@statuette

IMO #3 this is the last one and it's re: protocol token I have a lot of experience running base’s community rewards on farcaster, so hear me out: tokens aren’t perfect and bad design just creates problems at scale. but they’re still the better option. Why? 1. token allocation systems reduce politics, create credible neutrality, and make incentives transparent. 2. they help shift the focus from “why didn’t i get picked?” to "what actions lead to rewards?" that improves the quality of contributions, builds trust and improves sentiment. 3. a token can turn ecosystem growth into a structured system. early-stage builders, global contributors, new users without strong networks would be less likely to be overlooked because systems don’t miss things the way humans do. onboarding users, building apps, educating communities, all of this can be incentivized at scale. 4. proof of work should actually mean something. a lot of us have already done a lot of work for this network and a token can acknowledge that. i.e. building apps, onboarding users, creating content, educating others, supporting the network, hosting events, etc. 5. we’ve tried a lot of other options before. especially opinion-based manual rewards run by small groups of people.. remember /base-builds /base-creators, etc? As a former DRI, I personally still have PTSD tbh.. Here are the problems with these according to my learnings: 1. no matter how good the intentions are, these systems drift toward familiarity, visibility, and relationships. 2. they’re incredibly hard to scale because they miss a lot of the new users, early-stage builders and global talent. tokens tied to clearer signals could give them a fair shot earlier. 3. when rewards depend on who notices you, humans start optimizing for attention & proximity instead of building. over time this creates even more operational overhead. your dms, notifications become unmanageable, burnout kicks in, and it becomes harder to separate signal from noise. 4. if you set clear criteria and simply approve everyone who meets it, you get blamed for rewarding low-quality work. *** i refused to gatekeep anyone putting in a real effort just because they didn’t meet a subjective “quality” bar. you simply cannot judge a builder in Nairobi and the builder in SF with the same criteria without gatekeeping. Humans in developing countries don’t have access to the same resources. 5. tracking who is building and what impact they’re creating is a full-time job x10 that no human can do, but systems can. *** not so fondly remembering the many many hours I spent every week, getting the log from seneca, reading every single post, watching every single video, trying every app, scanning the channel feed, checking the spam just to avoid missing someone who deserves to be rewarded. i also destroyed my eyes during this time and had to change my glasses. 6. Let's say you move the rewards to open community voting to make it fair. Then it quickly turns into a popularity contest. people with larger audiences dominate, trust breaks, smaller builders, creators backlash, they gang up against you on social media and you end up spending more hours putting down fires, fixing community sentiment. so yeah... I'm pro token, too. *** adding some additional spice for the elite %1 there’s no need to shame people for being excited about getting tokens or trying to earn more tokens on the timeline. even 1 cent matter to someone who’s making $1 in wages for a full day of work. Also life is fucking hard and people need to pay their bills so they can keep going.

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