Composable Membership and its Role in Generating Social Capital

-Designing a membership system to generate social capital

In Web2, membership forms around services. In Web3, services from around membership. Put simply, being a YouTube subscriber does not affect your privileges when engaging in a Twitch chat or a subreddit.

Some communities at least take the first step to have some sort of access dependent on your token activities, usually a Discord server or channel. But access is only the first step to membership. Permissions are too closely tied to access right now, and status is left as too abstract a concept.

-How access, permissions, and status are the primary components of membership (and the role of tokens)

So let's improve on the current model. Access is discovery, permissions are responsibility, status is weight.

Having a token brings a community together loosely with a financial stake, but composable membership holds a community together long term with social capital. That's a lot of buzzwords, so let’s explore this in three parts: