kbot @0xkbot - Twitter Profile

0xkbot retweeted

almost 3 years ago

Looking back, almost all of our assumptions about NFTs were wrong: PFPs should have been the perfect vehicle to drive community growth. Groups that adopt them have a distinct advantage by letting its members represent the tribe in a front-facing way. Yet, the benefits haven't manifested. Instead we've become trapped in a bubble a few thousand large. The problem is that NFT projects see the NFT as the ends and not the means. Everything about these projects exist as a tribute to the NFT itself. Art upgrades, staking, raffles. It's all so self referential. An obsessive fascination with the tool. It would be as if early adopters of television formed a cult around TV sets. That's what most NFT projects are at their core. This mindset was enabled by a special period in time where so much money was being printed that it was feasible for images of monkeys to run up into the near million dollar range. A testament to our excess. Fast Forward to Today... 25,000 projects with 10,000 supplies, but only 4,000 daily users. 250 million seats for 4,000 people to fill. These numbers repeat often in my mind, because they represent a collective head-in-the-sand effect where the problem is obvious, but most fail to acknowledge it. Or they at least don't act as if they do. The PFP has become overly reliant on financialization and speculation — that much everyone can freely admit. At one point a few anomalies out of the tens of thousands of these projects were able to make a handful of people their yearly salary. But how many didn't make that? How many won't? Surely the majority. And this money does not come from an infinite wellspring. Each transfer of value chips away at someone else's capital. These PFP projects have become 0 sum games because of the closed nature of the system we find ourselves entrenched in. People get burned, they burn out, and they leave. I dare you to check your DMs both on twitter and discord later today. Clear them out, and see how many people are no longer here at all. In most other realms of human interaction, whether reddit or the real world, you exist in a much more open ecosystem. You have the chance to bring other people in. Here we bleed people out. People who were once riding the high from a massive injection of liquidity. Why is this though? Because of the hyper-financialized nature of NFTs, the fact that we create projects BEFORE creating functional communities, and the slew of negative associations that have formed around them — we've become an insulated ingroup. Additionally, the nature of twitter as our substrate of interaction has profound implications for our culture. One of which is that the type of individual who dominates in the attention economy emerges as a default representative and leader of the space. Many of these people do so by riding the twitter algorithm and stoking the cognitive biases of others — such as by giving them the hope that they will become immensely wealthy. The projects that survive, and try to become communities after-the-fact are put at odds with the speculators that saturate their ranks. They are noisy & demanding and force the project to capitulate because projects are forced to compete for bodies just to survive. And now, the community may have to sterilize itself to be as generalizable as possible to attract as many people as they can. This means that the ability to select for certain values is compromised, because those that are too specific in this regard will innately attract less people, and the speculators will take their attention elsewhere — limiting your access to the limited number of people here. Just looking at human history, throwing 10,000 people into a group together and expecting them to form something like a community isn’t realistic. They’re built 1 by 1. Genuine relationships are formed. People are oriented towards common enemies and take action together. Have you seen how hard it is to compel the average NFT degen to take action within their project of choice? And how many people are quick to jump ship to another project? When people are choosing these ‘communities’ based on their speculative prospects instead of some deeper value, that's when you know were in trouble. Ultimately, successful NFT projects will succeed in spite of the NFT model, not because of it. NFTs are tool worship, and we have to move beyond this self-referential state of operating. Because right now we launch these projects hoping a community will consolidate around them, rather than leveraging the technology to represent already functional communities with a PFP.

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