This is a small piece that I wrote after listening to The Defiant’s podcast episode “There Will be Billion-Dollar Communities on the Internet:” Jess Sloss.
You can find my notes on the subject here on my Twitter, or here as a Google Doc.
A strong community is one of the best assets a Web 3.0 project can have. In fact, it is the core component of any functioning decentralized application. Yet as we
I envision a future where Web 3.0 communities will be like nation-states. They will have their own rules, economies, and social structures resulting in highly sophisticated dynamic organisms that work towards certain goals.
As we know, nation-states are built around certain commonly held ideas. And if the communities revolving around certain figures will become like decentralized nation-states, I wonder what roles thought leaders or political figures will play within this new paradigm.
How will they utilize community tokens to disseminate their ideas? Or in other words, what will happen when highly effective public figures adapt the idea of community tokens?
I do not want to lay out all the possible scenarios, but rather point out a specific issue that comes to my mind.
Providing materialized incentives to supporters is quite an innocent way for artists to manage communities.
However, with thought leaders having these tools, we might see something quite different.
Thought leaders can positively reinforce their followers (e.g. can give bonus tokens to those who share posts/invite people/participate in meetings) solidify their communities, and gamify intellectual discourse.
This solidification of the community and the creation of echo chambers with financial incentives carries certain threats.
Firstly, it can conceptually bridge intellectual belonging to monetary incentives -with bribing in a sense. Secondly, more powerful echo chambers might eradicate intellectual discussion even further by turning it much more intolerant and rigid -like the actual relationship between nation-states.
Carl Jung said “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.” And I believe, when ideas/ideologies/standpoints to certain issues are incentivized with financial gains, they carry a much greater potential to “possess people”.
If you don’t think this is the case, just think about how we, as crypto people, are relentlessly in the pursuit of an incentivized idea. It would be naive to think Bitcoin gained this traction and momentum primarily because of its utility. Or because of the ideology behind it.
Greed was the fuel that drove Bitcoin’s great adoption. We cryptonites are a community, and most of the active participants of this community want to change the financial space, not because of the tech but for the money.
These community tokens might work the same way and facilitate entangling financial incentives to societal disruptions, which can result in much much much broader changes in our lives.
I believe it will be quite an interesting experiment.
I am always hopeful of the future.
But you know… You can’t be too careful.
