We’re (in) the money

YouTube can only recommend us videos based on what it knows about our habits on YouTube, just as Spotify can only recommend us music based on what it knows about our habits on Spotify. But with web3 protocols, we could choose to reveal more abstract data about our taste to match with content we might like.

Chase Chapman and Brian Flynn have spoken about a web3 Tinder: one that could cross-check social tokens across different communities to match two people based on their shared interests.

But the bigger point is that social tokens turn fleeting fun-and-play communities into long-lasting fun-and-work communities because social tokens turn communities into economies.

So what creators need, then, is the opposite of a cult: they need a decentralized collective, a DAO. With proper coordination, DAOs actually offer a far more compelling model for distribution than centralized models of either corporate conglomerates or, yes, cults. In fully decentralized creator communities, fans can actively become creators themse... See more

But for most creators, it will likely be a challenge to build an individual community around their singular presence... most fans would probably prefer to join a community around multiple artists, rather than to have separate Discord channels and low-liquidity tokens for each of the 500 creators they love.

As the workforce is increasingly atomized into a freelancer economy of solopreneurs, social tokens seem to offer a way for any individual to become a creator by printing themselves a kind of upfront loan, as discussed above.

A jpeg promises a jpeg, sitting in the static 1s and 0s of the present. But a social token promises whatever opportunity people want it to signify. As Tina He intimates above, a social token is literally the right to a dream.

Eliot Couvat suggested recently, social tokens enable crowdfunding-as-an-investment

Social tokens, Lambda School, Pipe: all of these capitalize potential money-makers upfront based on expected future earnings, and in doing so, actually increase the probability of financial success by giving them money to invest.