@sheldon

Loved this @nickysap ! It really speaks to my experience. For context, I got on FC in Jan 2023 (I rep the “old guard” title pretty proudly 😊). I’ve been pretty active ever since but lately I’ve felt pretty meh about the direction things are going. There’s been this shift from “come for the social network and stay for everything built on top of it” to “come for the finance with a sprinkle of social.” It feels like FC originally attracted people who genuinely believed in decentralized social and were eager to build on that but now it’s drifting toward becoming just another financial interface. As that happens, the culture and fun that made interactions feel real start to get chipped away. It’s in the subtle things like swapping out custom likes and the heavier push toward tokens all of which bring in a much more fickle demo. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need to pivot (boy have I pivoted to save companies). I’ve built and failed enough to know how hard it is to find a user base that truly scales, especially with venture capital pressure hanging over decisions. But pivots shouldn’t come at the cost of that core FC vision of building primitives that actually make decentralized social valuable. Maybe tokens are the right bet and a year from now we’ll all look back and say “good call team”. But right now, it feels like the decentralized social mission is taking a backseat and that’s the part that doesn’t sit right with me. It’s unclear what comes next but I’m hoping we can tilt things back toward more genuine social interaction rather than the heavy handed financial 💜

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