@trigs.eth

Speculators are a useful part of a free market. But when all you have is speculation, then all you're building is a casino. Speculation in real world markets is a secondary layer of arbitrage on top of the actual market. Without that fundamental layer of utility at the base level of the market, there would be no value to speculate on. Web2 created a false illusion that being a "creator" as in lower-case "c", aka influencer, is actually creating value because it is subsidized by ad revenue, and therefore seems profitable. That's why every attempt to monetize attention in web3 keeps failing: it doesn't have the monetary weight of real world products pushing ads behind it. The closest Farcaster has gotten is literally just straight up paying people out of pocket. Unsustainably. Subscription fees alone will never sustain! That's not how an economy works! Everyone in web3 keeps speculating on who's gonna become the next Mr Beast, except this time we all hold the coins and will get rich with them. But Mr Beast level money only exists if you're sponsored by ads. Now that he's kick-started, yes he truly is creating value in the world and able to generate revenue. But it's a fraction of what his ad & sponsor income is! Mr Beast would have starved in web3 living off their "creator coin" because there's no ad revenue to provide the cashflow that makes the whole endeavor profitable. We're building the wrong solutions. Sure, creator coins or whatever will be useful once we actually kickstart an economy. But if we want actual money to flow through Blockchains, we have to build things that actually help people create real value. And no I'm not saying we need to cater to ads. That's an outcome, not a solution. "More interesting content" isn't a solution either; it's another outcome. The solution is building better tools that people need to manage their daily lives in today's digital world. Building solutions that allow people to engage online with the least amount of impact possible on their time. Technology should be minimizing for attention, not maximizing. But that's what you get when you have an incentive system where ads pay ppl to keep your attention focused on your screen. Things designed to steal your attention and keep you distracted (casinos) are exactly the opposite of value producing. The more time people spend trying to trade tokens the less time they spend actually doing things that create value. In general, the more time we have to spend on devices the less time we have to create things of value. Blockchain's value is that it can automate all the trading and time it takes to manage all of that part of the economy. But we keep selling that as the front end feature! If everyone's attention is on flashy spin wheels trying to get prizes, or trading tokens, then they are not out there living their lives in ways that inspire them and others to create beauty and utility and things other people value. Nobody actually wants to care about tokens or coins. They are a unit of account, and accounting is boring as HELL! Winning a prize wheel never helps anyone, really. It just distracts an individual for long enough for them to lose their grip on something tangible they could have been spending their time doing that could have mattered.

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