Reflections on "Community"

Social tokens are not "community as a service", they are a "service" for a community ... that is, if you have a "community" to service.

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"?

"Game design can be thought of as the structuring of incentives.... Money (virtual or not) is a very blunt instrument, because it incents strongly but mostly as an extrinsic reward. Ideally, you find a way for the monetary rewards to tie into intrinsic motivators."

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:

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.

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

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.

For all the talk about how crypto is changing the world, the vast majority of token-based projects are short term games that structurally devolve into glorified pyramid schemes. Inflated expectations lead to the classic boom-bust cycle where speculative intent runs ahead of reality, and eventually, it all falls down.

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

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."