Reflections on "Community"

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

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

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?

"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."

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."

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.

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:

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.