🧵/NFT Projects come with built-in magic: they can trigger creative explosions and supercharge them. But from what I've seen, most of them consistently fail to use their superpower.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
It's a big lost opportunity.
👇
One fairly enlightened way to see PFP projects' potential is they are like Kickstarter on steroids. Every customer is also an investor and, importantly, also an evangelist - potentially.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
That's only true if the project enables that.
PFP projects with cute animal pictures are more powerful than DAOs and other fungible token orgs because they supercharge this "every investor is an evangelist" dynamic.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
People can adopt the project as their public identity and market it with every single tweet. See #LazyLions
But using your investors as free marketing is just half the trick. Maybe not even half. Ten percent.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
The real trick is still mostly unused by most projects that I see, though the ones that have stuck around tend to stumble their way to it.
Let's put up some runway lights.
Back in the old days, there were games like Doom, Quake, and HalfLife, that succeeded in tapping into the creative power of communities. They made tools available for modders, and plenty of people felt inspired to create huge amounts of cool stuff around the paid game.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
The creative explosions around games like Doom, Quake or Half-Life multiplied the value of the original game.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
It was made possible because the creators of those games were smart enough to let go of enough control to make it possible.
These creative explosions have happened many times in the gaming industry.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Minecraft and the Civilization series are just a couple more completely different game types that enabled people to contribute, and got a multiplicative benefit from it.
Pay-upfront games have been able to support creative explosions because their business model supported it.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
You pay up front. Why should the game creator want to prevent you from making their game better, and therefore more desirable for other people to buy?
Games that haven't benefitted from creative explosions? All the pay-to-win games like Farmville and its descendents (or even pay-to-look-good like Fortnite). They rely on keeping tight control to extract money from their users.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
PtE is likely to follow in this path for similar reasons. A mod that upsets the careful gambling balance and risks decreasing its profits is obviously undesirable.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
I predict big PtE games will generally remain centralised, controlling orgs.
Has anything gotten big *because* of the creative explosion, rather than by cultivating it afterwards?
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Yes, absolutely. For starters, most of the software you're using to read this is powered by this model of encouraging and capturing creativity.
All the big open source projects (Linux, Apache, Homebrew, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, PHP...) are the result of creative explosions that turned someone's pet project into a huge thing. They figured out how to harness ppl's contributions to build something larger.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
All the major movements, from Abolitionism to Women's votes, or Alcoholics Anonymous or Extinction Rebellion, are where they are because they figure out the trick to get people to contribute.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
If they hadn't figured it out you wouldn't have heard of them.
Open Source projects and social movements get huge because:
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
1) people want to contribute to things that are meaningful to them
and
2) they are structured to enable those contributions to flow, instead of standing in their way
Number 2 is very important.
Movements do this without any tokens. Their reward mechanism is meaning.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Unfortunately, because they have no financial token, they also usually have very limited financial resources and rely on donations. Their founders are often not rewarded.
This model can be improved.
A question I ask myself is:
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Will tokens make it possible for web3 entities to combine the power of money with the power of meaningful movements?
I think yes. Web3 can create movements that are decentralised and also have financial heft.
Let's zoom back in to PFP projects, and how I think they're missing a trick.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
NFT Projects' most valuable resource is not their Eth, it's their community of engaged investor-customers, many of whom (at least at this stage) are creative, entrepreneurial, capable people.
Many NFT projects are run in a command and control fashion, just like regular companies. If they're smart, they at least make use of their community as a marketing machine.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
But very few make use of it as a creative engine to actually drive the project forward.
I keep going back to Loot because it's the first project I encountered that really got that right. Even people who didn't own Loot were contributing.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Loot got that right, in part, by... letting go. They let go of control from day one.
Most NFT projects are tightly in control.
@crypto_coven crowdsources their PFP features from their early contributors✅@NFTLlama, an investor community, crowdsources its alpha from top contributors✅@robotosNFT let the community co-create the Robotos universe, and has now signed a deal to make an animated series✅
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Smart NFT project leaders realise that the core team is only a few % as powerful as the community, if leveraged, especially given how many capable and creative people there are in this space.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
The examples above are still humble beginnings compared to what's possible.
I'd like to see more NFT project core teams wake up and realise that engaging with their incentivised, motivated communities to *co-create the project* is a superpower they should use.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
"Allowing the community to vote on stuff" ain't it.
To trigger creative explosions, NFT founders need to step off their pedestals and stand alongside the community, and open up about ways the project is falling short.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
It takes vulnerability, and vulnerability is hard. It takes admitting you don't know, that you need help. pic.twitter.com/AW0vS1nY9w
At every step of the way, from moderation policies to channel structure all the way up to project conception, a project that wants to leverage the power of creative explosions should be thinking of how to welcome people's contributions instead of conveying "no thx, we gotchu".
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Creativity is fragile, and can't be forced. You can't power a creative explosion with raffles and giveaways and ponzinomics (though some people will still pour their creative soul into these bottomless vessels). You have to notice it when it happens and gently encourage it.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Creativity is messy, and can't be contained in rigid categories. If you try to restrict how your community helps, to control, to contain, to channel, to treat it like a child needing supervision... it will quietly go elsewhere.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Creativity starts small. It doesn't typically begin with a big "here's my awesome contribution that's obviously valuable". It starts off as a small trial balloon. If the balloon gets popped by a sharp needle, it won't come again.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Creativity thrives on recognition. When they create, people expose a portion of their soul. Everyone, in some way, craves the validation of being told that their work is worthy of notice, that this bit of their soul is pretty.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
Creativity builds on itself. The more creativity is welcomed into a space, the more comes in. Most people long to express themselves and so when they find a space where they are welcome as their full, creative self, they flourish there. Those spaces are very lacking in society.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
The payoff for doing all this hard work is that your community will help you make the project a success.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
They might even do it for you.
You're not alone.
You've got THOUSANDS of collaborators who want to help.
Invite them. Sit alongside them and work with them.
TL;DR: I want to see more projects that really engage their community in *co-creating* the project.
— Daniel Tenner (swombat.eth) (@swombat) November 29, 2021
I believe this is a superpower NFT projects have that won't be easily copied by Capitalism 1.0 entities.
LFG.
gm & gl