(very long post) Feeling pretty stuck after Berlin Blockchain Week on what to do next, here are a few raw thoughts:
1. The world has moved on from crypto
Create an account on TikTok and go explore. Crypto does not exist there and it doesn't matter. Yes, there are a lot of "how to make money" TikTok influencers, no doubt. But even in that domain, IMO, crypto is not a straight forward recommendation. What Am I going to tell a 20yo TikTok zoomer about crypto now? To invest in Ethereum? To participate in memecoins? To farm aidrops? The problem is that this has been tried and that there isn't a great way to make them have a guaranteed good experience in our space. Plus nobody brags with being employed in crypto. It's an anti-signal.
As a crypto space, in my opinion, we really have to ask ourselves if the first experience we expose a user to is constant rugging and losing money.
2. Decentralized social media doesn't matter to influencers
An influencer is influential because they have something in their aura, be that intelligence, or beauty, or something else, that makes them stand out from the crowd.
Most influencers who have gotten big during the algorithmic era of social media don't depend on "being able to own their audience." They depend on having a smart brain, or a pretty face and this is what makes them famous every day. I highly doubt the idea that the platform can give any safety here. An influencer's ability is what gives them power. And so even if they are banned, they probably won't care as they can just upload content elsewhere.
3. Everyone "gets" the appeal of a new social media
Everyone who is capable of reflection will acknowledge that TikTok et al are toxic to the brain. In fact, even addicted users are capable of reflecting that their addiction to these apps are a problem. But they also like to romanticize the "new types of social media" and propose these as a preference. However, they largely seem to be wilfully ignorant about the functioning of social media apps.
In my mind, I think there was also tons of damage done by creating a utopic idea of a social media app by constantly writing about how social media ought to be over the last decade. This utopianism is where Mastodon and Bluesky arise from. It's frankly also where Farcaster fits in. A few ideas that originate from this utopianism:
- Everyone's data is safe on there, there's no tracking
- It's not addictive in any meaningful way
- No bad people are on there, no conflict, no negativity, no wrongness
- Influential/rich/beautiful/intelligent people must not be able to capture the network
- Even the tiniest and obscure of minorities must feel comfortably safe voicing their ideas, even if the ideas are dumb to most
- Science will be king there and it'll be highly democratic. And there is, of course, no misinformation
People will say that they want this utopian space, that they will gravitate to come back even if that space has no addictive qualities, negativity or conflict. They will make every argument under the sun to try to convince you that this is indeed their revealed preference, and that if you just give them this space, they'll instantly move to it.
The reality is that they will, however, only stick to a consumer app that constantly bombards their attention and hooks them into a highly competitive status game. The anti thesis of their utopianism. Then gradually their utopianism will lead to a big disillusionment, resulting in eventually churning, but landing wherever they end up getting hooked. I've seen people say that they will go to Lens and then to Bluesky if FC disappoints them seemingly trying to think that they have a real choice of voting with their feet towards an actually more virtuous provider, ignoring the basics of building a social network.
In fact, having tried all sorts of things over two years in building a social consumer app, I'd say that social media is mostly "solved" and there isn't a ton to experiment with. You can basically do some combination of what everyone is doing, and if you do this in the right order, I think you can have a decent shot at succeeding. But users are unwilling to accept this. They feel entitled to their private utopia. The renewed publishing of social media utopianism contributes to this as well. And so at the end of it, you'll eventually only manage to hook a large group of people with some gate-kept bootstrapping mechanism and the standard user-addiction tricks.
4. Ethereum is broken
Ethereum is broken, culturally. As a space we've been captured by a group of people who control the public consensus through threat of ostracising. Basically you cannot voice your opinion freely because otherwise people in decision making roles (who aren't ought to decide in this way) will decide against you.
In person, when not wearing their alt pfp, people at conferences will hence repeat the same matras over and over, e.g. "privacy is normal," but these mantras are more like shibboleths to signal in-group commitment and to satisfy the purity test of staying in the sect and to remind everyone of your own social commitment.
The idea of virtue signalling is fascinating to me because it is usually triggered in those who are feeling especially guilty, like people who have promoted Ethereum to millions of users but now realize that its privacy isn't that great.
But to me it's more like putting lipstick on a pig. Ethereum isn't private and apparently there's no way to make it private tomorrow. But its leaders are all campaigning to make it private, and with that they can, at least for now, check mark that off their TODO list. The "privacy is normal" chant is making the pig a little prettier with lipstick to calm some of the guilt tripping souls.
In the past I would have felt like none of this was really a big deal breaker. I used to think that the Ethereum conference was just a scaled down version of the Ethereum community online.
However, not having gone to any conference since roughly a year, and having experienced the deranged memecoin rugging of the last 6 months, I now have to conclude that the people at Ethereum conferences are NOT the Ethereum community at all. In fact, the people at Ethereum conferences are just a small sub set of people who choose to lend their face to an otherwise faceless technology that is purely online and controlled by shadowy coder cabals.
If you say something about Ethereum at an Ethereum conference, why should we care? You may luck into soft-changing the consensus algorithm. But let's be real, it's all just one big hive mind and most of our signals don't matter.
This is also why I feel that Ethereum culture is so uniquely broken. At least when Google organizes their Google conference then they can control to invite a representation of their community to a venue, and they can then also make collaborative decisions about where to take Google next. At the end, Sundar can make an actual call and just do things.
I don't think this is possible with Ethereum. And where this is starting to bother me is is when people who are anyways not widely recognized as representing Ethereum will do a talk about Ethereum's values that they think represents a common understanding, but which much more resembles a gross misunderstanding of how the community works. To me, even if they get wide spread resonance for their talk at that conference, it still means nothing. Ethereum itself won't change. It'll just jog along.
Which brings me to how I actually feel like Ethereum governance works these days, which is more like a Ouija board. There is "the decentralized spirit" moving the indicator around the board. It is the force of all our fingers moving in our preferred direction. But there is no thorough representation of this spirit in the real world. It's not represented in written word either as it is ultimately a highly negotiated compromise and a sum of decisions.
This is why we can all say that "privacy is normal" and that "Contentcoins are bad," and that "CB shouldn't have sponsored the US Army," but all of these things will still keep happening and are completely out of our individual control. IMO there is an optimistic and a pessimistic interpretation of this, of course, but I tend to think that what you say to influence Ethereum tends to be more meaningless than meaningful to influence eventual consensus.
I know, some will say that this is precisely the point. It's decentralization. And I used to agree. But Ethereum the software has been so broken for many years. Change is direly needed. I'm starting to think that its culture is now cope-adapting to its brokenness. Dapps cannot be built. Users are having bad experiences. Meaningful protocol upgrades are basically all just incremental. There's much more potential if we could start moving. Or if we stop to build for Ethereum.
6. AI and war is making everything just harder
As if the above wasn't hard enough to deal with, in my opinion it's also highly questionable what we can actually build with a multi year vision that actually makes sense. This used to be more easy. But at the speed at which AI is advancing, does it still make sense to highly optimize a UI for sharing opinions? People rightfully ask "How will we use computers with AI in five years? How do you build defensible tech? How do you leverage your capital best? What do you bet on?"
5. Conclusion
Not sure what to reason about from here or how to conclude. These are anyways just a few snippets of thoughts I had in the last few weeks. Happy to discuss on any of these if you feel like you want to respond. 4 replies
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