Costly signals of skill

-If we work together for many hours over a significant period of time, you probably feel I’m worthy of your time.

the next iteration of the internet (or web3) will disentangle reputation from affiliation via more frequent and more granular endorsements.

This doesn’t mean literally everything is transparent - there’s a huge amount of nuance in how to maintain people’s privacy as we push for the benefits that come with better contribution data. For example, it might be enough to simply know that someone is being paid by a DAO rather than exactly how much.

Perhaps the biggest question is how will the ecosystem continue to incentivize interoperability and collaboration given that first party data is still very valuable?

-Contribution and role data. Right now there is simply no way to know who works in what DAO, who is in what guild, or who has done what project.

-Cleaner graph/standards. This will be an obvious point to anyone building in web3 at the moment, but the data is a (beautiful) mess. If you want to use a contribution graph right now — which people are connected to which DAOs and which projects and so on — you have to do quite a bit of manual work. For example, there’s no ENS type solution for pro... See more

How might we make the system we imagined above more of a reality? What building blocks do we still need?

To get better endorsements, we have to make them costly. They need to cost time, money, or status. LinkedIn endorsements are intended to cost status, but compared to an effective status requiring endorsement — such as an email intro — LinkedIn endorsements hardly draw down your status capital at all.

We are at the point where we need the initial valuable apps to pull the data out and do the work of structuring it for many more products to be built on top. After all, the platforms that own this data aren’t hoarding it in private vaults - that was web2 vibes.