Reflections on "Community"

Any reasonably clever monkey can create a short term game, especially ones that promise rewards to early adopters. How many waitlists have you signed up for without knowing whether you even want the product?

Yet I find myself asking one thing over and over again: is it really possible to build a long-term community modelled on the "Ownership Economy", without crushing the entire effort before it even begins under the weight of the "money game"?

The turbocharged incentive structure that makes crypto so potent in the long-run is exactly what makes it so problematic in the short-run. If all you've built is a money game, then all you're going to attract are infinitely elastic yield farmers.

I had managed to convince myself within days that social tokens were like magic fairy dust: sprinkle some on any crowd, and boost engagement and retention 10x.

Raph: "Tally the number of channel titles that mention or reference currency acquisition and wealth levels. It's clearly an extrinsic motivation architecture, at least in its messaging. Oh, I don't mean there is no organic element. But even the onramp is literally 'here's how to claim your play money.' It's framed around that."

You do not build a community around a currency. You build a currency around connecting communities

For all the buzz surrounding R.N.G.'s ethos of coalescing diverse groups into a shared pool of common interests, all Raph saw in those early days was a money game:

This is the crux of the problem that many token-based communities face: whether they acknowledge it or not, they are so focused on token price that they lose sight of why they were created to begin with--the shared values and interests, the intrinsic motivators, the glue that is left when all other bindings are stripped away

Layer on top of that the onboarding frictions for social money once you're in Discord, and you have the perfect recipe for good ol' country churn. Crypto communities have developed a real affinity for using tokens as access gates (i.e., the channels you can see are a function of how many tokens you hold). This approach presumes a high degree of aud... See more