Not a common problem, perhaps. A common, but unnecessary, desire in some cultural groups more likely. When you use a truck to haul heavy equipment and trailers to make a living, however, sometimes you just need a bigger truck.

When it comes to a work truck it's all about cost efficiency. Same concepts as technology infrastructure. You scale your server costs up as your demand scales. You don't get the top tier service when you're in beta testing.

Upgrades are a little slower in the real world with heavy equipment. I've been spending the last decade building up my fleet of necessary components as my skill and work grows and evolves. I started with an old, basic truck that had been in my family for almost as long as me.

I kept it running simply because it was fun to learn to fix it vs just spending money on something new. I now have a large diesel and multiple trailers and pieces of heavy machinery.

But how did I get there? Mostly through skill-arbitrage and betting on myself. Very little cashflow.

I started learning how to fix diesel engines because so many work trucks and machines ran them. I got my first diesel as a payment for labor I performed. I fixed it up and eventually sold it to someone out of state who wanted to collect it for more than I could get in the local market for a work truck. I had connections, however, from being active in online truck communities.

Network-arbitrage.

My next diesel I got in a trade for an old muscle car I had fixed up.

What I got was arguably higher in value for what it could do as a work truck, but the car had nostalgic value that made it worth it to the guy. That was a really interesting bit of nostalgia-arbitrage. I nailed that one by having a really good driving example that I'd worked hard to restore the "classic feel" of. I wasn't trying for this trade, I was just open to it and took it when I saw the arbitrage potential.

Most recently, however, I realized that this newly acquired truck wasn't quite enough for the newest machine I had added to the fleet that needed to be hauled around. I needed a bigger truck.

So it was back into the trenches to find another arbitrage. Some people would just go finance a newer truck, but then you have double or triple the amount of work you have to do to make your payments. This is an extremely down economy, so there isn't that much work to get. That makes financing a poor gamble. Risk analysis says that high interest rates and low economic power in your target demo is a bad trade.

This is the time for the scrappy underdogs who can execute skill based arbitrage to accomplish more with less cash.

So I'm out in the trenches, looking for that hidden gem. Something that is worth more than I can afford to buy, but somehow accessible through skill-arbitrage.

What I found was a truck that had a couple of "red flags". But what it also had was some signs of great potential. With older vehicles what you're looking for is signs of maintenance. I took a pretty big gamble and traded my truck in and put some of the cash from selling my other truck down to go all-in on this new gamble. The dealer had been struggling to sell it because the market has tanked recently and the little red flags were more obvious than the hidden potential.

Fast forward a week and now I'm putting on the first wash of what hopefully will be a successful investment.

This trade was quite complex:

• The dealer needed to move a stuck truck. Small dealers can't afford to carry vehicles long, and they were underwater having bought high and not sold before the crash

• The truck had some red flags that meant it couldn't go straight to work. Most operators aren't mechanics, so this is a no-go

• My truck had curb appeal because it was a specialty older model that was highly desirable in its condition, even if the sticker price was lower than the one they were trying to sell

So I was able to acquire the much more expensive truck for a very small amount of cash to get them out from underwater with a truck they could actually sell to recover their lost investment on the pricier truck.

Cashflow-arbitrage.

For me, I got a truck that would have cost me much more money to buy an equivalent of. All I had to do was put some time and parts into it and get it back to its full potential. Now that I've done that, the secret hidden potential of all the maintenance and upgrades the previous owner had put into it have been unlocked. It was a bank repossession, you see. Someone had owned it on loan and it appears they had spent all the "equity" of the truck on upgrading all the common wear parts to newer, more robust versions during the market boom when everyone was pumping money into toys. And then the economy tanked and apparently their truck got repossessed and bounced around for awhile, not getting properly maintained. Which resulted in the appearance of being a "red flag" when it really was a hidden gem that was just due for some important maintenance.

Maintenance-arbitrage.

But the real kicker with this one is that it's not like I'm just gonna go sell the truck to extract my value. Because there's a withdrawal tax on this investment called a bear market. The street value isn't liquid. So instead this yield is locked in a vesting contract that will incrementally release yield payments after "proof of contribution" milestones when I complete jobs and get paid for the services enabled by the truck.

The principle value will hold as long as I keep up with maintenance, and I can receive interest payments on my vested value as long as I keep jobs flowing.

BarterFi

Cars mean many things to different people: status, luxury, freedom, adventure, work... but as long as it doesn't break down, makes them look cool, and/or gets them where they need to go, most people don't think twice about their car, more less about why it is able to do what it does. That's for the realm of the 'car nut', and these individuals are generally not known to be well rounded conversationalists; like most nerds.

What's fun to me, as a car nerd who loves automotive history, is how intertwined the racing industry is with the development of the modern car. In the beginning, the early 'stock factory car' was pretty negligent on features. One of the earliest Benz didn't even have brakes! Thank goodness Bertha, Carl Benz's wife and arguably the more important car nerd in the family, actually took the prototype out into the world and interfaced with the public to figure out these important necessities.

Beyond just 'taking it for a spin', we have dozens of essential modern safety features that have come from racing; like in-vehicle tire pressure monitoring, traction control systems, not to mention the performance things like fuel injection and turbo chargers. Even more basic, however, are the simplest seeming safety features like crumple-zones or even simply seatbelts!

Cars used to not come with seatbelts at all, in fact, before laws were enforced to require them. The first significant wave of cars to get seatbelts were taxis, adopted from airplane technology, to keep tourists safer bouncing around NYC. Given the choice, however, people often requested factory installed seatbelts be removed when they purchased a new vehicle. Seatbelts were for nerds!

It was when the Sports Car Club of America started requiring seatbelts in all race cars that the idea started to spread throughout the world that this was a practice that needed to be standardized. Today, seatbelts are estimated to reduce the chance of injury or fatality in a crash by up to 60%. Without the racing industry providing the testbed to develop the cultural acceptance as well as produce the numbers of how effective this safety feature was, people would have continued 'opting out' for potentially many more years (evidenced by the number of people today who still refuse to wear theirs despite the risk of getting fined). Racing has always been good for one certainty: a large volume of high speed accidents with complete video footage of every angle.

The same can be said for a lot of car innovations we all take for granted today: the rearview mirror, anti-lock brakes, regenerative braking and hybrid cars in general... all of these technologies exist because the racing industry poured resources into R&D to develop them.

There was a time when stock car racing culture was so pervasive in the US that car manufacturers had a slogan "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everyone was watching the race track to see which car manufacturer had finally improved on the competition.

And yet... to most people (in the US at least) when they think of racing, this is still what they picture in their mind:

I'll be clear: I think it's perfectly fine that most people don't care about racing. It's a niche thing for nerds, without a doubt!

The salient point, I feel, is the relationship between the nerds and the rest of the world. Without the nerds, we all wouldn't be enjoying cars like we do today. And yet... nobody really has to care about trading, I mean racing, in order to benefit from it!

Yes, you caught me. This is an article about crypto!

I find myself getting more and more disillusioned with "web3 culture" because I think, at the end of the day, I just want to be a normie. I understand the tech and why it needs to exist, but I just don't really care for the culture bubble around it. I think it's because I just want to enjoy the modern car, not build the entire racing industry. This is why I never got into NFT's or any of the other cultural trends over the years. I just observe from the outside, fascinated, yet uninterested.

I have my passions that I nerd out about, but web3 does not really scratch the itch in the same way. Simply because I understand what a decentralized blockchain is and how it works and why it matters doesn't mean I want to constantly think about it or talk to people in my life about it. I rarely bring up my work with people in my personal life, and not because I don't think they'll understand what I'm doing. Not because 'it's too hard to describe'. It's just not interesting to them. It's like working on a Nascar pit crew and expecting people you're having lunch with to want to hear about what torque wrench you use. I'm used to people not being interested in my interests, as a lifetime nerd. I'm practiced at talking about other people's interests in social situations.

Trying to promote this industry has forced be to become so obsessed, however, that I've actually lost interest in most of my other passions and hobbies. It's created such a divide between myself and the real world around me that I've become isolated from all normal support networks and communities I've participated with in the past. Many of the people that I work the closest with are other people who live perpetually online, obsessed with their work as well, and relatively isolated from any kind of community or network in their physical world.

Birds of a feather flock together!

I fully recognize and appreciate that this is a big part of the appeal of this technology: it can enable us to form new "network communities" that are not constrained by physical boundaries. It's also the biggest flaw with this technology: it enables us to not push ourselves to stay connected with our immediate environment. What empowers us to connect actually ends up isolating us and keeping us disconnected.

All of that aside, at the end of the day, I simply don't want to be a part of the trading, techy web3 sub-culture. And that is the predominant culture that is pushing blockchain technology right now. And that is exactly why those of us who will never be a part of that culture are slowly being pushed away, back to web2 platforms where we can find topics of our own interest. And yet we're the ones that have all of the 'other' interests that this ecosystem is being built for... supposedly. When people think of crypto/blockchain/web3 all they see is the tech-bro culture that is dominating it. There's nothing wrong with tech-bro culture, other than the fact that it's not opt-in if you want to use this technology.

It's like saying you can't buy a new car unless you're willing to show up to the track every week and do splits on lap times or flush your brake fluid after every trip to the grocery store. In the automotive world they figured out real quick how to get dealerships, mechanics, and other specialty shops in the mix to interface with the public ecosystem instead of having your grandma have to go to the racetrack and talk to the guy selling nitro-boost about her check engine light.

The reality web3 builders don't want to accept is that the rest of the normie world is never going to care about trading, more less the tech that enables it. We won't adopt a million new users until arbitrage, liquidity pools, mev, and all that other technical stuff is hidden away in the background just like air-fuel-ratios, torque management, engine boost, and gear ratios have to be abstracted away for the average driver. Some people will always like getting behind the scenes and understanding what's under the hood, certainly. Trading, however, is the least interesting part of this technology for the vast majority of people and I don't see that ever changing. Tech-bro's keep thinking that the only thing stopping normal people from being the next Wolf of Wallstreet is access to a 24/7 anonymous trading floor.

It's not gonna happen.

As racing continues to be a niche interest, most normies don't even want to think about driving anymore, more less care about what's happening on the track. They'd rather just tell their phone where they wish they were and let some random piece of technology show up and take them there, no further questions asked. Especially if it brings snacks and bottled water.

Nobody cares about trading.

I mean racing.

If this is your first Trig Time, you'll find out I like to start with a mutual understanding of terms and concepts.

So let's kick it right off with some background:

Origin

Greek protokollon (“first glue”) - the first page of a scroll that validated its authenticity. The OG identity and provenance management system.

This later expanded to cover the entirety of all rights, rituals, and ceremonies of diplomacy and governance. It was, in the purest essence, a set of communication & coordination rules that would produce a fair and reasonable result when followed.

It still was required for individuals to maintain and enforce the rules so that everyone followed propriety and got what was deemed fair representation.

Modern Evolution

With the rise of technology and the looming future of interconnectivity, it became clear that we needed to have similar protocols for computers to be able to communicate with each other and get expected results, just like humans had developed for themselves millennia earlier.

All a protocol was at this point was still just a set of rules surrounding communication, process, and coordination that produced an expected result.

Computer protocols allow applications to interact autonomously, enabling more people to utilize them with fewer points of centralization. Most people still rely on the centralized application providers (platforms), however.

Blockchain Protocols

This is where things start to get weird. What makes something a blockchain protocol is still not yet well defined. One clear factor is that it activates the economic layer. Nothing about a protocol up until blockchains ever had any kind of value-capture mechanism. The value created was always extracted or otherwise funneled away by the external actors utilizing the protocol.

This left it up to volunteers to raise funding and partner with beneficiaries to coordinate the development of said protocols. There is no investible path for protocol development.

Suddenly blockchain changes that by activating the economic layer and enabling protocol usage to be tied directly to economic incentives. This is the direction and focus of Farcaster as it pursues protocol-hood.

Is that all it takes to be a protocol?

Added all up, this is my best summary of the evolution of protocols:

1. A set of rules that enables interoperability (classic Greek)

2. A formalized set of rules that enable machines to interoperate autonomously across distance, time, and scale (modern evolution)

3. A set of formal, self-executing rules that enable autonomous coordination among machines, humans, and economic actors— without centralized control (blockchain protocol)

Wait, where did centralized control come from?

Good catch.

We are talking about blockchains, after all. Should decentralization be a core component of a blockchain protocol? - I would say most certainly yes!

But that's just my opinion, and the debate between a protocol and a platform rages on! Many, many, many words have been written about this, and many more will be written in the future. Of this I am certain!

Suffice it to say, however, that there's another key component to modern protocols that has to be considered: they often have to be upgraded. Upgradable protocols means someone(s) has to be in charge of maintaining and updating them so that everyone using them has a clear expectation of how they work.

This may or may not be a entirely separate thing from a blockchain protocol, but we need to at least acknowledge that it exists and is necessary. Maybe we call it a decentralized protocol.

Why would you want to participate in a protocol?

Well, when looking at the classic definition, the goal is to enable interoperable coordination between two or more parties.

Makes sense.

What about a modern protocol? Well, we all want to participate in them because they comprise the foundation of the internet. Most of the applications we use every day rely on these protocols in one way or another.

Ok, but what about a blockchain protocol? Well, this one is both easier and more complicated.

• Easy: To gain access to the economic value generated by the protocol

• Complicated: The economic value of a protocol and how it will capture and redistribute that value is not always clear or simple to quantify and tokenize. Every situation is unique, no there is no guaranteed way to succeed.

Right now there are more experiments in progressive decentralization than there are actually decentralized protocols. There are some protocols that have, to some degree, solved for the value capture. Surprisingly few, however! Most protocols are still built and funded by a centralized group of builders with a vested interest in the success of the protocol and external funding that keeps development moving forward.

The Future of Protocols

What's exciting to me in all of this is the idea of creating self-governing and self-funding protocols that enable themselves to exist. This is the ouroboros of technology. Things like protocols can't stay the same forever. They are often never truly complete as they can only be built for what is possible today and remain open to changing for what becomes possible in the future.

Much like my vision for DAOs, I feel that there is a lot of work to do in order to solve for the foundational components that will enable these robust, capture resistant, non-exploitable protocols that can scale. These kinds of systems rarely exist, however. Just because we have the technology to program these protocols doesn't mean we have figured out how to build them yet. And you never know you've failed until the system fails.

"Success" is measured in time between failures.

This is the work of Nearchos. Let's build protocols!

In the web3 world, when people hear the word community they might find themselves thinking about their favorite project community, whether they call it a DAO or not. Or it might be a creator community, or an ecosystem community. Regardless, it probably exists on some platform like Discord, Telegram, or maybe something decentralized like Farcaster. The number of people that fall into this demographic, however, is very small.

The rest of the people are still on Instagram, Facebook, X, even Reddit. There is currently a migration happening towards more decentralized options, such as Bluesky or Mastadon. These communities are much more diverse, ranging from hyperlocal communities to ones that span the globe. Topics that unite these communities could be anything from the kind of vehicle they like to what kind of food they eat. Topic-based communities make up a significant amount of online engagement. Even in Farcaster now you find more and more people migrating to group chats or channels, instead of engaging in the main feed. TikTok shook up the whole industry with a new tactic: dynamic communities. They let people's own behavior form dynamic communities around algorithmically distributed content, instead of the more static foundation of self attested interests most web2 products started with.

This natural tendency for people to congregate around topics of shared interest is the very fabric of communities that has existed far before technology ever existed. It is the natural human phenomena that drives the persistence of social media in the modern age.

In order to move past the dark loop of the attention economy that currently powers web2, we have to provide something to people that they are missing. This isn't any one thing, but rather it has to be the right combination of things in order to attract them.

The two main narratives that seem to have struck a chord recently are:

1. Decentralization

   Everyone is growing increasingly disillusioned with centralized social media. Whether it's because the government was secretly in cahoots with media companies, running a censorship campaign-- or because now the social media companies are the government, there's plenty of reason for any side of the fence to be severely concerned with the risks of centralization around any media, social or otherwise, and not just in the US.

   The global battles of the future will be fought over data ownership, not land.

2. Creator Compensation

   This one might seem obvious, but it's also surprisingly complex. Obviously creators want to get compensated. The ability to monetize one's digital work is the driving force of the economy in an ever increasingly digital world. The complex part is that people are picky about how they engage with this monetization. The majority of the world is far less interested in tokens and incentive schemes rooted in cryptography and mathematics. They are comfortable getting paid to fill their content with ads simply because it only steals from them in ways they've already grown accustomed/numb to.

   Ad-driven creator economies only have to prioritize short attention spans. They don't have to go deep into a subject, worry about fact-checking or corroborating research, or even have any conviction around their content. It simply must grab people's attention for long enough to deliver them an ad.

Whether its entertainment, productivity, or personal growth, the world has turned to social media as the hub of their engagement with the world. This leaves us in a battle for Mindshare.

It seems clear to me that most people outside of crypto natives do not trust the crypto ecosystem, whether despite of or because of the current public news around it. Every cycle acceptance grows a little bit more, and retains adoption a little bit more, but mass adoption doesn't happen because as soon as anyone sees behind the curtain even a little bit, it's obvious the emperor has no clothes. At this point most leave, but some do stay and build value driven projects-- or they stay for the casino and never leave. Some people live for the casino.

The casino of crypto will continue to churn through the waves of adopters, and time and time again it ends the same: most users disillusioned and distrusting. Since the casino can drive enough narrative to build momentum for those at the crest of the wave to cash out before the crash, the cycles keep going. People can't help themselves but try to catch the next wave. Somebody's a winner, and next time it'll be me! But the people building the value-driven products aren't the ones winning in this scenario, ever, so the real products that actually serve people's needs don't get built. Just more games for the casino.

True adoption comes from remembering what drives communities in the first place:

Shared interests and values.

This is the secret formula to winning the mindshare in the great migration happening right now from centralized to decentralized platforms. Focus on optimizing for communities to share their interests. Drop the crypto, drop the tokens, and drop the speculative incentive schemes.

Focus on helping people who have specific interests generate high quality content about that subject to share with an audience that will value that contribution and have a productive response to it.

This is the necessary foundation before you can start monetizing anything. Farcaster proved that in seeding the initial community, and now it's time to do that for other communities.

Whether they are unhappily located on a different platform, or actively interested in finding a new one, there are very few people that would resist trying something new in the volatile moment we find ourselves in-- with the exception of influencers who have actually achieved a following on centralized platforms and already produce a legitimate income.

This is a perfect opportunity to onboard new users en masse.

But the trick isn't in getting them to try it. The trick is getting them to stay. There has to be significant value for a user to shift their attention space from one platform to another, even if they're already interested in doing so. The web2 model is to maximize for convenience and dopamine. This strategy has effectively killed the entirety of the traditional forums prior to the social media age. Almost every community that existed on a forum has migrated to some kind of social media app that uses algorithmically delivered content that maximizes for short term attention, so the individual has to cycle to a new piece of content quickly so there can be another opportunity to inject ad space. By maximizing for instant dopamine release, this Attention Economy is able to gain surprising user retention. It's the perfect combination of factors to keep people engaged: rage bait, personal validation, and the promise of rewards if you win in pvp against your fellow community members. The easy escape to games, short-form videos, and memes of cute animals keeps people desensitized to the loss of rich, deeply engaging content.

Dan Romero on Warpcast

Have you tried the onboarding flow recently? What % of casts are crypto posts if you don't select Ethereum as an onboarding interest. The issue is overall supply of interesting and entertaining content. If we can 10x that, may be enough to keep people around. Revealed preference is people want infinite scroll (why Twitter For You, TikTok, IG Reels do so well metrics wise).

Farcaster

yesyes on Warpcast

Pretty much this. I think the "revealed preferences" stuff applies in some cases but i believe even @dwr.eth uses them too much. Example - assumption - "Unhealthy person states that they want to eat healthy but continue to eat unhealthy food so their revealed preference is that they want to eat unhealthy" possible reality - Unhealthy food is more readily and cheaply available than healthy food. If healthy food was present near to the person then maybe the person would at least start eating somewhat healthy. https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1812028627690917966

Farcaster

By over-focusing on the 'revealed preferences' of users, we've lost the focus on what creators need to create high quality content, and what communities need to showcase that content. All users are revealing w/ their preferences in apps designed around maximizing short-term attention is how best to play to the metrics and maximize ad revenue/attention capture.

This doesn't help communities grow.

Somewhere in the transition to modern social platforms, we lost the focus on quality of content and depth of discovery. The flash and payout of the short term attention economy buried it. While platforms serving ads might be more successful with these tactics, communities suffer. This results in quality contributors burning out and the churn of low quality contributors continues on while the influencers that stick around profit by continuing to pump out content that fits this short attention span model, with no increased depth or exploration of the subject matter.

This is resulting in the erosion and disillusionment of many previously thriving communities. These are the characteristics that I see missing in the web2 social media world that was either lost from the previous era of forum based platforms, or was not improved upon and remains an opportunity space:

1. Onboarding

   New users are just thrown to the wolves. Having onboarding options for communities that can be custom tailored to the needs of the community is crucial. This is a space that AI can serve, but only if it's seamlessly integrated in way that provides a positive experience, not a frustrating one. How the AI is trained and implemented becomes critical-- a design space that needs experimentation.

   Data ownership is a critical factor here, and one that blockchain provides ample opportunity to tap into, but we haven't seen the practical application of data ownership in a meaningful enough way to create value in this opportunity space. Community owned AI tools is low hanging fruit here.

2. Curation/Moderation

   This was the secret weapon of Reddit that made it dominate early on in the development of web2 apps. The up/down vote was such an effective curation tool that it drew a massive number of people into it. The exploitable nature of it, however, led to the only retention being a very specific brand of person that needs no further description. This is an opportunity space that has not been improved upon yet. To this day, many people still rely on Reddit to find social proof of questions they have, and many LLM's in the limelight are trained off of this data due to its unparalleled value.

   This is somewhere that platforms need to focus on flexibility, not rigidity. Create an environment for communities to experiment with different curation and moderation techniques, tools, and strategies. Let distributed experimentation find the solutions faster than anyone could arbitrarily design them.

3. Knowledge Management

   While connected to onboarding, this is one thing that was actively lost when migrating from forums to web2 based social media. There is absolutely no consideration for knowledge management for communities in the algorithm. There's little room for injecting ad space if people are able to quickly, easily, and conveniently get the information they need and get back off the app. This has resulted in the design space catering towards maximizing people's attention on the lowest value content: repeated basic information.

   Instead of encouraging the gradual deepening of collective knowledge around this shared topic, the community devolves into basic arguments over simple facts that are often misunderstood because of lack of context. The context is never developed because the app is designed to push people to new content to engage with so they can see more ads. Staying in a discussion and going deeper could be used to update a knowledge repository that is used to enrich the onboarding experience for new members, so that they don't have to repeat the same basic questions and misunderstandings that the previous string of new members just hashed out. This would enrich the experience for all members and collectively encourage everyone to take their interest in the shared subject matter deeper, instead of burning out.

   This also, subsequently, feeds the AI tool, constantly improving the onboarding experience for new members as the community's collective knowledge grows.

   This only works if we are moving away from attention metrics and moving towards getting people what they are looking for quickly and effortlessly, affording them time to get back to living life and not getting sucked into an attention-hole on the internet every time they have a question.

4. Dispute Resolution

   This is a design space ripe for experimentation. One thing that is inevitable in a community is that people will have differing opinions about the subject matter.

   Sometimes this dispute cannot be resolved beyond agreeing to disagree. Not every question has a provable answer. But some disputes are rooted in misinformation that have to be constantly corrected. This is an area that has extremely ripe fruit to harvest for increasing the value proposition of a community tool. Anything that can help facilitate the resolution of commonly perpetrated disputes will reduce friction and tension in the community, resulting in a more positive and inclusive experience for everyone.

   This is the exact opposite of the Attention Economy. Web2 social media caters to these disputes because rage-bait is the single most effective way to capture people's attention for just long enough to inject an ad. Resolution is never the goal in this system.

   This is also an area prone to capture, however. I see this as a major flaw of both forums and modern social media communities: opinions tend to solidify around commonly repeated opinions of high value contributors. This can create an appeal to authority effect where the community whitewashes everyone's opinion to be uniform instead of embracing the diversity of reality.

   Experimentation in this area could find solutions where we don't algorithmically create confirmation bias feedback loops, but rather constantly push communities to be more open and inclusive to valid, but contrary opinions.

A common theme in the above 4 points is clear: Open Experimentation. There is no silver bullet, and no one-size fits all. So here are the 3 steps to bringing communities into the next age of social media:

1. Cut out the focus on attention space for ad revenue or engagement metrics, and maximize for serving the values and purposes of the communities: Knowledge Sharing.

2. Use that as the trojan horse to get people to accept blockchain rails. This creates an opportunity for people to start to learn about the features and functionality of blockchain that isn't just about casino games and number go up, without speculative incentives getting thrown in their face.

3. Incentivize app creation around making tools for content creators to do more than make financialized memes. Long-form discussion, educational content, how-to's, etc. are the foundation of a Community. The short-form, attention grabbing content can be built off that for growth and reach, but you can't skip to the end.

If all we do is cater to web3 communities that want to play casino games and pretend it's some kind of reasonable living, that's all we'll get. There are millions of communities out there that don't want anything to do with casino games that are just looking for a safe place to share their interests in a mutually beneficial way. This is proven by the fact that communities aren't migrating to web3 social platforms in hordes with the current focus on monetized speculative incentives.

This is our target market: content-driven communities trying to openly share knowledge.

This is a thought-piece that serves as a kicking-off point for a research initiative to actually dig in to existing communities and find out more about what they need to get offboarded from centralized social prisons and ready to take control of their digital identities.

Learn more about this initiative, and the 6 Pillars of Technological Innovation that are necessary to enable the promises of web3 and a creator owned economy by following Nearchos.

There. We did it! DAOs are defined. Blog over....

Just kidding! We all know nothing is ever that easy! Ok, let's try a little harder— but sticking to the vein of being literalist: let's define these terms!

• Decentralized: The simplest definition for me is no single points of failure. Everything else expands out from there, based on context.

• Autonomous: This is the trickiest one, I think. I commonly hear this means automated. While automation is one way of achieving autonomy, it's not the most applicable definition of it as I see it. To me, a more helpful definition is self-directed actions not controlled or gated by a centralized authority. This may require automation, but it is not fully encapsulated by automation.

• Organization: This one is probably the least confusing. A collective body of separate parts functioning together as a whole. This implies some kind of collective purpose, as well as some kind of authority structure. Beyond that, things get murkier! Anything from flat hierarchy/anarchy to C-Suite fits, when it comes to role structures within the organization.

OK, so now we have a bit of a baseline of what a DAO is from a literalist standpoint, simply from breaking down the words to their definitions. That doesn't really help other than getting us together on a mutually understood launch-point to dive into what a DAO really is!

If you really want to dig into terminology, this classic piece from Vitalik is a no-brainer (well, it's a big-brainer, but you should definitely start here!). I'll share with you a relevant quote:

in a DAO collusion attacks are treated as a bug, whereas in a DO they are a feature

This is hugely significant, and a point I often see lost with most organizations masquerading as a DAO, when in reality they are just a DO (Decentralized Organization). To have autonomy, an organization must have robust enough capture resistance to prevent collusion. Almost every single example of a DAO I've seen has failed to achieve this feature. It's not the DAO's fault, but rather just the immaturity of the space combined with the nature of human behavior. But it does explain why so many people have left with a bad taste in their mouths about a DAO they've participated in! At some point everyone's experienced a DAO embracing collusion to get results, and it often disillusions one's belief in the promised features of a truly Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

For further reading, Bankless DAO has a great writeup of DAO history, as well as Aragon if you wish to further continue this exploration of where DAOs have come from!

To continue deeper into the topic of DAOs of the future, let's look beyond the simplest definitions of these terms and start to explore the specific context in which they apply here.

Starting from the baseline of no single points of failure, it's easy to recognize the value here and to simply say that nothing within the org is reliant on any one single individual, agent, or entity. In practice, however, that is extraordinarily difficult and the value is not always so clear, when in fact it can be far more efficient and effective to simply take the risk and let driven individuals get results without hampering them with oversight.

So why is decentralization worth the cost? For this, I'll start off with a reference to a greater mind and point you to Spencer Graham's foundational work on AntiCapture.

The promise of capture-resistant governance is managing shared resources in a way that prevents capture of those resources by bad actors.

Decentralization, when combined with the A and the O, creates a system of capture resistance that is essential for DAOs to operate and make/execute decisions in an unmolested manner.

When describing Autonomous Organizations, it's not about things simply happening on their own, because if control of the automation is dictated by a centralized entity, it's not really effective for the goals of a DAO. So, it is rather about the authority structure that dictates what/how individuals can participate. So automation, yes, but automation controlled by decentralized forces. Permissionlessness is essential in so far as individuals can be self-directed in what they choose to contribute, or if they choose to exit entirely. This does not mean there can't also be gating in the form of the organization providing rules around who can do what— if it is controlled by a properly decentralized governance system. There absolutely can be roles and responsibilities assigned to individuals with this premise of authority. There is a tricky balance to find here, maintaining operational functionality while preventing centralization of power and/or collusion potential. I don't think we've fully cracked this nut yet! The Hats team has been busy building primitives to help DAOs manage these complications, but there is much to be done in terms of making these primitives a part of a casual business workflow.

To continue exploring the reference to Hats, check out their ProtoDAO to get a sense of how far along we are with the tooling side of what is necessary to build Autonomous Organizations.

There is so much room for exploration in the definition of an Organization. To give the voracious readers something to chew on, I highly recommend reading this summary of Headless Brands. It gives a good context for thinking about how different these things can be to what we're used to seeing.

For those who really want to get deep into some reading, I highly recommend checking out the work Beautiful Solutions, an anthology of out-of-the-box solutions to some of humanities most troubling coordination problems. It's a book of inspiration that we can, in fact, do things differently!

Traditional organizations have had their heyday— DAOs are a new type of organization that has the potential to change the way that we work and live. However, in order to reach their full potential, DAOs need to be built on a foundation of specific core principles in order to actually achieve escape velocity.

To get a clear overview of the Core Principles of the Punk movement and the foundation of crypto/web3, I'll point you to my article The Way of the Punk.

To summarize:

CyberPunk - We must decentralize authority or we will be owned by it!

CypherPunk - Without Privacy we cannot have freedom.

SolarPunk - Life without Culture is empty.

LunarPunk - Culture without Humanity is dead.

So let's just brainstorm on what the core principles of a DAO might be, based on this knowledge:

• Capture Resistant

  • Hard for collusion to influence Governance

• Embraces Change

  • A powerful minority cannot override a majority consensus

• Revolutionary

  • Majority consensus cannot silence minority voices

• Permissionless on/offboarding

  • Contributors cannot be forced to stay against their will

• Impact Driven

  • DAOs serve an obligation to achieve a result

• Builds Culture/Reputation

  • Participation is a part of one's identity, not just a means to an end

• Low Code/Configuration

  • If operating a DAO requires a CS degree, that is a barrier to entry that is unacceptable.

With this all as background, I have put together what I consider to be the 6 Core Pillars of a DAO. These are the foundational infrastructure primitives that need to exist in order for these organizations to actually function as intended and not just be a larp.

None of this is possible if participants in a digital organization don't have fully sovereign digital identities. This means that their digital identity is owned privately by them and can be taken anywhere. Organizations do not own a contributors identity, and cannot prevent them from leaving with it. Nor can a user's identity be impersonated by another actor. Without this key foundational pillar, DAOs can never be truly trusted..

Contributors must have assurance of secure access to communications. If a centralized entity controls the front or the back door to all of your communication, then a DAO will never truly be resilient. Almost nothing on the market actually fits this bill, currently. There are a technical hurdles to overcome, as well as social hurdles. Most governments demand backdoors to monitor for things like national threats and other such dangers. Every popular communication platform relies on a closed source front end run on centralized infra. Not all communication needs to be private/encrypted, but all communication needs to be resilient and accessible.

At the end of the day, DAOs are still for people. Automations might be necessary, but if there is no connection between the people being affected by the DAO, then there is no room for the humanity necessary for DAOs to be better than what they're replacing. There needs to be a layer for social engagement that doesn't violate the other principles necessary for DAOs, whatever that may look like. True consensus isn't possible without some kind of social engagement.

This is the drivetrain of the the DAO. Without proper tools for contributors to collaborate, the DAO will not be empowered to reach its potential. Actors operating in silos will waste effort and efficiency to the point where centralization will be demanded in order to get things done. Without collaboration tools DAOs will not be productive.

This is by far the least attended to pillar necessary for DAOs to succeed. Knowledge sharing, or another way I like to look at it— context sharing— is absolutely crucial to successful decentralization and autonomy. Contributors cannot be empowered to take up and put down responsibilities if there is no way for the accumulated knowledge of past contributors to be disseminated. Some knowledge may need to be gated, and some knowledge might need to be updated. In order for DAOs to sustain over time, knowledge sharing has to be a living, breathing part of the DAO.

This is the popular kid in high school, when it comes to Blockchain. Everyone loves building tools for consensus mechanisms! The irony is that they are almost always voting mechanisms, usually in the form of a financialized token (it's just a governance token, I swear, Mr. Howey!). It's ironic because voting is only necessary in the absence of consensus!! Voting is the last ditch effort to push a decision through that just simply can't be decided in any other fair way. It is, however, necessary to enable voting to accomplish the purposes of DAOs, so thankfully we have tools like DAO DAO. DAO tools built by a DAO. What could get more DAO than that?!

But when we're talking about Consensus Mechanisms, we're talking about so much more than just tools for token based voting. I'll refer back to the amazing article by Connor McCormick on The Death of DAOs as a great read on some of the failings of simple token based voting and why DAOs suck, in their current iteration (not really DAOs yet, by my definition!).

There's more than just conviction voting, quadratic allocations, or prediction markets, however. Another great read by fellow onchain explorer, Matt The Birdman Arnold, explores the ideas of holarchies. In this piece we start to see the roles of reputation as contributors move between communities. Consensus mechanisms start to get much more complicated when you start viewing a larger picture. Simply saying dollars=powers has proven its limit of usefulness. We have to start evaluating less tangible values that are far more applicable analogs to social tools for consensus we're all used to in traditional organizations/life.

As was alluded to in the beginning, the supposed death of DAOs has been massively overreported. In fact, we have yet to see the full birth of DAOs! Until the 6 pillars are fully available in a low code/configuration platform, communities trying to build a DAO will always struggle to overcome key chokepoints.

Anyone who's read this and has found themselves thinking This is what I'm building!— I can assure you that you can only be building a part of it. We're all building a part of it! What I'm describing is the future of blockchain/the internet. This is why we're all here. In order to actually achieve success, however, everything all of us are building has to become composable with each other. Projects working in silos are doomed to repeat the centralizing mistakes of our predecessors.

I guarantee you, nobody will DAO it alone. At least not yet! (Hint to future solo-DAOs powered by AI Agents, but that's not yet!)

I do, however, want to hear absolutely everything about what your building and how it solves these problems! Hit me up in the comments or on Farcaster to tell me what you're doing, what I got wrong, and what you think is even better!

1. - Channel purpose -
   Topical aggregators: A place to post about a topic unrelated to any specific community or project you're in. Optionality to get new user discovery from varying degrees of connection in your trust network.
   
   - Use Case -
   /dogs
   Some people may want to follow /dogs to see random dog casts or to engage in dog related conversations. If they opt in to a topic like dogs, this should signal the feed to incorporate dog posts, prioritizing people in their trust network but also pulling from casters in dogs for new user discovery. Could modulate how many degrees from you on your trust network it pulls from.
   
   Others may wish to only have a place to share there dog thoughts, but otherwise only engage primarily with those who follow them and not get user discovery from that topic. This allows them to "tag" their cast with a topic to isolate it to those in their trust network sharing this interest to increase social bonds between existing connections without spamming topics to followers who aren't interested, causing churn.
   
   - Gating -
   The idea here is that instead of every community having a private dog channel everyone from every community can use the same /dogs and let the social graph and user preferences create their desired 'cozy corner' effect within that global community.
   
   So whatever gating is necessary for preventing spam is fine. If that means interacting w/ a frame to join a channel to gain casting privileges for the first time, that's ok.
   
   - Features -
   Narrowcasting the only option for these channels. If users aren't forced to narrowcast to these topics, then you need to give followers the option to opt-out of certain topics. Giving both casters and followers the ability to control a more dynamic relationship w/ members of their social graph is necessary to prevent churn.
   
   With narrowcasting to topics, followers can opt in to topics from specific casters by following that topic and caster and adjusting their settings in the channel as desired.
   
   Alternatively, some users may only want to follow that topic for one specific caster. In this case, allowing followers to subscribe to a topic from a caster without following the rest of the channel or some alternative solution.

2. - Channel purpose -
   Public dashboard for projects & orgs.
   - Use Case -
   /Warpcast
   This could vary from channel to channel. Some projects may just want a central place to post announcements and let others share topically relevant information back. Discussion would be encouraged, but highly encouraged to stay focused on topic.
   
   This is where the topical channel features would help encourage new user discovery as people find other fans of Warpcast that also like dogs. They can now talk about dogs in /dogs or privately, building the strength of their connection over Warpcast indirectly, without having to involve anyone else in the /Wapcast channel that are uninterested in this topic. Those that are would be invited by nature of the trust network of these two complimentary channel types.
   
   - Gating -
   These channels could want to be publicly readable but require you become a member to post. Gating is then left to the org itself to derive an appropriate method, but it likely would require something onchain. It's possible something offchain could be used as well, however, if the group wanted.
   
   - Features -
   Other projects may also want to add 'subchannels' that are things like:
   a. Support Request
   b. Collab Offer
   c. Feature Discussion
   
   or any number of other sub-topics that are relevant to their organization and community of followers. Some followers may want to opt in/out of specific sub-topics. Some sub-topics might want to not be public and have an additional filter such as an onchain identifier (hold an NFT or Credential) to get access to read the content.
   
   Having an official 'announcements' feature, whether its a subchannel or a different delivery mechanism. Users could choose to sign up for different types of announcements to have them pushed either via notification or simply by having them prioritized in the home feed.
   
   These channels could have options between narrowcasting and widecasting by default. Certain subchannels may need to be narrowcasted. Some may want to give users the choice to do either.
   
   Followers should be able to easily 'unfollow' any channel or subchannel, however, without unfollowing the user themself. If they simply don't want to see casts about a specific org or project, but otherwise want to follow a user, this should be a toggle. A list of 'unfollowed' channels would be helpful for users wishing to review their settings.

3. - Channel purpose -
   Curated Communities
   
   - Use Case -
   Anything from /six to members of a specific hypersub.
   
   The idea here is that people should be able to spin up a member-only channel from basically anything that is onchain. Subscribe to a paragraph blog? part of a channel. Mint a hypersub? Channel. The fewer barriers to making this happen the more useful it becomes. It increases your surface area for new user discovery, just like with the topical channels working with your org channels.
   
   If you sign up to a Hypersub it should automatically put you into the private farcaster channel and private chat; simplest way to put it.
   
   - Gating -
   Everything is gated by some form of onchain proof to keep the community culture intact. Because of that it's highly configurable, but does require at least some level of onchain interaction, even if subsidized to remain 'free'.
   
   - Features -
   Could be anything from a topic channel to a full decentralized community utilizing sub-channels and announcements. Biggest feature is just that any onchain criteria can be programmed to control a channel membership.
   
   Could even be a way of 'minting' people into a group. By leveraging the trust networks established from the topic channels as well as org channels, users could allow certain groups access to mint them into a channel (or group chat!) by sending them something onchain.
   
   
   

To set the stage, let's get back to the foundation of the punk culture and the evolution of the tech movement that has defined this modern era:

For a lot of followers of tech culture, the historical roots of cyberpunks can be summed up in the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, posted by Tim May in 1988. Reading this now, it seems almost prescient with its description of the technology that, as stated by May in 1988, "has existed in theory for the past decade". Even now, 30+ years later, the average consumer is only beginning to experience the realization of some of May's predictions for the future.

The movement that catalyzed this manifesto was centralized around several key themes:

1. The centralization of power, aided by advancements in technology, will bring about a dystopian future that alienates people into tribalistic groups that don't trust each other or collaborate.

2. This dystopia will be marked by insidious use of manipulative mind control in media and daily life, disguised as convenience.

3. Advancements in tech and AI will reduce the agency and usefulness of individuals within the system.

4. Corporations will seize power from democratically operated governments, leading to techno-feudalism.

Rebellion from this system centered around embracing anonymity in the digital space. By remaining anonymous, individuals could subvert the control of their overlords by engaging in Open Source Software & Protocols, digital piracy, and other forms of rebellion from the authoritarian control of those in power.

As technology evolved and the fears of the Cyberpunks became reality, a new wave of rebellion started. This movement was best summarized by Eric Hughes in A Cypherpunk Manifesto in 1993. There is a single central theme in this manifesto that is the grounding force behind the entire movement: Privacy.

Hughes himself put it quite simply in his intro:

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

This need for privacy is what led Hughes and other Cypherpunks to adopt cryptography/encryption as the path forward in the growing digital age. These are the technological roots of the entire "crypto" industry as we know it today— although much of the industry has lost the focus on privacy for the end user. This emphasizes a point Hughes drove home in his manifesto:

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place.

Hughes and his contemporaries understood a truth that has proven itself time and time again:

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.

Cypherpunks are dedicated to cryptography/encryption, open source code, and privacy.

You didn't think it was going to stop there, did you? While most everyone has heard of Cyberpunks, since we've been watching movies about them since the late 80's, fewer have probably heard of or understand the difference between them and Cypherpunks. As culture continues to evolve, however, it would be foolish to think that Punks would stay static.

The next evolution of Punk behavior comes from an entirely new generation who was not only raised on the rebellious anarchy of the Cyber/Cypher Punk mindset, but they also saw the degradation and destruction of the natural world that we all exist within. This merged-awareness has resulted in a new movement of anarchy that is focused not only on freeing us digitally, but also embracing sustainable change in the real world.

This movement recognizes that we are already in the Dystopia of the Cyberpunk handbook. Empowered by the foundation laid out from a decade of Cypherpunks building infrastructure for encryption and privacy, Solarpunks have an optimistic view of the future. This movement is less defined by any central manifesto, but rather is a collective movement of a highly dispersed group of value-aligned activists. William Joseph Gillam attempted to create a "manifesto" as a research article into the various aspects of this movement, if one wishes to dig further into it.

Themes that you'll find among Solarpunks have more to do with regenerative economies and wholistic agricultural systems. They strive to integrate wholistic thinking not only into the technological fabric of our lives, but also into the real world that we rely on. Sustainable systems design is a requisite characteristic present in these groups. The positive sum focus is designed to create systems that generate egalitarian results, rather than opportunistic value extraction designed to funnel power and resources to the top of the pyramid of authority.

If you thought it would stop with Solarpunks, then you weren't thinking ahead enough. Just as the Solarpunks started to realize that there was more at stake here than simply our digital sovereignty— our very planet and the systems that govern our behavior on it are threatened by centralized authority— Lunarpunks represent a newly emerging generation of Punks who grew up with the dichotomous juxtaposition provided by innovations in technology and the negative impact on social systems & mental health they've had. This awareness has brought with it a resurgence of interest in spirituality, albeit a less centralized and authoritarian flavor. The Lunarpunk movement is best defined simply by examining it in comparison to the concepts that define Solarpunks and the gaps that has left for many individuals in terms of values.

Lunarpunks are often viewed as the Yin to Solarpunk's Yang. It is about the rediscovery of the individual among the collective whole. While less clearly defined, it represents a more completed picture of what it means to be Punk in the modern world.

What does the future hold for punks? It is hard to say. At least now you can speculate on it with a full picture of the robust history that has led us to where we are today.

If you found this informative, or have suggestions on how to make it more complete/accurate, I would love to hear from you! Comment here or find me on Farcaster!

Decade+ later and the advertising industry is pumping out over $600b per year and yet content creators are still struggling to figure out how to make it in the ecosystem.

Where did we go wrong?

As any good business student would do, lets follow the money!

The basic structure is pretty simple:

Step 1: Advertisers pay Distributors to show their ads
Step 2: Distributors incentivize content creators to make engaging content
Step 3: Content Creators self-promote to Consumers to get engagement
Step 4: Consumers see ads and go buy products

As you can see, consumers have to bring their own capital to this game, but that's understandable as they are just consuming, right? Value is created by companies making products people want to buy, and that value flows downhill to the relevant actors in the system that distribute awareness of those products. It all sounds alright at first glance.

At second glance, however, there's a darker game at play here. Everything in the digital world creates data, and data is nothing if not useful at making systems more efficient. So distribution platforms figured out early on that if they collect data from consumers and creators, they can utilize that data in secondary markets to drive more competition from advertisers. Now there's a whole new value flow, but one that is invisible to the users and content creators. So much for Consumers not creating any value!

With the advent of AI, this hidden market is starting to become more and more meaningful. It is creating such a dynamic change to the entire process that it actually interrupts the value flow from ever reaching Creators!

This is the dark loop that is being perpetuated by the attention economy we currently are stuck in. As AI continues to get better, and data continues to be enshrined within the distribution protocols that 'own' it, not only will Consumers be increasingly exploited by these centralized and narrative controlled platforms— another blog for another time, but also creators will be harvested for content and left with nothing. Platform owners and advertisers win because Consumers are blind to what is happening and are addicted to the dopamine rush of engaging with online content and buying new things.

Solutions for systemic problems like this are never simple. There's no one "do this and be saved" solution to offer here, sadly. We can, however, take collective steps towards building the foundation for a new economic model if we continue to focus on open primitives. That is the value of Open Source Software, Decentralized Platforms (non-extractive), and Public Goods Funding— also another blog for another time; open, decentralized platforms that are owned by the commons can provide a foundation to build an economy that doesn't have perverse incentives or hidden value extraction.

In this example, all of this happens on a decentralized platform that doesn't extract any value or "rent". This is obviously an oversimplification of everything that is necessary to get an economy like this off the ground, but it demonstrates the value flow and how significantly it changes the incentive structure. Instead of advertisers paying a third party to distribute their messaging, they can access data directly from the user (with their consent) in order to issue advertising "airdrops" to the most relevant user groups. This increases the amount of value that flows back to consumers tremendously considering they got zero value before. It also, incidentally, reduces the advertising budget needed for products to target the most beneficial niches.

I call that a win-win!

It also puts the power in the hands of the content creators by letting them utilize AI tools to maximize the quality of their content creation so that consumers are more motivated to spend this new income source on directly funding creators that they prefer. No external funding necessary! This is a closed-loop system that does not get exploited in any way if anyone chooses to invest external funding into it at any stage. Everyone is in sovereign control of their identity, data, privacy, and monetization.

Everybody's winning, nobodies getting exploited! The only difference is that there aren't centralized bottlenecks that are capturing all of the value and controlling where and when it gets distributed.

If you found this exploration of economic structures interesting, follow this blog for more ramblings from someone who absolutely refuses to give up on a decentralized future!