AL #53: Web3 Social is All-in on World-Building
Will it work?
I started taking social media seriously at a really stupid time.
2023 was a decade after my Twitter internship and was the year I decided that I should try and use it to help my business.
I spent the year sharing my thoughts about protocols, strategy and other topics that you read about here. Twitter was also where I connected with many of you and exchanged ideas, shared tips and built projects together.
Turned out it was also the last year that Twitter (now X) completely changed the way it works.
Things deteriorated quickly from there, some of my numbers for reference:
Time to unpack what happened.
“Audience is a moat”
The early social media era introduced friends, followers, subscribers.
These social graphs allowed each user to directly control what they would read.
It took some time but entrepreneurs realized that an organic audience can be a moat and provide significant distribution, a complete inversion of the more traditional product-first approach.
This peaked during Covid where more people were writing threads and the most successful of them built massive businesses on the back of their Twitter accounts.
But then everything changed…
The Death of the Follower
You may have seen this video from Patreon CEO Jack Conte called Death of the Follower:
As social media platforms realized that they monetize attention and algorithms can result in more engagement than follow-graphs, they dropped the follow graphs entirely in exchange for “For You” feeds.
Content is now evaluated and distributed piecemeal.
You don't own your audience anymore, the social network does by becoming a real-time marketplace of attention, aiming to match viewers and content.
As a result, content is now trending towards the most short-lasting, retention spiking and attention-grabbing forms of content: short-form video.
Many are concluding that this is where we have to adapt, Greg's thinking:
But every moment has a counter-movement. In this case, it’s the idea of world building.
World-building
Alex Danco describes it like this:
the more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to [accomplish], the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out - without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there
Kenning Zhu sees it as a form of personal expression:
and while I built my world 100% as a creative compulsion, only recently did I realize that when you do it with passion and purpose, it works. it works as a "marketing and sales" strategy. it works in helping you "build an audience." it works in making you money.
why? how?
the premise of world-building is this:
when you express from your whole, complex, creative, infinite self -- you will not only be seen, but you will magnetize the right people and opportunities to you. why? because worlds are magnetic.
The idea is simple.
Reject working inside the medium (Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok).
Instead, build your own medium and invite people over.
Sounds familiar?
This is the kind of unbundling and de-platforming that crypto is all about.
Crypto and World-building
We even have a term for this.
Ludens already articulated how blockchains help enrich worlds and make them autonomous:
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari describes how, in addition to our shared objective reality (the Universe and its physics) and our private subjective reality (our own feeling and thoughts), we experience intersubjective realities: intangible concepts shared by multiple human beings. Prime examples of intersubjective realities are religions and money. Those realities – being subjective – have subtle different interpretations across people: love, an intersubjective reality, is experienced in very different ways. Even if shared, it remains intangible and subjective.
Autonomous Worlds enable "Interobjective realities”. Through autonomy and an objective formalised introduction rule, we can reduce – or even remove – the (inter)subjectivity of those realities.
We have taken part in intersubjective realities for ten of thousands of years. Now, using the affordances of autonomy and transparency from Blockchain World-substrates, we can grant some of the rigidity and objectivity of our shared physical reality to our shared intangible realities. We can take the leap from intersubjective realities to interobjective realities.
When we wander over to Farcaster, short-term video is not a part of it.
Instead, we have human curation and community in the form of Channels.
We have interactive experiences and windows to outside worlds in the form of Frames.
And we even have currencies and assets that help make the world our own.
Platforms like Paragraph, Mirror and Hypersub protect the direct relationship with users and enhance it through meaningful patronage and curation.
What’s really happening is that there is now a third way of building an audience, supercharged by these new era crypto platforms.
Attention – using traditional social networks but the attention is lost unless it is channeled to your own medium.
Intention – using search engine optimization to respond to user queries which is being radically altered through the disruptive force of AI interfaces.
And finally World-building.
In which there are no rules according to Kenning Zhu:
in building a digital world — the first challenge is to unlearn all the shoulds. we follow the “shoulds” of building ventures on the internet — because we think that they’re recipes which will guarantee success. but actually, this is an illusion, borne from a human desire for certainty and security.
Personally, I'm exploring how to tap into the world-building medium and will keep sharing where I'm getting stuck.
This is an amazing take and needed to put algorithms in perspective as sources of new community members as opposed to where the community lives. The community lives in your world.