itsbasil on Farcaster

basil pfp

i love this place but it’s not getting any better. i talk to four or five builders every single day, and over the past few weeks, the tides have started to turn. almost everyone i’ve spoken to who’s trying to build a real, scalable product with the intention of surviving across cycles is seriously questioning the direction of base & exploring alternatives. it’s heartbreaking. nobody — not a single person i’ve spoken to — wants creator coins. not one. the only people building in that vertical are the ones trying to fix the very problems they created. we’re perpetually pushing ten people on zora all with deep coinbase relationships. what does this have to do with base blockchain? half of them aren’t even builders & more than half of them won’t be here in a year. can we be honest about that? it’s not even because they’re bad ideas, but because they launched on a creator coin launchpad that makes zero sense. are they creator coins? are these projects? why is there a trading competition? none of this makes sense. why are we forcing a square peg into a round hole just to sustain a broken narrative that doesn’t make sense? do you know what builders really want? they want a faster chain. they want gas stability & sponsorships. they want $10k checks. they want to build on YOUR blockchain, not build around it, not forced into an app chain or elsewhere. you ARE the blockchain. build the blockchain & support the folks building on it. that’s all they want. that is your only job. instead, we’re throwing invalidated shit at the wall — doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on failing, directionless projects while real, multi-person teams with momentum & traction get ignored. we hide behind greed, ignorance & inertia, pretending not to see what’s happening right in front of us. talk to the people. this isn’t good. they are not happy. they are leaving. you think i’m loud for clout on a 100 person network? i am loud because these builders are my friends; because i am building with them. i’m loud because they don’t care to be: they are ready to throw in the gloves. we’ve learned nothing from the lessons that came before — from friend tech, from virtuals, from zora x5, from farcaster, from tba, from crypto itself over the last eight years — why are we ignoring all of it? why? do we really not see this? again? for the nth time? this only goes ONE way. please, can we be real? farcaster tried to build for creators for THREE years & got NOWHERE. what about lens? what about every single attempt before? what about the last 5 zora models? cmon, man… these are people’s livelihoods; these builders have families, children, spouses. they quit their jobs to build on YOUR chain; to strengthen YOUR network, to make YOU money. why are we doing this? and now, we’re about to push another unvalidated model as if Jesus came down from the heavens & wrote the code himself — one that lets founders dump FIFTY PRECENT of their token on their holders, with zero connection to fundamentals, revenue, product, or users. just another attention game, another cycle of manipulation… zero validation, yet we’re rolling it out across multiple pads, multiple teams, as THE model that will feed the hungry, pushing it top-down. come on. we laughed at binance for asking 8% for a listing. the whole base community joined in: “how absurd! we don’t want the largest exchange in the world dumping on us!” and yet here we are, pushing creator coins with fifty percent insider ownership whose ENTIRE purpose is to be dumped on their own communities… launchpads with fifty percent insider ownership whose ENTIRE purpose is to be dumped on their own communities… it’s just sad. genuinely sad; and it’s painful to hear the same thing, every day, from people who’ve been here for years. i just don’t get it anymore.

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Angel pfp

my optimistic take is that what builders really want (or should want) is more users. And so Base and FC are trying things to attract those users. > do you know what builders really want? > they want a faster chain. they want gas stability & sponsorships. I don't fundamentally agree with this. Hackers and technologists want this. But anyone building a company shouldn't really care or depend on a third party's technical advancements for success. You have to write your own destiny. And if the logic is that we need killer apps to bring those users to base and third parties will build those apps then arguably whoever has such a killer idea that they could bring the masses to base is better off doing it themselves?

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Angel pfp

oh and fwiw i also don't really fuck with creator coins either, but my commentary is more on seeing them through the lens of using it to onboard masses and then findings ways for those newly onboarded users to trickle into the other apps in the ecosystem.

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basil pfp

yeah the new thing is users users users but World has users & no body cares base app will have new users too; a bunch of them but it won’t move the needle even if we secure 100 tiktokers, what does this do? do you think the same people building the development infrastructure should be concerned about securing 100 tiktokers? we brought a bunch here & literally gave them $600; they lasted a week

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Angel pfp

i hear that and I think it's a balance. There will be nobody to pay the bills for all the dev infra if we never get enough users. And vice versa no point in acquiring users if the tech sucks. This probably gets into the nuance of qDAUs lol. By "users" i definitely don't mean your run of the mill farmer here for a quick buck. That's high churn and bad for everyone. I know people hate on abstraction but the more the tech can become invisible will retaining the benefits and distancing itself from the casino baggage that comes with language like "wallet" "coins" "transaction" etc. then we get to an exciting place as we onboard more users who just want to use apps that add value to their life. > base app will have new users too You're also right here and that's my gripe with builders waiting for base for both tech and users. You're limiting yourself to whatever Base defines as a user. I'm particularly sensitive to this topic because I took a big early career risk on VR which had a similar problem. And myself and all my friends who have companies that survived from the first wave of Oculus excitement are the ones who decided not to wait for users. Too many devs begged and relied on Unity, Meta, Epic, etc. for tooling that would fix the fundamental problems. Because both building a good product people want to use AND fixing some hard underlying tech problems is not easy. But it had to be done. And those of us who went to war with building our own rendering tech, hardware, etc. figured out how to capture the users that others were waiting for the big players to bring them. And at one point Meta did begin to onboard a bunch of users but they were kids. So if you were waiting for Meta to help you with enterprise you were suddenly SOL when they cared more about impressing 13 year old Billy than figuring out how to scale to enterprises with huge spending power. tl;dr you have to write your own destiny in emerging tech. both technical and distribution.

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basil pfp

same goes for token/capital markets the more we abstract from the user & the revenue model, the better chance we have at onboarding normal users but then we do this… https://farcaster.xyz/itsbasil/0x5ec3387e

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