech), it can be harder to see the gravity of the UX problems that exist with any odd project since the odds are that a good chunk of your users are only there for financial gain. When you build a product people can make money from by just using it, they're probably not going to be too interested in whether the product meets whatever standard as long as they get paid. Accessibility is a big deal when building on the web these days. But if I built the least accessible site in the world and I promised users say $15 per hour for being on it, I'm pretty sure there'd be minimal complaints about the accessibility problems and more focus on getting the money.

Take Farcaster for example. Farcaster does not have a token nor does it explicitly promise rewards to anyone for using the platform. And yet, how many people do you think are on Farcaster hoping to be early to the next memecoin from the Farcaster Scenius that makes holders very rich suddenly? My guess is a lot.

Since Degen took off earlier this year, a lot of people who have joined have joined in hopes of getting rich, not necessarily because they believe in and buy into what Farcaster represents. When these people offer their opinions on the direction Farcaster is heading at any given time, are they likely to care more about directions that they think help them make more money or those that are really healthy and helpful for the platform overall? I don't know, you decide.

Many thanks to Tyler Hilker for reading this and giving me very useful feedback.

Most people's dreams don't revolve around work and so it's always a bit weird when I say that, but mine do to some extent. I've always fantasized about working hard on some personal, impactful project. Alone in a cabin in the woods perhaps, writing the next truly great book of our time or cracking some really difficult equation, things like that.

There are a number of reasons for this deep seated desire to bury myself in work at least some of the time, some of them good, others not so good. But that's for another essay, another time. Right now I just want to say that one of the reasons is that I am obsessed with the idea of obsession. 

I love it when I meet people who are absolutely obsessed with what they do. They're so concerned with the work that they know even the smallest details about it that others would deem unnecessary. It doesn't matter the type of work as well. Quant traders, rappers, designers, whatever the field, I just really enjoy meeting people who know the minutiae of the work they do. Something in them calls to me. I want to be like that. Obsessed with what I do, invested in it down to the seemingly unnecessary details of the work. I write more about this kind of "good obsession" in an essay of the same name with examples from fields as different as football and hip-hop.

One final observation. As the years go by I'm beginning to realise that this kind of obsession with the work is absolutely necessary for developing good taste in any field. Those who have good taste in fashion pay closer attention to clothes and accessories than everyday people like me who just put on whatever they have in the wardrobe and head out. Likewise with design, hip-hop, football and pretty much every other field. Obsession with the work is a prerequisite for great taste. 

And, if there is something I've ever wanted to have when it comes to work, it's great taste.

Feeling agitated? I take a walk.

Overwhelmed? I take a walk.

Unable to focus? I take a walk. 

But this essay isn’t about walking per se. Lately I decided to start replacing my morning walks with morning runs, at least on some days. I’m not sure when exactly I made that decision but the decision has taken effect and I’m running on some mornings now.

This morning I woke up late. I typically want to begin running by 5am and be back home long before people are out and about. But, I woke up by 6:30am today and almost decided against running today because I woke up late, but at the last moment I decided to run all the same. 

And while I was out running today, I realised that the reason I picked such an early time (5am) to go running was because I didn’t want people to see me “running badly.” I’m very self conscious about being seen doing something I don’t typically do because I don’t want to be seen doing it badly. 

I’ll come back to that in a bit, but first it’s important to note that my routine up until this point has mostly consisted of a 1 hour walk in the morning. And I don’t think I have ever woken up at 5am specifically to walk. Typically I wake up by 7am and walk till 8am. But even on days I sleep late and wake up late, I still walk. I have woken up by 10am at least once and still gone for that one hour walk. 

My point? I’m not self conscious about walking? I don’t particularly care who sees me walking, but I am deeply self conscious about running. Again, I do not want to be seen “running badly.” And I think this ties into my deep fear of failing at things publicly.

I don’t want people to see that I can’t run as well, as consistently, or for as long as a really good runner. And this is absolutely crazy because I just started running! Of course I can’t run as well as people who have been running for a while. Why should I expect to?

But for some reason, I do. I expect myself to run as well as the pros even though I’m just starting out. And this goes beyond running too, I expect myself to write code as well as the prodigies in the movies I saw growing up even though I’ve been coding for only a few months. I expect myself to design as well as the guys on Spotify’s design team even though I only finally cracked my Figma course open a few days ago.

And of course, a corollary to these unreasonable expectations is that I don’t show my work in public at the beginning stages of trying to learn something. An approach which is just foolish and ultimately makes it more difficult to learn because an integral part of learning anything, especially in the beginning, is getting feedback from people who are farther along than you in that discipline. But because I hold myself to unreasonable standards and don’t want to fail in front of people, I hide my work from much needed scrutiny until I think it is good enough to be shown.

Exhausting.

Today I almost stopped running when I realised that people were beginning to come out and go about their day. I had to keep reminding myself that I’m running for me not for the public gaze. And what makes this all the more absurd is that these people most likely don’t even care about me. They’re probably absorbed in their own life and its challenges and make no more than a passing mental note of the guy running. But there I was torturing myself nonetheless. Crazy.

At any rate, this is one thing I’d like to work on during what’s left of 2024, this deep seated fear of doing things badly in public, even when I’m just starting out. To borrow a quote from the great Nigerian philosopher Speed Darlington, “may self consciousness die ten times!”

(Somewhat random, but, I don’t think I had this self consciousness when I started walking but I think that is partly due to the fact that I started walking during lockdown and everyone was indoors, and partly due to the fact that there is technically no right or wrong way to walk so I can’t really.)

I've poured time and effort over the course of my (short) life into learning how to write well. If there is one skill I have tried to relentlessly refine, it is writing well.

While I've made money off it in the past, monetary gain has never been my ultimate aim. Never. What I seek, what I think I have always sought, is the beauty of clear self-expression. The ability to think deeply and express clearly. To say meaningful things about important subjects as I think about them. As far as I am concerned, writing is thinking. There are no distinctions between those activities for me because I am always thinking with a pen in hand. So to get better at one is to get better at the other.

So far I think I have mostly succeeded at getting better at writing. Never mind that the clearest evidence of my success was a WordPress blog I had for the better part of a decade and deleted in the rash grip of a depressive episode once upon a time in the abyss of suicidal ideation.

But, my relative success notwithstanding, I am worried about the future of creative endeavours like mine in the face of the relentless onward march of an ever-hungry, all-conquering god: generative AI.

We've already seen such a proliferation of AI being used to write essays, especially in academic settings, that it is becoming a norm. I already see students on the internet wondering how people went through school and passed before AI.

There is a sense in which this sentiment is not new. Time passes and technological capabilities increase and one generation is unable to relate to the experiences of the one before it. I too once wondered how people went through school before calculators.

But there is another sense in which this is entirely new. And this is the sense which ultimately matters if you ask me.

For example, a calculator for all its help is still just a tool. In order to solve a math problem, even with the help of a calculator I still need to understand the problem at hand. I need to work out when to divide and when to multiply, what to divide and what to multiply and so on, on my way to my final result. The calculator only comes in as a means of making the process of getting the result at each step easier. I am still fully engaged and involved in the solution of the problem.

With generative AI, the dynamics are entirely different.

All I need to do is enter a prompt and wait for the result. And if the result I get back is not satisfactory? I can simply click on regenerate and get a new result back in milliseconds. There is no engagement, no involvement, the entire procedure requires almost nothing from me, it is as passive as passive gets. And passivity is dangerous for the mind.

But this is not an essay about the dangers of passivity for the human mind. That's an essay I should write sometime but don't wait for my essay. Read Nicholas Carr's book The Glass Cage for a full treatment of the topic.

This is an essay about meaning on some level.

What does it mean in this brave new world to be a creative? To be an artist? A writer? A designer? A musician? To devote hours and hours to refining your craft. This while fully aware that an artificial thing, a cold, unfeeling, inhuman collection of 1s and 0s can now be prompted by schoolboys to produce the kind of work you do in seconds.

One thing that seems increasingly clear to me is that barring some intervention, this new frontier will be economically damaging for creatives. Why hire someone to teach you how to write or edit your work when you can just have AI write and edit it for you?

Will anyone really care that your song is 100% human-made and not AI generated in the future? I don't think so. And with AI able to generate music in an instant, while you agonise over a chorus for weeks, the ability to compete is simply non-existent.

Economically, it seems like creatives are walking into a future where the premise is: "if you cannot beat them, join them." Sell AI generated music and peddle AI generated essays, abandon your quaint, outdated nostalgia for human stuff and do what works.

And yet, creative endeavours derive some of their meaning from being labours of love. It means something that I am writing this essay, and thinking about what to type as I write every single word. All 1166 of them.

To be sure I am being aided by technology as I write. I am writing it on my laptop (and it is on the cloud) not with a quill on sheepskin so the possibility of loss in the case of an accident is near zero, all things being equal. And to be sure, typing on my laptop is almost certainly more comfortable than writing on sheepskin. Technological advance from quill to Dell has made writing in a sense, easier.

And yet, all this technology serves as mere tools which I direct to my own ends. At the end of the day, it I writing this essay. There is someone behind the screen labouring to make himself understood, to say something, to make you feel something about a particular topic. So that you may never have met me but at least now you know what I was thinking about vis a vis artificial intelligence on the 6th of June, 2024.

And this is what bothers me so much.

AI can already mimic humans very well in writing essays that seem human. The key word there is 'seem,' because while they may follow human patterns of writing, and obey all our rules of grammar, they are decidedly inhuman. BUT IT IS INCREASINGLY IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL!! And not only is it increasingly impossible to tell the difference, most people don't care about the distinction and will care less and less as time goes on.

When AI writes a paper about the effect of repressive regimes on their citizens, does it matter that there is no 'I' behind that paper? It is not a person labouring to make himself understood, to say something, to make you feel something about a particular topic. It is an artificial thing, a cold, unfeeling, inhuman collection of 1s and 0s whose inner workings we don't fully understand telling you what it thinks a person would say.

Does that mean nothing?

Social media, in particular, has become an attention span-destroying, soul-crushing, outrage-manufacturing, mind-numbing machine. Every time I open Twitter I feel like I am in the domain of something demonic, something infernal. I feel the need to be on my guard while I surf Twitter or risk getting stung and falling into the abyss as the poison of self-righteous performative outrage courses through my veins. When Sam Kriss says The Internet Is Made Of Demons, it comes across as an outlandish claim but I'm very sympathetic to his concerns and I can accept his conclusions.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have been despairing about the state of social media and their effects on regular users for a while now. I think social media has been a net negative for humanity, I think that the promise of a more connected world on social platforms has not materialised. Quite the contrary. If anything, we’re more disconnected from actual people than ever before. And the void left by that disconnection has been filled with ever-increasing connection to these rectangular slabs of plastic and glass.

And yet, while we are still grappling with social media, something that poses a far greater threat to humanity than social media is here already. Generative AI is already here and it is accelerating the transformation of the internet into a garbage dump of mindless, meaningless, and mediocre content. The signpost to the internet for newcomers now should be the same as the title of Erik Hoel’s essay on the topic: Here Lies The Internet, Murdered By Generative AI.

Even kids are not safe anymore. In this essay, Erik Hoel spends a bit of time talking about what YouTube for kids looks like these days. AI-generated videos featuring parrots with four eyes and two beaks, incoherent plots, an utter lack of any cohesive narrative, and millions and millions of children drinking in this garbage. My friends and I mourn our childhood a lot. In particular, we always talk about how we had much better shows and cartoons to watch as kids than the kids in the last half decade or so have had. Unfortunately, things are only getting worse by all indications.

And yet, as dire as things are right now, I cannot share Sam Kriss’s certainty and declare definitively that The Internet Is Already Over.

I hold out hope because I know that the internet can be beautiful too.

I owe a lot to this strange technology. I’ve met people I would have never met otherwise while traversing the weird maze that is the internet, and those people have become threads without which the tapestry of my life’s story cannot be woven. I’ve learned things I would never have learned otherwise, and read books and essays that changed my life.

Even though the internet in its dominant form at the moment is designed to be a mind-numbing machine, my ability to think has been sharpened by engagement with the intellectually curious online. If my intellect is a knife, the internet has provided, amidst several perfectly useless but shiny pebbles, stones on which that knife has been whet.

As time has gone on, so much of what the internet is has become what Jakob Greenfeld describes as the dumb web, shiny pebbles incapable of whetting anything. And because this is the more popular face of the internet, it now requires conscious effort whenever we pick up our phones to find the places that make up The Smart Web. And places like that still exist to be sure. Places where people are still thoughtful and more interested in having meaningful, nuanced, and interesting discussions as opposed to mass-producing garbage tailored to algorithmic whims.

Dougald Hine refers to this part of the web as the Hand Made Web. The parts of the web that are not subject to the logic of winning by making content to please the algorithms that govern us online. Personal blogs are a good example of this. When I write on my blog I feel free because I don’t care about anything. I don’t care about SEO ranks, how many people read what I write and so on. I just want to write something that hopefully helps me clarify my thinking on the subject in view. So does David Perell, Paul Graham, Ekpegbue Stanley, Irina Dumitrescu, and everyone else who contributes to the handmade web.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to find your way to TikTok than to any of these places. But I am, perhaps foolishly, hoping that things will change. Somehow as the mania and insanity on social media reaches its zenith, regular people will choose more and more to participate less and less in the insanity of the dumb web and find refuge in the handmade web. However, who is to say that even the handmade web will not become insane given enough time?

Maybe this is what the internet is at the end of the day. Thanos but for the spread of digitally propagated insanity. Dread it, run from it, insanity arrives all the same.

Let us pray.

In this essay I wrote about having an action bias and moving forward relentlessly when in doubt. When I wrote that essay I was in a phase where I was learning to do things even with limited information and lots of uncertainties about the outcomes. And I did learn to move forward, to take action, to refuse to be still, to take steps towards my goals no matter how small.

While I still stand by everything I wrote in that essay, I have come to realise that there is something I didn't consider while writing it. And that something is this: sometimes you make progress by standing still.

I learnt this lesson in December of last year.

Last December I went home for a while because I'd had a really difficult couple of months beginning in July. I had lost my job, tried to switch careers with little success, and was low-key homeless at the time.

My typical response to finding myself in such a situation is to make a detailed, comprehensive plan to fix things and work on making that plan a reality 24/7. I'd have worked 16 hour days, 7 days a week if I could to fix whatever I perceived the problem to be.

But, thankfully, I was burnt out. I'd already been working nonstop from August to November and I needed to rest badly.

So, instead of throwing myself at the problem, I decided to stand still for a while, do nothing about the problem, and collect myself. I was largely inspired by these two tweets.

Looking back at December now, I realise that I absolutely needed to have that time of stillness and reflection. To recollect and recenter myself, decide what is really important to me and what is not, and head into the future with clarity about where I am headed, why I am heading there, and how I intend to get there.

Having an action bias is great and I will keep trying to cultivate that. But what's also great is knowing when to stop, stand still, and do nothing.

I think this is even more important because the world we live in right now is always pushing us to constantly be chasing this goal or that goal. There is no shortage of productivity gurus, hacks, templates, influencers, and courses out there, each promising to help you squeeze out all the value possible from every single minute of your life.

In these times we live in, to stand still is not just necessary every now and then, it is also active rebellion against the zeitgeist.

Of course, standing still does not mean lounging around the house doing nothing, binging Netflix, and eating doughnuts (yes, I'm describing myself, sometimes). That is also a pretty dangerous mode of life, it is as dangerous as the hyper productivity mode, perhaps even more dangerous because you end up achieving nothing and killing time along the way. (For a fuller exploration of what killing time by doing nothing looks like, read this essay: Don't Kill Time)

While I was home in December I helped out with chores, started reading books again, worked on my mom's poultry with her, and even did a little coding (keeping myself to only 4 hours a day as a limit). I also took long walks and spent a lot of time talking to some of my favourite people on the phone.

I aspired for leisure, but the Latin kind of leisure that involves being present and fully involved in the world around you, not the laze-on-the-couch type of leisure. To quote David Perell here: "Leisure is not a time to retreat from the world. Rather, it’s a time for poetry, prayer, and philosophy — a chance to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going."

David Perell

@david_perell

On the weekends, I aspire for otium.

It’s a Latin word for leisure. But not the American kind where you sit around and do nothing. Instead it's about playing sports, contemplating life, reading great books, consuming great art, and walking around town with a cappuccino in hand.

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1:25 AM • Nov 4, 2023

Without the experience of standing still in December I would not be moving forward this year with as much clarity as I have at the moment. I'd probably still be hastily, frantically trying to effect the changes I desire to see. Trying to head in one direction today and in a different one tomorrow. Moving along with no definite sense of direction and with no real purpose behind most of my actions.

So, if you feel frayed right now, worn out, exhausted, uncertain about where you are headed, or even possibly unsure where you want to be going, maybe you need to stand still for a while.

Maybe you need to tune out all the things you are trying to achieve that keep driving you to move forward, and spend some time thinking about where you are going and why.

Maybe you need to keep the phone and PC in a drawer and reconnect with the natural world. Drink coffee (or tea). Contemplate the walls of your apartment. Go on long walks. Take long baths. Read a book for leisure again. Call your loved ones. Clean your apartment. Eat fries and watch a movie you've been putting off.

Some poetry. Some prayer. Some philosophy.

Just. Stand. Still.

And because I spend a lot of time in Web3 environments, I keep thinking about how the principles I read might apply to this or that Web3 product.

In one of the chapters I came across this quote where Jack Dorsey talks about how he builds products for users:

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, shared how his companies answer these important questions: “[If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives.”

Dorsey goes on to describe how he tries to truly understand his user: “He is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store . . . This is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play. It’s really, really beautiful. If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally because you can edit the story and everyone can relate to the story from all levels of the organization, engineers to operations to support to designers to the business side of the house.”

Immediately I read this, I thought about the Web3 space and what writing a user narrative for this space might have looked like at its inception. What, for example, was the experience Satoshi was hoping to give to users when he made Bitcoin for example? (My answer: decentralised, censorship-resistant money. I could be wrong of course).

Farcaster

Chukwuka Osakwe on Warpcast

What's the user narrative for Web3 anon? What story in the life of the average individual is the tech we're bullish on designed to fulfill? https://i.imgur.com/mfbxdSg.jpg

Enter: Stablecoins

Yesterday I started thinking about Dorsey's process with respect to stablecoins.

This isn't at all surprising if you know me. I got into Web3 because of stablecoins, I've written about stablecoins being how Web3 gains mainstream adoption. And as far as my day-to-day life goes, I don't think there is any product I would like as much as cheap, fast, globally available cross-border payments in a globally recognised currency. Aka, stablecoins (or USD-pegged stablecoins to be more precise).

So, here are a couple of user narratives for stablecoins that come to mind off the bat.

1. Someone in Nigeria wants to buy something from someone in Australia. He immediately reaches for the easiest, cheapest means of payment he knows. It's a wallet containing a USD stablecoin balance, he enters the sellers ENS address and sends them 250 USDC. The seller immediately receives 250 USDC in Australia. The entire transaction costs a few cents and takes only a few seconds.

2. Jane manages payroll for a content agency in Tokyo. The agency hires freelancers from everywhere on the globe to churn out content for their various clients.

3. I want to buy a cup of yogurt parfait while strolling in the evening (as I do now and again). As I walk to my favourite vendor's shop I send the money to his address before I get there because we've done this so many times before. I pick up my parfait as I walk by, exchange a few pleasantries, and keep walking.

You might be wondering why I'm so fixated on USD stablecoins when this could be done with just about any token onchain. It's simple really, I'm thnking about the broadest possible user base here, people who want to do payments across borders but couldn't care less for our degen money games. They just want dollars, that's all.

Of course this scenario is possible today already but it's not yet a very seamless experience mostly because stableecoins are not yet widely accepted legal tender. So even though the cheap, quick stablecoin payment is already possible you still have to convert that to your local currency to be able to spend it.

For example, say someone sends me USDC on Base right now, the procedure to convert it to Naira looks something like this:

1. Swap USDC from Base to Optimism using Layerswap (the centralised exchanges that work in Nigeria right now don't support Base as far as I can tell).

2. Send OP USDC from my wallet to the wallet address provided by the centralised exchange I want to use.

3. Do a p2p trade with someone on the same platform who is looking to buy USDC with Naira.

4. Spend my Naira at long last.

Steps 1 and 2 are unnecessary if you use the wallet adresses provided by centralised exchanges when you create an account, but of course that's not safe (cue the FTX music). If you are not a very patient person (like my flatmate for example), this process probably turns you off the first time you try it. Unless you're maybe a little bit adventurous like I am.

There is still a ton of UX work to be done to bring this to the level where it's easy to use without much thought for the regular person.

Notwithstanding all this I'm hopeful. When I first started freelancing in Web3 I was blown away by the speed and ease of transaction settlements. Before crypto invoicing and payments would typically be the biggest hassle whenever I did work for international clients. If we get this right, it could be absolutely huge.

A few days ago Agost Biro shared a video breaking down the tactics used by German football coach Julian Nagelsmann to the Football channel on Farcaster. The video ended up being so good that I spent some time watching more of their videos and this one about Brighton coach Roberto De Zerbi really held my attention for a good while.

Roberto De Zerbi, more than any other manager I've ever seen, strikes me as someone who is absolutely obsessed with the smallest tactical details of the game of football.

Whenever I watch a De Zerbi interview, or read an article, I know I'm almost always going to learn something new about the game of football, see the game in a slightly different light than before.

If you don't like football at all, don't worry, I'm not here to bore you with football tactics.

The point I really want to make is this: when I consider all the people who have inspired me by being really good at what they do, the Kanye's, Nolan's, and Steve's(SDV.eth not Jobs) of this world, one trait i think they all share in common is this obsession with the minute details of the work they do.

They tend to be people who care so much about the work they do that they put in a lot of effort into understanding their field in its minutiae.

Not content with just getting the work done, they are deeply interested in and knowledgeable about the medium they have to work with and the tools they use to work on that medium.

Kanye is probably a good example of someone so obsessed with detail that he took a deep knowledge of the medium(vocals, melodies) and tools(TR-808) of his craft and pushed his field in an entirely new direction with the 808s & Heartbreak album.

Another very good example of this phenomenon is David Perell. David is a writer and he runs the online writing school Write of Passage. I'd been writing for a while before I came across David Perell and would have considered myself a writer all that time. But I was still blown away by how much detail he went into when analysing what makes good writing good. Even talking about things like "varying the length of your sentences" that sounded like they belonged more to the world of scientific empirical analysis than the world of writing.

I could go on but I think you get the idea.

What I've noticed lately about this obsession over small details is that it arises almost naturally when people find and do work they love and care about.

When I do work I don't care about I am just glad to be done, whatever done looks like. But, when I genuinely care about the work, it's only natural that I want to do it very well. And wanting to do it very well then makes me more likely to go the extra mile in seeking to understand how to do the work well.

This is probably the reason why the best people in every field tend to know lots of seemingly random and small details about the field. Details that could only have arisen from trying to take things apart to truly understand how they work.

I don't think most football managers care that much about how their players put their foot on the ball. But Roberto De Zerbi does. He loves football and he cares, so he's a little bit obsessed.

As always when you've not written for a long time, beginning is the hardest part. But in this case, there are two hard parts, one is beginning, the other is deciding what to write about.

When I started this newsletter I was taking a Growth marketing course and writing about my learnings from that course as they applied to Web3. But shortly after beginning this newsletter I turned my back on marketing and I haven't looked back since.

So, adrift and rudderless, I let my writing die while I pursued other things. But I'm determined to get back at it for at least 3 reasons.

1. Web3 is an incredible space with a lot of things happening in it that I want to think about and what better way to think than by writing?

2. I need an outlet for all the information I consume. What better outlet than writing?

3. And finally, I want to try and synthesize all the knowledge I've gathered from various sources over the years and see how they apply to this maverick of an industry.

Anyway, I've said all of this just to say:

I'm not yet sure what form the publishing itself will take, but I'm committing to publishing something before the end of December and figuring things out from there.

Talk to you soon.

To build out virality in your Web3 products you need to:
Build virality into your product if possible. Make sharing inherent to the usage of the product, so that in order to achieve goals, people have to (or want to) use it with others.

1. Build a product which offers a great user experience.

2. Make it easy for people to share in an unobtrusive manner.

3. Use CTAs. Remind them to share if they are enjoying the product.

Virality is the fancy word marketers have given to what happens when a lot of users share your product (yes, exactly like when a tweet or a TikTok goes viral). Virality is what happens when you successfully turn users into marketers and evangelists who go on to tell other people about your product and urge them to use it.

My favourite example of users becoming product marketers is Spotify. Spotify has a few ways of getting users to share Spotify with the rest of the world. Every year the Spotify Wrapped event gets everyone talking to others about Spotify. Shared playlists and shared remote listening sessions make you want to drag your friends on. (Tl;dr Music is a shared experience and Spotify capitalises on that majorly).

Virality is a word that you get to hear often in marketing circles. Everyone talks about examples like Dropbox and Loom and how they used virality to fuel the growth of their products. And with good reason, who doesn't want people telling others about their product and growing off those referrals? It’s a low-cost, high-ROI way of growing your business.

So, how about Web3? Today I’ve been thinking about Web3 products and how to incorporate virality into Web3, and these are a few thoughts so far.

Bad Web3 “Virality”

First, a problem. There’s one virality method we use a lot in Web3 even if we may not recognise it as such, airdrops. Typically, when a new protocol/app/service launches, they incentivise early users to do things like make social media posts about them in exchange for the chance of winning some future airdrop of tokens.

A particularly common form of this is the meme contest. Just about every early-stage Web3 product community I’ve ever been a part of has had some version of a meme contest. Users create memes, share them on social media (typically Twitter), and the winners get some monetary reward.

Although immensely popular in Web3 and although it gets you eyeballs (and usually for maybe $300), the more I think about it, the more I realise that this is a bad viral strategy, and I wonder what the effectiveness of those campaigns have been so far.

There are many problems with this approach but they all stem from the same root: virality only works if it is powered by (satisfied) users as opposed to financially incentivised people.

Here are a couple of problems with airdropping:

1. People who join for financial incentives may have no intention of using your product long-term. They’re just in it one time for the money.

2. This kind of sharing is rarely done within the context of your product. When I send someone a link to a song on Spotify I like, it’s because I’ve enjoyed using the product and now want someone else to enjoy it with me. When people show up with #(insert protocol) tweets on Twitter, I have no idea what the product is or why I should use it.

3. Following from 2 above is that having seen so many so-called “shillers” in the Web3 space, most people now block them out. I get almost one unsolicited tweet a day linking me to some NFT project but I know the type and I never give the project a second glance.

4. And finally, 3 above means that the shillers and airdrop hunters probably exist in some kind of bubble of their own to some extent. So maybe all your airdrop money buys you is more airdrop hunters and not actual users.

Good (Web3) Virality

Unlike the airdrop guys, you really want people to share your product after using it because they enjoy using it and they want others to use it too. A good example of this is the decentralised social network Farcaster.

Since I joined Farcaster, one of the things I’ve been struck by the most is how great an experience it is, and how you almost immediately want to share it. And so you find that most people join Farcaster because (like me), someone mentioned how great it was and gave them an invite.

You also get your users to write essays (which are basically sales pitches) like this one about your product telling people how great it is and making them want to join.

Another example is Rainbow Wallet. I don’t think I’ve seen any Web3 wallet’s users publicly laud their experience while using a wallet like Rainbow Wallet. And because using wallets is such a bad experience, tweets like the one below can be all it takes to convince someone to at least give Rainbow Wallet a try.

Some Suggestions For Building Virality Into Your Product

1. It’s a product design problem.

The thing about virality is that it’s not first a marketing technique, it’s something that has to be built into the product from the word go.

What do Loom, Dropbox, Slack, and Spotify all have in common for example? Simple they’re built to incentivise sharing. Sometimes that happens directly (you share files with Dropbox, videos with Loom, and Slack is designed for teams so you have to share to get the other team members on board). And sometimes indirectly (you don’t need to share music with Spotify but you want to because it enhances the experience).

From the get go you should be designing sharing mechanisms into your product. Especially if your product is one that doesn't inherently need users to collaborate with other users to achieve their goals.

Two examples of Web3 products that are well positioned like this are PartyDAO and Dework.

PartyDAO is a tool for letting groups of people perform activities on Ethereum together, naturally, this isn’t something you can use alone, you have to invite others.

Dework is a productivity tool for Web3 teams enabling them to collaborate and track progress on tasks in one place. Again, this is inherently a tool that has to be used by multiple people instead of one person.

2. User Experience

Think about the two Web3 examples I gave above (Farcaster and Rainbow Wallet if you’ve forgotten). Why do their users tell others about them? You don’t have to share your experience using a wallet in order to use it. No, people talk about them because they had a great experience while using them.

It’s kind of like Spotify, telling the world about the best wallet experience you’ve had completes the experience in a way.

There is no magic bullet around this, if people have great experience using your product, they are likely to talk to others about it, so go out of your way to make sure your product has great UX. The good news here is that the UX of Web3 is so bad right now that even slight improvements will likely generate a lot of buzz no matter your product category (wallet, defi, nft marketplace, whatever).

In fact, we are at the level where Web3 UX is so bad that great user experience can be a moat for your Web3 product. Spare nothing on that front.

3. Enable People To Share Easily

Think about sharing a video with Loom, the process doesn’t get in the way of using the product at all. Or sharing a file with Dropbox. Or sharing a link to a Spotify song.

These are all easy processes and in some ways (Loom with video for example), directly tied to how the product is to be used. Similarly, you should build a way for people to easily share your product without interrupting their use of the product.

A big part of this is figuring out what to get people to share. Typically it has to be something core to the product (Loom — Video, Dropbox — Files, Spotify — Songs, Slack — Shared Workspace, and so on).

4. Remind People To Share (Use CTAs Folks)

You can also include calls to action at appropriate points during the process of using your product. I’ve put this last because like 3 above, it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t impede a user while they’re doing something.

For example, if you’re a wallet, you could include a CTA after every successful transaction asking the user to share something about your wallet on Twitter. But what if they’re trying to make multiple transactions and your CTA is just getting in the way of proceeding to the next transaction?

Include CTAs but they need to be both visible and unobtrusive, and typically show up when users have had success using your product. Also, consider toggling the frequency of these CTA pop-ups so they don’t become frequent and are eventually ignored.

Risky, but it could be worth it, especially if users enjoy using your product, and it’s difficult to build sharing into the product inherently.

Conclusion

1. Build virality into your product if possible. Make sharing inherent to the usage of the product, so that in order to achieve goals, people have to (or want to) use it with others.

2. Build a product which offers a great user experience.

3. Make it easy for people to share in an unobtrusive manner.

4. Use CTAs. Remind them to share if they are enjoying the product.