A Case for More Events on SN
(I felt like writing about something today so I picked writing about how to grow SN)
I think we need events that are smaller than MSM but more frequent for growth.
I don't think rewards are a good way to make SN attractive for people. Money is a pretty boring incentive. It can be a strong incentive that gets stronger the more money you put on the table, but it's still boring.1
So I don't think our marketing should focus on rewards. It should focus on "money as a tool on SN" instead of "SN as a tool to make money". I have to admit that I don't know how that would look like yet but I'll think about it more.
I also think the biggest impact of rewards is farther down in the funnel of making new signups contribute consistently good content. I think our "most valued stackers" contribute as much as they do less because they can make good money but more because they believe in SN and the impact the "SN model" can have on online communities in the long run. They seem to redistribute the rewards they receive inside SN; acting as their own little reward pools. So they see their rewards as part of a closed system they want to push forward.
This includes to some degree the vision of territories. Reward pools might just be the basic layer to make online communities work by combating spam (since that's where fees go) and incentivizing good content (next to zaps) at the same time (where "good" is determined by consensus and a web of trust); enabling territories with more complex but effective models for better online communities.
A fun analogy might be to see rewards like division in math since rewards are used to distribute sats: they divide good content from bad content.
However, the impact of math on our world didn't come from throwing more division or any other basic operator at stuff. It came from better mental models how to apply these operators. Matrix multiplication being the basis of computer graphics is the first example that comes to my mind. At its core, matrix multiplication is nothing more than adding and multiplying numbers but the "numbers layout" (matrix) and rules that we apply have these emergent properties.2
To be fair, describing our rewards as "simple division" is not fair since the web of trust is already using more complicated mental models (which includes matrix multiplication) but the point is that maybe we can build more on top of that instead of doing more of the same thing. So the question might be: What other experiments can we run with a pool of money and a web of trust? Instead of rewards, SN becomes cheaper to use? Instead of redistributing sats from stackers to stackers, redistribute sats from stackers to territories, founders, ...?
So much about rewards. Now to events and fun:
Meme Monday, Fun Fact Friday and the cowboy hats are fun. Only the first two use money via bounties, the latter one does not but was still a great success in making SN feel special I would say. Meme Monday and Fun Fact Friday are competitions like MSM but on a much smaller scale so it doesn't impact the overall experience of SN as much. It's very easy for stackers to ignore them if they want. One can also opt-out of the "cowboy hat game" in their settings.
So I think a great way for growth is to combine the fun of the cowboy hats with events that have only short durations. If they are shorter / less frequent, we can make them impact the overall SN experience more while they are running.
Examples:
- anon day
- r/place
- everything costs 10x and/or you can only zap multiples of 10x
- ...
(maybe weekends are the ideal length, so 2-3 days)
With frequents events, we have consistent fresh content with which we can market SN outside SN and by not making them too long or too big, they don't impact the experience on SN too much. It's easy to opt-out by not showing up for a few days or not participating. Stackers are still mostly in control how they want to interact with SN.
The idea is that new people show up for or prior to the events but stay because the idea behind SN intrigues them.
Footnotes
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I just listened to this (title might be awkward, I clicked because of the topic, thumbnail and JP and not because I want a raise lol) and JP mentioned there that "sometimes, people don't want a raise, they want opportunities and advancements and the only way they can conceptualize that is more money" (00:43-01:06). I think that's related to what people want from online communities. Not money but freedom, opportunities, innovation. What's missing from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok is not bitcoin, it's a way to level the playing field and shift power back to users and decentralized money might just happen to be the solution. ↩
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Like pretty much anything in math boils down to? Even multiplication boils down to adding numbers. ↩