@cassie

It's been something I've had a hard time trying to articulate, but ultimately, I feel the latest attempt at crypto x social is once again demonstrating a failure of incentive alignment, but worse, it's infecting some of the classic social venues too, as projects try to introduce the same primitives there. Classic social media has used two primary levers traditionally to grow userbase: creator monetization, and network effects from growth in monetization. TikTok speed ran this playbook as the latest example. For a startup, unseating entrenched players is effectively impossible, it requires either an exodus event (which in the case of Twitter, Bluesky partially succeeded, but embraced a very specific cohort which repelled literally everyone else), a way for unknown creators to capture attention unlike how they did on previous platforms (risking that previous platforms won't just steal your playbook for themselves, making your growth rapidly curtailed), a net new social primitive (which again, same risk), or a new monetization strategy. Crypto x social effectively took the last route, and the last route alone. The earliest of these attempts failed in part because crypto was _extremely_ niche (for validation's sake: "could be right idea, wrong time?"), but later attempts took two paths as variations on the theme, sometimes both simultaneously: creator tokens or rewards (top down, mirroring traditional social), or engagement rewards (something only crypto can really do, bottom up). But as the saying goes: show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome. Crypto can only do the latter because reward tokens are generally synthetic: the issuer, usually the platform or something ad-hoc attached to it (e.g. noice, and before it, moxie, degen, etc) can mint an infinite supply, and derive allocations dynamically. If a traditional social media company tried to reward reply guys in threads, they'd go bankrupt. But that observation reveals that such an approach is an attention hack for growth – it cannot survive long term. It is no surprise thus that the projects that lead with this either pivoted or died. Creator tokens too show a poor outcome, but I'll spare the discourse, as there's already been plenty around that. So what does that mean? There's no way for crypto x social to succeed as a concept? It only engenders slop posting either at the highest level or a flood of garbage in replies? Neither – it just means that the architecture of _existing_ social primitives has no alignment to crypto primitives. Or more accurately, the existing social primitives that have been attempted for this alignment. This is because in the traditional public forum-style medium, direct transactionality doesn't work – Twitter, Facebook, etc. can afford to lavishly spend on creators with the most command for attention not because it brings on people to spend money in a flywheel on their platform, but because it brings eyeballs to the ads placed around that command. And this shouldn't be a surprise – the original pitches for the companies that produced these products included advertising at the core of their revenue model. The incentives aligned, the architecture of social primitives were melded _by_ the incentives. So how do you use transactional incentives as a social flywheel that doesn't devolve into a carnival of slop? It turns out, we already had a social primitive that mastered it, and to nobody's shock, for their first decade, there was no semblance of advertisements (although they are trying to experiment with it now): Discord and Telegram, the group chats. Of course, now there are some varieties of crypto x GC based projects out there. But they're making the easiest naive move of financialization that kneecaps any attempt at growth: cost to send, either for the user, or the app that integrates. Why do they do this? In part, because a basic blockchain approach can't scale. The inherent limitations of a blockchain's effective "bandwidth" reduces the relationship with incentives to directly "solve" the bandwidth problem – if spam exists, they make it expensive. But we've been there before – trying to solve spam by adding cost was attempted so many times with email that it literally has a meme template reply (https://trog.qgl.org/20081217/the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-wont-work-checklist/). So effectively, discord and telegram "solve" this by having the capacity to handle it (more "bandwidth"), but also one other important factor: self-policing. Because communities self-organize, it's easy to establish safeguards, entry rules, either by invites, performing some kind of robot test, hell, even "react to this message" tests that if you do so too quickly to be human, you're banned. So if you can adopt that social primitive, your _only_ concern becomes the cost of scale. And therein lies the incentive alignment: you design the protocol so that scaling has no inherent "bandwidth cap", but also you design the protocol so that self organizing communities effectively serve themselves while serving others to a limit, such that you can utilize a community subscription model that gains support from the "1,000 true fans" (https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/) while the majority of members are not paying much, if anything, except perhaps in terms of computer resources to help delivery of messages. This model is not only sufficient, it's proven – Discord could not exist at their scale without the monetization from Nitro. This is the thesis we are all in on with Quorum and the Quilibrium protocol that powers it – we think crypto can make things better: keep conversations private, keep communities censorship-resistant (from outside influence), let your 1,000 fans enhance your community, and instead of simply pocketing subscriptions like Discord does, communities share in subscription fees, split by protocol, with no way to know who is a member, who runs a community, or who is paying – unless they want to prove it, but because it's based on raw cryptographic primitives to achieve it, it remains fully verifiable that payments go where they should. We think creator coins, effectively a palatable attempt at a rebrand of "memecoins" are the worst example of what crypto can achieve, and that "tipping culture" only succeeds at producing a feed of slop. Instead of trying to create incentives for formats that were never built to be incentivized in such a way, we aim for a proven approach that aligns incentives in the most powerful way: let people stick together, organize, communicate, build communities. The money, we believe, will follow.

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