One of the biggest problems prediction markets had originally was trust.

Not trusting the odds or the interface. Trusting that the market would resolve correctly to match the outcome in the real world.

This is the “oracle problem” for prediction markets. And a solution eventually emerged called Optimistic Determinism. The structure for the solution is decentralized: someone proposes an outcome, and it is assumed to be correct unless challenged during a dispute window. If challenged, a resolution mechanism adjudicates, backed by economic incentives designed to reward honest reporting and penalize incorrect claims.

Today, Optimistic Determination (brokered on UMA.xyz) powers billions of dollars in prediction markets on Polymarket. It tends to be reliable but has issues. Resolution can take time. It depends on people being attentive and economically motivated at the right moment. It works best for large, high-attention markets. For smaller or more specific claims, it can be brittle and unreliable.

Agentic verification is a different approach.

Instead of centering the resolution process around proposals and dispute, it leads with agents. This isn’t a new idea (UMA and Chainlink have done interesting research) but it’s one that has been getting increasingly possible. The agents are becoming more reliable but beyond that, there are ways to structure the process around them, pairing claims with explicit verification plans, that can push the needle much further.

Earlier this week I shared a prototype for this flow.

Agentic Verification via Claim Runbook

How it works.

• You provide a claim and our agent disambiguates it and identifies authoritative ways to verify the claim.

• If it meets required criteria, the agent creates a runbook for the claim.

• Our agent executes the runbook automatically on the resolution date (or on demand) and resolves to an outcome with cited evidence.

• Once resolved, the agent packages the outcome, cited evidence, and reasoning into a signed attestation onchain.

• Because the attestation lives onchain, any smart contract or app can consume it instantly. (enabling prediction market resolution, conditional payments, bounties, and use cases we can’t yet imagine)

The current prototype is simple. I’m using basic models and lightweight orchestration to test the shape of the system.

But the reliability ceiling is much higher. Improving the claim runbook stage, tightening verifier inputs, or adding an optional challenge window for high-value cases all move the system toward stronger guarantees.

If that works, oracles shift from slow and coordination-heavy to fast and widely accessible. Longtail prediction markets, niche, and timebound claims, all become more viable.

It also extends beyond markets. Bounties that pay automatically. Escrow that releases without intervention. Conditional grants that trigger on measurable milestones. Trading strategies that rapidly react to verified outcomes. Any system that depends on a recorded outcome becomes easier to build.

If this direction resonates, check out the prototype.

And if you have thoughts on how to make Agentic Verification more robust, I’d love to connect. DMs are open.

It’s never been easier to make a bet online with crypto but it remains difficult to compose your own.

As an example, take the one million dollar bitcoin bet made last year by the technologist and investor Balaji Srinivasan. Despite this being a bet about crypto, and Balaji seeking a way to do this bet onchain, the bet was created the old fashioned way. It was a gentlemen’s bet, and resolved socially when Balaji sent 1.5 million worth of Bitcoin out a few months later.

There’s nothing wrong with a bet enforced socially! There is though, something special about a bet that can automatically resolve. One where all parties put their wager up first and the stakes are transparent for all to see. If Balaji’s bet already captured attention as a social bet, how much attention could new bets generate when there’s no question about skin in the game?

And if you could do a bet between two people, what other kind of bets could you do? And where else could you explore?

An open way to compose the future

One frame to think about what to build here comes from an app called IFTTT (If this, then that). In IFTTT you choose a trigger and then an action, or series of actions to follow after. I can choose a trigger like getting a new follower on Twitter, and then connect it to the Hue lights in my apartment to automatically trigger a light show.

Imagine what this flow could look like when you can trust an onchain oracle as the trigger, then can make any onchain action happen after that.

The kind of composability you can get here is wild.

“If this, then that” for the future - Potential Use Cases

• New formats for predicting the future

  • Roulette style prediction markets

    • Determine a payout based on how close people get to the exact date it happens in the future.

• Large scale, one on one bets

  • Balaji’s million dollar bitcoin bet

  • High stakes matches over games of Chess or Fortnite (where each party puts up an NFT wager)

• A new way to launch meme tokens

• Novel ways to engage communities

  • Reward community members for helping the community achieve a goal

• Polymarket style prediction markets where you can direct the pooled fees to wherever you like

• Performance Based Bounties

  • Decentralized XPRIZE

  • Better altruism

    • funds automatically transfer when specific goals are triggered

Binance is to Uniswap as Polymarket is to ________

It’s hard for those new to crypto to understand this but there was an era in crypto, where Uniswap didn’t exist, and in order for your coin to have a chance, you had to get a major exchange to list it for you. We’re currently someplace similar with prediction markets.

Polymarket, which has done nearly a billion dollars in volume the past few months, is doing great but they are curating everything in a way similar to Binance. What could a prediction market look like that was more like Uniswap? One that’s open with Ethereum values built in?

Next steps for an “If this, then that” prediction market

It’s possible to hack all of the above use cases together with smart contracts and onchain oracles. At the moment though, it’s a mess. It’s difficult to connect oracles (like uma.xyz) and deploy the contracts in a way that just works for a user attempting to create a market. There are also plenty of UX and social challenges to making these markets legible and compelling to regular people on the internet.

Before we jump into creating a general product that allows anyone to compose their own market, we’re rolling out some experiments.

To join our first one, follow our Telegram channel. We will go live soon.

And if you like what we’re working on and want to support, mint the image of this post above on Zora. It’s up for the next 24 hours.

As always, DMs open.

Websites that allow you to bet on the future have exploded this year and most of them work in a similar way. You get a question about whether an event is going to happen in the future and then you can trade around a Yes or No decision up until the point it’s resolved. This is cool shape that’s taking off but it comes with tradeoffs and limitations.

For instance, what would a prediction market look like if you could bet on an event happening at a specific time down to the second? Or a time deep into the future? This kind of prediction market isn’t possible with the style of market that Polymarket uses as you’d have infinite options into the future (and thus liquidity collapse) so you need to go back to the drawing board for a different approach.

One way to approach is to take inspiration from roulette but with a twist: instead of betting against the house on numbers, you're competing with other players to pinpoint when a future event will happen.

How it Works:

1. Create a prediction: Something like "Starship Booster successfully caught by Mechazilla", and assign a trusted resolver.

2. Bet: Users place bets on a specific month, day or second when they believe the event will occur.

3. Grow the Prize Pool: All bets contribute to a shared prize pool.

4. Resolve: When the event happens, the resolver confirms the exact time.

5. Payout: All who have that time covered receive proportional payouts from the prize pool.

Advantages

• Precision: Allows for extremely granular predictions.

• Timescale: Suitable for events happening today or far into the future.

• Jackpots: A small bet could yield a massive return.

This is a broad shape and there are plenty of tradeoffs and questions. Like, how will the proportional payout work? How do you reward those who cast their predictions before others? How do you build more transparent and flexible resolvers? How could you introduce elements that make the market more positive sum?

And what questions aren’t we asking?

We’ve been thinking about the questions above and releasing related experiments for a little while now but this is a more advanced shape to explore. To better organize, we’ve created a new Farcaster channel to share updates and talk through the various challenges this kind of market poses. If you’re intrigued by prediction markets or have thoughts on this one, we’d love to hear from you.

Join /prophecy.

Shoutout to Jacob.eth who planted the seed for a positive sum prediction market in his Prophecy Market post and Packy McCormick who expanded it in his post Startup Prophecies.

Last week, Twitter released a new feature that had many scratching their heads. They disabled public likes for all ~360 million users.

It’s subtle but I don’t think people understand the impact this could have on the app at this scale. Some thoughts on the good and bad of private likes, but first some context.

Anyone who’s been on Twitter for a while has seen it go through periods of collective mania.

One of those periods came in 2020 when the pandemic was in full swing and it felt like the world was ending. In this environment, the most extreme voices took over on Twitter and the outcome was one where people were afraid to say anything that went against an emergent orthodoxy. Those who did often lost friendships and jobs. (You may have already memory holed it but, if you’re in doubt or need a refresher, read what it was like to live through this era at the nytimes in Nellie Bowles's book, The Morning After the Revolution.)

At the peak of the mania, there was one thing that people did to attempt to regain some sanity. Instead of tweeting about some polarizing issue, they would create a Twitter poll. Because Twitter polls are anonymous, you tended to get more authentic replies. With a poll, you can take a position that seemed super popular among an influential clique (like whether we should abolish the police), make a poll, then watch that position get obliterated.

The revealed preference from this era is that many people wanted to call bullshit but didn’t want to tap a button on their phone and then have their lives destroyed.

With one code push, Twitter just made every fave on twitter quasi anonymous in a similar way to twitter polls. I see two outcomes for this, both of which are likely to happen at the same time.

Outcome 1:

If faves are private, a silent majority can now enter the chat in a way that it hasn’t before. The algo that powers your feed is going to get a ton of new data from people who are much more honest about what they like. All of this could make room for a more centrist or moderating group of users to gain distribution. I know some who have already been getting more likes from groups of users who didn’t usually like their work.

Outcome 2:

The fringes of the left and right could tilt even further and rage bait could increase. If there’s no social cost to faving a tweet you can let it rip. You can fave garbage tweets that confirm all your priors and the only thing tethering you (or anyone) to base reality is community notes.

It’s too early to tell but I’m hopeful we get more of the first outcome. If we’ve learned anything about the past 10 years on these platforms, it’s that the lunatic fringe on the left and right have disproportionate control of their cohorts. Particularly in times of heightened conflict or an election year.

It’s possible that we look back at this era of public likes as an anomaly. A seemingly innocent feature that, at scale, and over many years, drives people crazy and away from expressing what they really think.

Public likes have been pure cocaine for a hall monitor class that's had too much influence on the app.

The chilling effect is real.

We can do better.

Most memecoins fail. For every $doge (which currently has a market cap of ~28 billion dollars) there are thousands of others that start hot and then crash to zero. There are good reasons for this. When you give people the option to buy as many coins as they want and then sell as many as they want, they do it. If a project gets too much attention without a core group of believers, it gets eviscerated.

One way to think of memecoins is that the “meme” part of memecoin is pejorative. We don’t think of Bitcoin or Ethereum as memecoins but they once were just jokes (and still are to many people). A memecoin is a project that is either a scam or a project in a kind of incubation period. If it survives the brutality of the market, the meme part of its name falls and it graduates. It’s now just a coin.

For most of my time in crypto, I’ve been extremely skeptical of memecoins. I rage quit crypto in 2017 after seeing the ICO mania swallow the entire space. I came back a few years later after the tech finally seemed to be getting better and all the building around NFTs starting happening.

The memecoins in 2024 are different than 2017. They, very explicitly, don’t promise future returns or present themselves as securities. Many put the meme itself as the main dish on offer. And if I have a beef with this crop of memecoins, it’s that they often do very little to expand the meme they say they are focused on.

Can you orient a memecoin to expand a meme?

Late last year a friend and I attempted an experiment here. A coin called $YOYO had popped off and then crashed. We were curious to see whether we could get people who still believed in $YOYO to create and then buy memes associated with the coin. We created a site called $YOYO Moodboard where people could add a meme and then purchase it by spending a small amount of the $YOYO coin. We got some ridiculous contributions to it but ultimately, only one person ended up spending their own $YOYO to mint. It was clear that, if you wanted a different result in behavior, you would need a different architecture for the coin.

A month or so later $Degen went live. Degen came from a channel on Warpcast where people were already sharing memes and projects. They launched the coin by airdropping tokens to people already invested and then created a system where those same people could tip anyone on Farcaster the tokens. All without depleting their own bag or incurring any transaction fees. The outcome was an explosion of activity, riffs and interest. The current $Degen market cap is 84 million dollars.

Other projects followed. meme.market, which requires you to cut in meme creators when you purchase the token went live. Enjoy.tech launched yesterday which has a tipping and point system.

For lack of a better term, I think of these projects as regen memecoin projects. They air out a meme and attempt to enhance that meme through a variety of incentives.

Some crypto friends have told me that I’m missing the point with memecoins. The point of memecoins is to be as stupid as possible. And the game here is a player vs player game of chicken where you can go bust or get rich. I get it. And I find it fun (when number is up). But I think we can also take some deeper swings.

With Farcaster and so much of this tech becoming more accessible, a different kind of group coordination and reward system is possible. One where the upside is more balanced and more legible to creators, speculators and fans. And one that has the potential to do the hard thing. Help communities find their memes.

-

If you’re interested in this stuff, checkout our recent project which involves pixels and riffs. And follow me on farcaster / twitter. (DMs are open)

Thanks to Jon Bo for edits.

This month, Pitchfork announced that it was laying off most of its staff and folding into GQ. Shortly after, the LA Times announced they cut 25% of their staff with Insider and Forbes following after. These kind of media layoffs have been in full swing for years but Pitchfork brought out some takes.

One of my favorites frames came from Yancey Strickler who described Pitchfork’s downfall in the context of a “Prestige Recession.” Yancey, who used to write for Pitchfork, explained it’s decline as something that can just happen to publications. They catch lightning in a bottle, help cultivate a scene and then fade. Yancey further described this category of cultural criticism trending toward de-professionalization where the money, for a bunch of reasons, just isn’t there anymore.

I very much agree that we’re in a “Prestige Recession” and find this frame to be helpful in making sense of the internet and so many of the institutions connected to it in 2024. Where I disagree is the part about the current state of cultural criticism and it’s future. Music coverage and cultural criticism is thriving right now, it just looks very different than how it did before.

Let’s give a specific example as it relates to music.

I’ll caveat this by saying I’m not a massive music nerd but every now and then, I’ll find a new artist/genre and want to go down the rabbit hole. Which is what happened last year when I discovered an obscure artist from the Instagram story of a friend who saw him live that I instantly loved (shout out to Jeremy). My first instinct wasn’t to go to Pitchfork as I might have done in the early 2010s to learn more, it was to type his name into YouTube. And over the course of many searches, YouTube gave me so much that I wanted.

His music videos were the first thing I devoured and then I was onto live performances set up by other channels. Then a video essay that chronicled his rise from uploading songs to SoundCloud when he was 13 to where he is now. I got context, endless reaction videos, and then a review from the, “internet’s busiest music nerd” which i hated, but understood.

Many people have good theories on why Pitchfork fell apart, one is simply because it came online when the above competition wasn’t there. There’s no doubt that they are a unique publication that does something different than all those other orgs but they are also a publication. They failed to innovate on their own editorial product over two decades and then leaned into their prestige and self proclaimed authority. To the degree that, on the day their publication folded into GQ, Pitchfork’s Twitter bio was, “the most trusted voice in music.” A bit of copy that’s under a yellow checkmark which they pay Elon Musk $1,000 a month for.

We don’t know how deep we are into the prestige recession. We don’t know whether we’re in for another decade of this kind of turbulence or whether we’re about to turn a corner. The thing that keeps happening though is that, just when you think we’ve found the bottom, a new wave of layoffs hit. Or just when you thought there was no way we could get lower when it comes to the general trust in media, we find a new low.

So how do you survive the prestige recession?

One way is to embrace it. Accept that the graph above about trust in media is that way for a reason and ask yourself how we got here.

This applies to the media industry but it also applies to so many other institutions dealing with historic declines in trust; higher-ed, the health care industry, and each major political party in the US.

How did we get to the point where a private undergrad education costs ~350k? Or a political reality where nearly half of the country now calls themselves independent?

A prestige recession is downstream from a normal recession because you can coast for longer when you have prestige. A publishing company (like Condé Nast) can buy a pub, throw money at it hopes that it will eventually figure itself out, then cut it off with no warning. And when you have an endowment of 50 billion dollars like Harvard you are untethered to reality in a way that is hard to comprehend. Most people don’t question the prestige until something crazy happens and you see how deep the rot goes.

In the past few years we’ve seen some people defect from orgs with prestige and then go and do their own thing. Many launched Substacks which caught fire and turned into publications (shoutout to The FP, Platformer, Pirate Wires, Blocked and Reported, Defecter ). Others launched podcasts and YouTube channels (Lex Fridman, Channel 5, MKBHD, Conversations with Coleman, Honestly, New Models and so many others). We’ve even seen an attempt at a new university (University of Austin).

At every step of the way, I’ve watched many roll their eyes at these efforts. In order to gain their following, the orgs had to do many non-prestigious things, like beg their early supporters to give them $5 a month. Or get into the weeds in their comment section to resolve a dispute. The thing that all of the above orgs have in common is that they’ve all, painstakingly, built a direct line to an audience that is paying them every month. And because of that, they have more job security than anyone currently sitting at a desk at The New Yorker.

The institutions with the most prestige in the US did not start out that way. They started from a place of genuine need and built from there. And with this much institutional trust in the toilet, it’s hard to think of a more compelling time to do the hard thing once again. Let go of prestige. Return to first principals and find something people want. If recessions are good moments to build new companies, prestige recessions are good times to build new communities and institutions.

We’ve never needed them more.

This post will get into the value of onchain as a term but before that I’m going to begin with a reference point that made all of this click.

In the late 90s there was a social movement called the free software movement that seemed to have caught lightning in a bottle. Many software developers, hackers, and orgs were gaining traction and excited about the potential of free software but were also hitting a wall. The group had a difficult time explaining itself to those interested in adopting free software or the ethos.

“The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage.”

The free software movement had many members who were compelled by it’s ethic. And others who shared the ethic but were focused on what it would take to grow out of its niche.

At a certain point, “open source software” was suggested as a term that could be a bridge to describe some of the more compelling behavior in the free software movement. It clicked with a few in the scene who saw its potential. They got together and workshopped a way to tell a better story about their work. They made a meme map for free software:

And a meme map for open source:

It’s notable that when “open source software” emerged as a term, there was plenty of pushback. Some close to the movement in marketing and public relations, “felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better.” Some of the biggest backers of free software (Richard Stallman), never accepted it.

But the more people thought about it, the more it stuck. “the issue (with free software) was its lack of clarity to those new to the concept.”

After the meme mapping, opensource.org was launched shortly after, and the rest is history.

So why does this matter for crypto world?

We’re in a very different time period in 2023 but another group of software developers, hackers, and orgs are hitting another kind of semantic wall. There’s no doubt that something special has emerged in some projects associated with web3 and crypto in the past few years but the associations with these words, for a great percentage of the internet, has gotten intensely negative.

Many have attempted to define web3 but it’s slippery in a way that’s similar to the free software movement. Someone talking about web3 could be talking about a technology, a value proposition for users, a personal conception of the ideal internet, or all of the above at once.

Without getting into a full on debate about whether web3 ought to be abandoned as a term, what I love about onchain is that it’s practical and tangible. Like open source software, it centers on its architecture. A piece of software is either open source or it’s not. An object is either onchain or it’s not.

It took a few days, but after reading Jacob.eth’s post about onchain, it eventually clicked and my mental map of the space felt like it had received an upgrade.

A pragmatic example for where onchain helps

Mark Zuckerberg just launched Threads and signaled that his app was taking steps, for the first time, toward decentralization. It’s not yet live but the app plans to take part in the “fediverse” and use Mastadon's ActivityPub standard.

This is intriguing but also very difficult to pin down. If Threads is using Mastadon's ActivityPub standard, does that mean anyone can make a client? Can anyone write their own algorithm for the feed? Can someone unban someone who has been banned by Zuck?

None of this is clear but if you asked Zuck whether his new app is decentralized, he can say yes. If you ask him whether Threads is embracing some of the ethos from web3, he could even make a case! But if you asked him whether Threads is onchain, the answer is no.

In this case onchain can help unlock a more substantive discussion about a platform’s offering and what power users really have on that platform.

Let’s map

There are some that work with blockchains, that never embraced the web3 label, who find this semantic debate tiresome. It’s also worth noting that no term is going to be a quick fix for salvaging the reputation of any this, this will only come from building more projects/apps that people love and trust.

But language is a map. The words we use to describe what we do mean everything when it comes to how we think of our own work, who joins, and what we then build.

In the late 1990s, Tim O'Reilly (of O’Reilly media), and many others, noticed something lacking in how the free software movement was describing its work. So he gathered a group of leaders in the “Freeware” space for an in person summit. At that event, they produced a map for the terms they used and fleshed out a new story that took off shortly after.

What if we tried something similar?

On the left are the maps created at the Freeware summit, and on the right, is a template for terms we can map.

My intuitive sense is that onchain is a useful term worth embracing. But some of this is still fuzzy and before we embark on a campaign to get onchain into the dictionary, it’s worth it to take a deeper dive into why this term is resonating with many in the space. While also hearing some alternative proposals (that go beyond whether the hyphen stays or goes).

I’m publishing this to air out some thoughts around all of this and to encourage anyone to take a stab at the above map. I’m also putting together a group for a live session where we take a swing at this map collectively. If you’d like to join this session, or contribute asynchronously, say hello! DMs are open.

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Ty to @sdv_eth and @daranda for the feedback on the post. Special shout out to all behind the on-chain vs onchain partyvs.party project which helped accelerate these thoughts. Many insights came after launch through the positive/critical feedback in response to team onchain’s offering.

Ever since Elon took over Twitter there has been a ton of chatter about leaving Twitter and building alternatives to Twitter. So far, the exodus has not happened in a way that people expected or hoped but some alternatives to Twitter have emerged. In the past year we’ve gotten Bluesky, Post.News, and Warpcast, a client of the Farcaster protocol.

I love that people are building these but my beef with many of these alternatives is that they are all so similar to Twitter. There are some differences when it comes to interoperability, community, and content moderation but the core is the same. You sign up, you follow people, and you get a For You page controlled by an algorithm.

The For You model works for the platforms and can be convenient for the user but it can be frustrating for creators who are publishing their work into a noisy space ruled by an algorithm that’s always changing. It’s no wonder that a major trend among creators in the past few years is to use social to bring a portion of their audience into a space they control. They create a Patreon, which unlocks a Discord, and that Discord has a starkly different structure and focus.

When it works, it’s beautiful. You get people like Alt Shift X who are able to stream for hours about GoT or Dune where users are submitting insightful questions and he’s riffing with them in a way that makes the space better (my term for this is conductor social networks). There are problems though, even when creators exit a social network like Twitter, they are still going to other platforms where there is friction for their audience to get there and the creator is limited in their ability to make the space unique.

A Channel Experiment on Warpcast

This week, we got a taste of how this could go differently. Dan, the creator of Farcaster and Warpcast, tweeted this:

My response was immediate as this filled a real need. I’m a Nuggets fan, this was the most important game of the year, and I was seeking a space where I could talk about the game outside of group chats with friends. No one follows me on Twitter for my basketball insight so I craved someplace different.

There was an explicit goal for this channel and the experience was about what you’d expect. It was a group chat about a basketball game from a cohort who also is interested in crypto. There were memes, predictions, and some trash talking. The exciting part about it had to do with how it felt to be inside of it and how it could be developed further because of Farcaster’s interoperable design. Some thoughts:

• Even thought the space was technically open for anyone to see and write to, it felt more like a viewing party at a friend of a friend’s house.

• I may have casted more in one night on this channel than I’ve casted on the app in total. The focus and ephemerality of the event was clarifying.

• Things get interesting when you realize that every surface in the channel was customizable. The moderation, the algorithm for displaying posts, everything could be reworked. Including bigger pieces of the design:

  

• That an NFT unlocked it made it even more interesting and opened another surface.

  

  

• The business model for creators/conductors is clear and compelling here. The NFT for Game 5 was minted 279 times. When you include gas and Zora’s fee, this means people collectively spent $1395 for this experience. And also felt good doing it:

Channels on Twitter

Compare the Warpcast Game 5 space to the For Us page that Twitter automatically generated for the game.

The feed is sterile. A bunch of pre-approved accounts sharing clips from the game and little else. Even the “Top commentary” tab is accounts that have all been pre-approved. The “Latest” tab just gives a random set of tweets that use the #Nuggets hash tag.

And outside of a sports context, what about the communal “For Us” feeds Twitter automates 24-7? For topics like:

Twitter’s channels aren’t just bad because they are designed to be rage bait that extends your session time, they are bad because they are deeply mid.

Take an example from today when “Tenderloin” started trending.

When you click into the feed you get raw videos of people on the streets of SF overdosing on fentanyl, people screaming at each other calling each other racist, and images of someone’s dinner (they made a pork tenderloin).

What’s Next For Channels

There’s been an assumption for years that these Twitter channels would eventually improve as AI gets better but it just hasn’t happened. Twitter might be able to juice more session time out of the user but there’s an inevitable context collapse. I’ve rarely left a Twitter channel and felt satisfied in the way I did with this small experiment from Warpcast. Or I have with other creator owned channels/spaces in Discord in the past few years.

There is an art to creating a quality channel. And one of the prerequisites is to give creators the raw materials to make it their own. One where they can set a context, bring in a targeted group of people, and make money doing it.

This kind of control is what the major social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit are hesitant to give to any of their users. Their entire model is about driving people to their own apps and feeds so they can sell more ads.

The beauty of Farcaster is that it’s an open protocol. Anyone can make a client. Anyone can radically customize that client to fit the needs of the communal space they want to build. Anyone can make an NFT that serves as your key to that space. You can do it for Game 5 of the NBA Finals, for your favorite DAO, or you can take on a larger target like making a channel for your city.

The tech to do this has been here for sometime but the audience and financial incentives might finally be starting to click.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to this Substack! Follow me on Twitter or Warpcast. And as always, if you are thinking about this stuff, don’t hesitate to reach out. DMs are open.

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This post was originally written eight years ago and never published. I’m posting it this week as part of a seven day publishing experiment (that has been extended by one week) to take a deep dive into my drafts folder, and air out the stuff that I hesitated on.

This is one of my favorite pieces in my drafts folder. It’s my thoughts on the Mad Men finale but ultimately, a dive into the meaning of Don’s work selling sugar water and why it has value. I think I hesitated here as it’s a pretty wild conclusion and I wanted to get it right.

Steve Jobs is famous for recruiting the CEO of Pepsi with a line.

“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

I heard about this story when I was a kid and its one of those things that had an impact. Coke is bubbly brown sugar water. It makes people fat. It gives you heart problems and rotten teeth. Research suggests if you are a regular drinker by the time you are 10, you are 3x as likely to get diabetes. 

And these are the facts I would often spout to anyone who would listen to them when I was a teenager. Coke was a kind of capitalistic plague. The company was awful but, perhaps even worse, were the agencies in charge of making it even more popular. I drank coconut water and green juice.

Much has changed since then. I have swallowed some of my angst. I drink Coke sometimes at a movie theater or with bad whisky. But, if I’m honest with myself, the judgement hasn’t really gone away.

Those who make technology often roll their eyes at Coke. The product is boring. It is technically finished. There is a recipe locked in a safe somewhere in Atlanta. The people who are paid to make it more popular are making ads that are often as homogenized as its syrup.

But then I found myself wondering why my heart stopped when I watched the commercial play in the last seconds of Mad Men.

It was a beautiful ad from 1971. But it was also something that made me choke on my own prejudice.

If Coke is a finished product then what is it actually selling?

We’ve watched him for almost a decade. What has Don Draper been doing this whole time? 

The simplest answer I can come up with is that Don has been listening. 

Don suffered. His life could have ended at the bottom of a rocky cliff. Or on the pavement of Madison Avenue. He did things he regretted. He was a fraud. 

But he also climbed the ladder. He got to a point in his career where he could walk into a room, pitch, and get one of the most powerful organizations in the world to say yes.

And this is the bizarre power of Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, and the other huge brands where the product is mostly figured out.

They are a canvas.

Coke’s annual marketing budget is 2.9 billion. The sell 1.8 billion cans every 24 hours. They are in every country on this planet except Cuba and North Korea.

Coke’s message is simple. 

We are one people among many. We’re united by simple things like a smile, a song, and a Coke.

Many in tech roll their eyes or vomit at this. They see it as a cynical exploitation of multiculturalism. The corporation doesn’t care about the message, it just wants to sell you sugar water. But couldn’t it easily go the other way? 

Maybe we have Coke because selling multiculturalism is actually really hard. 

Our planet has 196 countries. Many ethnicities and religions. Two sexes. There’s an eternal political value in exploiting these differences for political gain and this is the current we will always be swimming in.

It’s not abstract. Nations may not kill each other at the same rate in which they used to but the wounds are still there. Getting a few billion people to wake up every morning and swallow the same thing is a big deal. It’s political in its own way. If we want to imagine a world where the lines between nations matters less, we need more shared experiences.

Sugar water gives us an excuse for a global shared experience. It’s simple enough to understand. It’s profitable enough to fund massive world wide campaigns. And those campaigns need money because the work is extremely difficult to produce and expensive to distribute. People are cynical. Making something that inches us towards unity takes patience and eventual leaps of faith.

Don was a deserter of The United States Military. Both his marriages failed. He hurt people in his life when they needed him most. But he survived.

When he got to the top, this is the message he sent.

A note from 2023. Special thanks to Kate Lee and Rick Webb for edits on this.

This post was originally written seven years ago and never published. I’m posting it this week as part of a seven day publishing experiment (that has been extended by one week) to take a deep dive into my drafts folder, and air out the stuff that I hesitated on.

Don’t really remember why I didn’t publish here. Maybe it didn’t go far enough? Wanted to sharpen the positive. Or just hesitant to admit how hard I fell. But here we are, from 2014:

I’ve spent most of my life ignoring pro sports and looking down on people who seemed to care. I’m into art & tech and sports to me, has always been an elaborate way to sell Bud Light. The drama is loud and dull and I had plenty of disdain for the people in the back of the bar shouting at a wall covered in plasma screens.

… For whatever reason, this year was different. I fell hard for the Broncos and then the Nets. One is my hometown and one is my new town where I’ve lived for 7 years. It started slow. Both teams did way better this year than anyone thought. They fought hard then both had crushing endings. One, a rout in front of 111 million people.

I’ve felt so horrible after each season that it made me question whether to let myself do this again. The season is fun, sometimes thrilling, then it ends and it’s darkness. Dreams are crushed. I feel stupid because I let myself fall for something I have no actual ability to control.

The ending is what makes sports so different than art. You go through a similar up and down in art but the ending in art is designed. There’s an arc and a specific message. Sports doesn’t have that. The story is TBD. And for every sport, there is only one winner each season which makes most everyone a loser. So why do billions of people agree to a routine and public punishment?

It’s an open question to me and I’m posting this here because I want your answers. But I’m also starting to think that the punishment is the point. They take the hit for you. You think about what it means. Then they walk into the press conference and say next season things will be different.

A note from 2023. The Nuggets are in the NBA finals for the first time. They just took game 3 to be 2-1. I watched nearly every minute of the game on my laptop tonight and when they won, all I felt was mild relief. Nothing real until they close the deal.

This post was originally written nine years ago and never published. I’m posting it this week as part of a seven day publishing experiment to take a deep dive into my drafts folder, and air out the stuff that I hesitated on.

I don’t remember why I didn’t press publish on this one. I think I was focused on my company at the time, hesitant to share something more personal then, or overthinking edits. But here we are, in 2014:

I sleep in front of a giant map of the world. It’s a beautiful map, full of endless geographic detail. The idea I had when I got the map was that I’d stick a pin in all the places I’ve been. I’ve slept in front of this map for more than five years in three different NYC apartments and, aside from a few cities in the US, I have not stuck in any new pins.

I dream of traveling and I’ve had the means to travel ever since I put the map on the wall but I’ve always come up with some reason to stay where I was. My parents don’t travel much and I didn’t study abroad in college. When I graduated a trip was my fantasy and a way to manage my own psychology. I’d tell myself that I can travel when I close funding for my startup or reach some other imagined milestone. I met the first milestone but it wasn’t long before I came up with new caveats to the deal with myself. Another year went by where I stayed.

In It’s a Wonderful Life the main character spends most of his life hitting moments like this. He fantasies about traveling the world but every time he’s about to leave he convinces himself that he needs to stay. It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie you watch around the holidays because his self sacrifice is rewarded in the end. An angel shows him his world would really have fallen apart if he left and those who count on him for so many years—pay him back with an actual basket of money. This is not the way it usually works in the real world, but the film is also a holiday favorite because its lows are so low. After spending most of his life denying his dreams for others, he stands on the ledge of a snowy bridge clutching a life insurance plan; he’s convinced that his body is the only valuable remaining piece of himself.

Around this time last year I was alone in my room in front of my map and I bought a plane ticket for Tokyo. It was a seven day trip and the flight left the next morning. It was not something I planned or could even really afford but I clicked submit.

I’ve had a year to reflect on this trip and pay off the AmEx Bill. In some sense my trip was pretty common. White technologist heads East to discover self is a cliche for a reason. I booked an airbnb in Shibuya. Took the bullet train to a sculpture garden on a mountain top and attempted to impress the locals with my dance moves. The biggest surprise to the trip is that after spending all those years sleeping under the map, wanting to go somewhere, it didn’t feel like that big of a deal to finally be there. I just felt lucid and more at peace.

What you dream and what you fear feed off each other. Each gives the other electricity. The biggest problem with pausing your dreams is that you lose touch with what you’re actually afraid of and your thought process warps. Every time I denied myself a trip, I promised myself something bigger in exchange. The trip needed to be perfect. Somehow worthy of all the sacrifice and now even further from my original grasp.

It’s easy to slip into this. Every day you get older it gets easier to fall into the decisions you made the day before. So you have to say it over and over again.

Travel in the direction of your fear.

A note from 2023. Shout out to Scott Kidder and James Del who I joined on the trip. And Aniq Rahman who encouraged me to say yes and buy the plane ticket the night before.

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One of the hardest things about writing independently on the internet is that you don’t have to do it. You can catch a lightning strike of inspiration for a post, fire up a draft and then edit it until you talk yourself out of it.

Is this post really two posts? Is this something to save for later? How do I make this legible on Twitter?

I’ve struggled deeply with this. I publish solo, but many things I’ve written online have involved friends, business partners, fam, or significant others, giving it a read and saying yay or nay. And even if they say yay, I will hesitate to press the button.

The outcome is that my drafts folder is like an elephant graveyard of ideas and scraps that never made it over the finish line. I joined Medium.com in 2013 and currently have 178 drafts on deck. Substack and Notion have their own folders and maze of half finished thoughts.

Everyone has their own process for publishing. Some are great at volume. Some focus on meatier posts every now and then. I tend to lean more towards the latter but I also want to mix it up.

Which is why I was so excited to see a friend doing a publishing experiment and challenge, “7 posts in 7 days.” The premise is in the title. Publish one post a day for a week. Break your usual writing rhythm with a group and see what happens.

So that’s what I’m publicly committing to now. And instead of new stuff, my goal for this is to take a deep dive into my drafts folder. Air out the stuff that I’ve been sitting on with some reflection on whether or not it holds up.

I’m starting at 2013 and working towards the present. You can think of it as a kind of long overdue spring cleaning. TBD on where it will go, but will post a reflection when it’s all done. To follow along, subscribe below or on Twitter.

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Shout out to Jon Bo for launching this project.

For the past year I’ve been trying to figure out why I love certain web projects and why some make me want to gouge my eyes out. Then one night, the YouTube algorithm reunited me with a scene from the Office.

The scene is a classic. In it, we learn that, for weeks, Michael Scott has been participating in an amateur improv class and breaking every rule of improv imaginable. He derails scenes, escalates them, cuts off scene mates and all in a way that involves him earnestly participating.

The scene lands because it’s a cringe that’s so relatable. Everyone knows how glorious a good riff between semi-strangers can be and how little it takes for one person to bring it all crashing down.

So how do you cultivate better riffs? how do you start one? Where do riffs often go off the rails in web2 platforms or web3 projects? What kind of riffs are newly possible and worth experimenting with in web3?

A Simple Framework for Thinking About Riffs

Creating a good riff is more art (and luck) than science but the most helpful framework for thinking about riffs I’ve found involves three core roles. These roles each can have different names depending on the project but each role brings something distinct to the table. The context maker (or curator/conductor) provides a frame and guidelines for the riff. The creator (or user/player) answers that call. And the patron (or backer/collector) supplies the reward for riffs they like, which can be something as small as a fave or a conversion to a subscription or to a large purchase.

When things go well in a riff, these roles move in sync and can create a kind of creative flywheel where the outcome is something no one could have imagined in the beginning. Think about how incredible of a machine TikTok is for setting up riffs. On TikTok, any video uploaded has audio automatically separated so others can use it as a base for their own videos. One memetic audio clip can serve as a context that spawns thousands of videos, which then spawns other clips, reactions, and duets. Occasionally, you get alchemy:

When things go poorly in a riff, the roles get messy. In the case of Michael Scott’s improv class, the cringe begins when he rejects his role as individual player and forces his own context on the group that then reluctantly participates.

So what about riffs here that go beyond what we’re familiar with in TikTok? That are made from scratch?

Riff Examples from Three Different Eras of the Internet

MillionDollarHomepage.com (2005)

One of the most famous websites of all time was started by Alex Tew ( who would later go on to start the multi-billon dollar company Calm.com). The premise was simple, he laid out a grid of one million pixels where anyone could purchase a pixel for $1 and attach a link to it. The brilliance of the project was that Alex was great at capturing press attention, and at a certain level of press attention in 2005, it started to turn into a good deal for advertisers. The novelty of the site and the story attached (he made it to pay for his university education), was irresistible. He set the context, cultivated the attention, and people started buying pixels.

r/place (2017)

Reddit was inspired by Million Dollar Homepage but introduced a novel mechanic that played into the tribal nature of subreddits. All Reddit users could place a pixel on the page but only every five minutes and anyone could then cover your pixel with their pixel. The mechanic created a gang like collaborative riff where various subreddits or aligned groups would commit to a certain place of the map and then defend their turf. And because every pixel was recorded, the eventual output was a fascinating animation that cataloged how these riffs came and went.

Exquisite Land (2021)

Exquisite Land was released into one of the frothiest NFT markets imaginable in 2021 but was notable in that it was entirely free to play. The mechanics were pretty simple, a few friends started by drawing tiles on the grid and then when the tiles were placed a coin appeared that they could then share with others (or themselves) to create the next tile. All artists minted their tile as an NFT for free (even the gas was covered so there was no charge to the user). The outcome of this was a month long riff experiment where people also owned their work and helped create a wild looking internet mural with a group of friends and strangers.

All of the above projects are rare, memorable, and difficult to replicate. It’s notable that many people tried to build a web3 version of Million Dollar Homepage but few gained traction. All three of the projects resonated because they had a novel way of revealing the strengths and weaknesses of each era of the internet.

A State of the Union for Riffs and the Creator Economy in 2023

For the past five years, the creator economy has had momentum. Platforms like Patreon and Substack helped make it possible for people to make a living from their creative work by getting money and support from backers directly.

One of the big ideas in 2021 was that all of this was going to explode even further because of the blockchain. The mechanics of NFTs and in crypto would strengthen this relationship and open doors to new communities where participants would have more direct ownership. So how are things now?

In 2023, we’re about a year into the crypto bear cycle. The price of Ethereum is back from it’s low point but a huge percentage of NFT projects (if you value these projects based on floor price) have collapsed in value and many are asking what the future holds.

Here’s Li Jin from Variant Ventures:

Many close to the scene have a take on where things went wrong.

This sentiment is reflected in the data on the platforms.

It’s hard to think of a single new NFT project right now that doesn’t look like this:

Or an NFT project from an established creator group:

Or the outcome from a prominent creator:

Some of the most pointed criticism of NFT culture in the past few years has simply been true. It attracted people who are incredible at building hype but little else. The novelty of investing in digital objects was amusing enough to bring new people in but it was rarely profitable for them. Many who did find success collecting were targeted by hackers and then robbed for hundreds of thousands in a few clicks. Things like “community” were promised and sold for five figures only for people to realize, later, that this meant access to a Discord full of other degenerate gamblers.

Even for those who entered with a project that was truly interesting, the danger was often in it succeeding too soon in the market. A group would find and love a new project, speculators would see the trade activity, and in a few days, only the original clique and those with a ridiculous amount of money to blow could buy a token. The market pressure would seep into everything after that, like an early stage startup that does an IPO for all of its stock on its first day.

In other words, the riffs, in too many of these projects weren’t just bad, they flattened into a repetitive and expensive zero-sum game of trading and flipping. At it’s peak, there was a seemingly never ending supply of new projects to back/promote and those with a lot of ETH could toss hundreds or thousands at projects leisurely then take gains as they came. Those who didn’t have a lot of ETH had to evaluate every project for its ability to flip or it would be game over. Many spent more than they wanted, lost it, and then never returned.

Hope

Sometimes it’s only possible to make progress when you’ve learned the hard way. It’s difficult to think of anyone now in NFT world who isn’t critical of the 10k PFP meta or who has an allergic reaction to slick sites with roadmaps and pseudonymous founders.

And yet, in all of the mania in the past few years, there’s been an incredible group of people who chose to focus on things they loved about the space. All it took was one project they really connected to. Or a group of people they met through the drama of trading and building. Or an aspect of digital ownership that they see as core to the future of the internet.

Some things that have been inspiring recently:

A decentralized alternative to Twitter is live and growing

Farcaster launched before Elon took over Twitter and has been steadily growing users since. The decentralized part of it has lead to launches of multiple clients and communities (hi Purple DAO) that support the expansion of the protocol.

A DAO bought a golf course

Many DAOs launched in the last year with grandiose plans and some of them succeeded. One of those DAOs is Links DAO which pulled members together recently to purchase the above golf course in Scotland.

Amusing partnerships are happening with brands

Poolsuite x Ralph Lauren.

Some artists have really found their patrons

Instead of going all in on a 10,000 piece collection that mints out in a day, some artists have taken their time. One of my favorites is BKKBros who has been doing a speed run of video game history, one piece at a time, for the past two years. He’s amassed a group of patrons who support his work, and he’s one of many who has done something similar at various scales and niches.

Some communities have really found a home

Shout out to FWB, DEF, and the Manny’s discord.

Weird coordination games are happening on chain

PartyDAO + a tic-tac-toe arena.

People are doing crazy musical collabs then selling them in loot box form

A string of experimental music projects lead to a 77 person headless band and recently to CC0lab, which is releasing musics and stems into the public domain.

It’s never been easier to publish on chain and create context around your work

Zora and Manifold have radically simplified this process and are consistently rolling out new formats.

The podcast ecosystem around the creator economy/ crypto is really good

Shoutout to Interdependence, New Models, Chase Chapman, Overpriced JPGS, Bankless, Joshua Citarella, Building at the Edges, The Scoop (I know I’m missing some. remind me)

Millions of dollars are getting deployed through DAO governance and quadratic funding

Shout out to Nouns and Gitcoin.

A new model for AI digital voice is emerging

In 2021 Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst launched Holly+. A project that involved Holly using machine learning and AI to make a twin of her voice that others could use in their own work. Anyone could mint a token and those who minted became part of the DAO controlling the digital twin.

This project sounded insane when it first came out, but here we are, two years later and the technology to do what Holly did for her own voice has swallowed the entire music industry. People are releasing high fidelity mixtapes that feature realistic depictions of Drake and Kanye.

And some artists are embracing a version of Holly’s model that includes NFT splits.

Every era of the internet brings new mechanisms that deepen the kind of riffs that are possible. These new mechanisms also tend to bring some combination of euphoria and chaos. This was true with the first message boards in 1985, true for social media in the 2010s, and it’s been true for the past few years with NFTs unlocking native digital ownership.

In the spring of 2023, we’re way past the euphoria stage in NFT world. Things have fallen back to Earth and the questions people have been asking are now heard at a different volume. Is this all a fad? Do people really care about digital ownership or are they more interested in exotic gambling? Will those who profited in the previous cycle cash out or pay it forward? How do we make this tech more accessible? How do we use this tech to unlock better riffs?

They represent a sliver of the total market but all the projects above give me confidence about where things can go. The tech that enables NFTs and digital ownership is just tech. There are so many ways it can be used and those who release projects have control of the context they create and riffs they want to enable. They can direct their energy towards floor price, or they can lean into something weirder.

We’re now entering a cycle where a huge group of speculators have left. And a cycle where, in the past two years, the infrastructure to code custom applications has gotten radically more accessible. This is a unique time to do what has always been fun to do on the internet. Launch products that set up a good riff.

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special thanks to Jon Bo and Daniel Keller for the edits

Last week, a friend and I pressed publish on a new project.

We realized when we published this how crazy this project will look to most people. Why pool capital to purchase something that can’t be purchased for years? (If ever) Why focus on Mars when there are so many other problems on Earth?

Even among those in tech/crypto, there is a well worn skepticism when it comes to projects that look too pie in the sky. We’re also in a bear market, some of the rosy eyed visions for Web3/DAOs have come crashing back to reality. There’s a real question about whether this scene is mostly good at producing exotic JPG casinos or whether the immense wealth and talent in crypto can translate into something more fundamental for the internet.

Some of the reaction was what we thought we were going to get:

However, some Tweets and DMs were more encouraging.

We wrote about the why for Mars last week but even among those sold on going to Mars, there are open questions about why to focus on Mars now? And what a DAO can really contribute to the mission in the near term.

This is a list of our current answers about what Mars can give Earth and why this will be a fun DAO.

Why We’re Excited about a DAO for Mars

The dream for Mars is in our bones.

Ever since we landed on the Moon we’ve known Mars is the next leap. Sending rovers and satellites to the planet is great for research but will never satisfy the itch to put boots in the dust.

Mars is a powerful frame for thinking about the future even if we never land on Mars.

Mars is ~30 million miles away and is the closest thing we have to a new world in 2033. If Mars is a symbol for the new world, what dreams do we have for the new world? A DAO can help prompt, cultivate, and reward responses that take a deep dive into that question.

The tech required to get to Mars is closer than it’s ever been but some of the most exciting parts of this aren’t about the tech.

A trip to Mars requires a huge amount of capital and sign off from governments of the world. Once the task of getting there is tangible, a host of new questions arise. Who gets to go first? What qualities are we looking for to start the colony? What happens when they land? What happens when multiple colonies form? What allegiance do the colonies have to the groups that sent them? All of these questions need to be explored and an independent internet org can help accelerate and structure these conversations.

Elon has dominated the conversation around Mars and it’s going to get stale if it’s mostly him.

He’s done more to make the Mars dream real than anyone on the planet but there’s so much more to this dream than the transportation required to leave the planet.

NASA is overly cautious and unlikely to move without public pressure.

It’s been 50+ years since Apollo and we still don’t have a mission plan on the books for Mars. They have plenty of explorations and more rovers planned for 2030s but nothing that incorporates Starship.

If NASA won’t move fast enough to Mars, we’re going to need to develop a backup option with other nations, corporations and investors.

There’s a reason some of the most famous and successful expeditions have been privately funded.

The Nouns daily auction system is a proven mechanic to pool and deploy capital that could work really well here

This isn’t a DAO to make complex software that requires a lot of centralization and coordination. It’s a DAO to make waves in the zeitgeist that change hearts and minds. Ideas on how to do this can come from anywhere and the DAO provides an invitation for people to come out of the woodwork.

Many people will think this is ridiculous and that’s ok.

On its face, selling tickets to win something that isn’t even possible yet meets every criteria of being a scam, but that’s also the schtick. This is designed to attract earnest believers of this dream. The nature of the daily auction model means that we can slowly attract these backers, then it’s on the team and members to make a splash with how that capital is deployed.

We're at the very beginning of the space tourism industry and talent/interest is pouring in.

Blue Origin is regularly sending ships to low orbit, costs to get to orbit are falling, and the first commercial flight around The Moon is planned for this year.

One of us is going to Mars

Buying a commercial ticket to Mars is a tangible challenge with a clear ending. Pulling it off will take energy and patience over many years but it involves a dream that everyone on Earth can understand. Of all the moonshot causes the crypto world could go in on, it’s hard to think of one more fascinating than one that makes “moonshot,” a dated term.

Last week’s launch was the soft launch. Before we launch a formal DAO we’re absorbing feedback on the structure of the project and putting together a group who’s animated by the mission. Similar to how Nouns has “Nounders” (their initializing board), we’re doing the same and looking to add a few strategic partners.

If you’re interested in any of the above, we’d love to hear from you. Follow our telegram channel for drops, join our homebase, or reach out directly.

Also, special shoutout and thanks to all who minted the free open edition and made their RSVP to Mars. 260 have been minted so far! The mint closes Thursday.

thanks again you to all who've given feedback on this project. @jondotbo, @DnlKlr, @chasews, @thattallguy, @joshcrnls, @matdryhurst, @HipCityReg, @tmincey, @DonCald, @the_carlosdp, @jeremymims, @vikkiinguyen, @caro, @JDel, @TimshelXYZ, @ScottBeale, and @Leigh_Christie

”If you hate it so much, then why don’t you leave?”

We are a few months into Elon running Twitter and some of the worst discourse has revolved around this question. You have people airing out reasonable critiques of how Elon has been running the company then have supporters mocking them and showing people the door. You also then have major celebrities leaving Twitter in the most performative way imaginable.

What’s lost in this is that both the current Elon Era Twitter (that has existed for 2 months) and the Pre-Elon Twitter (that existed for 16 years) has been a mess. Many of the things people are complaining about now are issues that have always been there. The problems that form, when a single CEO brokers the discourse of millions, are well known.

So what do we do about it?

One idea is to turn the challenge on ourselves. How can we, personally, make better social networks?

This could mean cloning Twitter and going for massive scale right out of the gate as some are attempting. Or it can mean starting on a much smaller and more tangible scale.

Roll your own social network or help nurture an independent one

You’re already doing it for friends and fam

Have you ever formed a group chat? Or rage quit one? Congrats, you’re basically Mark Zuckerberg. These smaller chat groups have been so ingrained into our life that I don’t think people realize the degree to which sustaining them, in a positive way, is a skill that people can get better at. There’s no 3rd party moderator to call when things go off the rails in the fam group chat. You often have to learn the hard way but the first step is to realize that what you’re involved in, is a digital social network, and there are nuances to the chat box everyone is typing into.

There have never been more accessible tools for you to bring your people together

You have Discord, Slack, Geneva and many other new ones attempting to get your attention. At their core, all of these apps give you the ability to make a place that you can moderate as you wish and integrate with the rest of the internet as you wish. You have to use their interface but the amount of integrations and customizations you can do is a sight to behold.

It may bring you more joy than tweeting about how much you hate Elon

The amount of emotional energy dedicated to dunking on Elon for how he’s running Twitter… with tweets, is a sight to behold. I get it, there’s plenty to target, but at what point is it a self own? You’re still there. If your conviction is that high, live by your values and exit. Or try something on the side until you feel more comfortable to take the leap!

If it goes well, rolling a social network is a path to meet new people, make money, and nurture creative relationships

This trend of carving out private, independently moderated spaces online isn’t new. It’s the trend that created the internet as we know it (shout out to The Well circa 1985). What’s new is that the internet is now both normal (~5b people use the internet daily) and the frustration with the major platforms has never been as pointed. We’ve come full circle and people are searching for their own version of The Well.

It’s time to grow up

The deal we’ve accepted from Twitter and Facebook is a convenient deal but a cheap one. We are promised a “public square” for free on the condition that we’re not citizens in that public square, but subjects.

It’s taken us a decade to realize how few people this satisfies in practice. It’s hard to understand how bad it is until you’re the one pressing the report button on a Tweet threatening a friend and then waiting weeks for a reply. Or what it feels like to be told there is no such thing as shadow banning only to see the interface for shadow banning emerge years later. When things go off the rails on Twitter, there is no due process, no jury of your peers, and no transparency about how consequential decisions are made.

Even Elon understands an aspect of this. A few weeks into owning Twitter he kicked some of its most major decisions to a 24 hour Twitter Poll.

But he misses the other side of this. That poll was a sham. It didn’t go to all of Twitter in any organized way, it went out to people who follow him and happened to be online on a Friday night.

Transitioning the users of these mega platforms from subjects to citizens requires something different. Continuing to wait or encourage Elon and Zuck to do this doesn’t seem like the best strategy.

If we’re tired of kings, it’s time to grow up and build on land they don’t own.

There’s already momentum

Some of the most fascinating new sites are niche social networks. Shout out to New Models, FWB, Do Not Research, Farcaster, Poaster, Def, Are.na and so many others that go beyond my own immediate interests.

All of these spaces have run, head first, into issues with moderation and community stewardship. All of them have codified rules and guidelines that are unique to them.

These networks are all tiny in comparison but that’s also the point. I think we’re much more likely to find better practices for conflict resolution, due process, and treasury management in smaller spaces than to start at huge scale and then work backwards.

Elon has (inadvertently) given us a rare window for something new

Elon owns Twitter now and the meta conversation about how to run a social network has blown up in a way we haven’t seen in a decade.

Many people are actively looking for new spaces to go. They are debating the details of social platform policy in a way that just didn’t get attention before. And it’s a beautiful thing.

If we’re serious about a future online where we aren’t the playthings of boy billionaires, then we’re the ones who are going to need to grow up.

It’s on us to realize we have a choice of where we spend time online. And it’s on us to remember that building and refining social networks isn’t some weird or nerdy thing reserved for the Zuck’s of the world—it’s the thing that, quite literally, made our world.

We’re better at creating social networks than we give ourselves credit for and there’s so much more we can do to translate that skill online. In 2023, the tech required to make this happen has never been more accessible.

I realize It’s one thing to talk about rolling your own social network and another to have some skin in the game. I recently tossed my hat into the ring with some friends (more on that soon).

For the rest of the year, I’ll chronicle attempts to start a few mini social networks from scratch, post some thought experiments for ones I think could exist, and continue to back the ones I love.

To follow along, follow me on Twitter and this Substack.

ty/shoutout to @jonbo and @chasews for edits

In 2016, when news about the secret Peter Thiel lawsuit against Gawker came out, I made a plea to Thiel and a prediction. Call off the lawsuit while you still can, if this lawsuit is successful, it’s going to accelerate a culture war where everyone loses. The crux of it is here:

It’s fine to disagree with Gawker. They certainly have screwed up sometimes, but there’s a reason we made freedom of the press, the first amendment. Why can’t Silicon Valley counter speech with speech? Why do you need to use a proxy lawsuit? Many legal experts predict that Gawker will win the Hulk Hogan case on appeal but it won’t even matter because fighting the lawsuit took so much money that it bankrupted the company. This is Silicon Valley justice?

My worry, as someone who works in tech, is that support of the Thiel lawsuit is going to backfire and everyone in tech will suffer. The world is waking up to the hypocrisy and grotesque wealth of the valley—they want to know who this new power is and they won’t always be nice in their questioning. The middle class in America, the European Union, and those abroad want to know what kind of future it faces as the tech industry continues creating products that eliminate their jobs. Thiel just crucified the most notorious dissenter of Silicon Valley and called it ‘philanthropy.’ If this is how Silicon Valley billionaires are going to treat their dissenters, then dissenters have no choice but to go underground.

I stand by the post but I was wrong in one respect. Dissent of Silicon Valley did not go underground, it went above. Gawker alumni were fired or quit in 2016 and they graduated to the most elite media organizations in the country. The hypocrisy of a Facebook board member secretly destroying another company because it didn’t like its media output was too much. A new cohort of journalists and critics started asking questions and applying pressure that wasn’t there before. The floodgates opened.

For the past few years I’ve heard endless complaints from people in tech about how the media is unfair. The complaints about negativity have gotten to the point where many companies treat the NYT like Gawker, where they vow to not engage in a request for comment.

I’m sympathetic. The NYT has also morphed in the past four years and there’s an illiberalness to it sometimes that’s disconcerting. What I haven’t understood is those in tech talking about this problem as if they don’t have any agency.

There was a point, in the Spring of 2020, after reading Marc Andreessen’s “It’s Time To Build” essay, where I couldn’t resist.

The response at the time was about what you’d expect. Balaji suggested a decentralized fact checking system that hasn’t been built, Antonio García Martínez said that we’ve been here already, and Paul Graham said that SV’s contribution to media is the infrastructure that powers Twitter.com.

But as the year progressed, efforts and energy around building more handcrafted media in SV increased.

A16z invested 10 million in to Clubhouse but more notably, they are on the app all the time. You have some version of Andreessen + friends radio happening every night on Clubhouse right now and it’s getting a big following.

And then a16z announced their new enterprise.

There are many reasons to be cynical here and many reasons this could blow up but it’s a long time coming.

My hope with this accelerating Silicon Valley interest in media and local government is that those with the resources, swing for the fence. Stop tweeting into the void about how people in SF hate techies and put your own ego on the line. Many know the infrastructure and bureaucracy in SF, and other American cities, is a kafkaesque nightmare—expose it. If you don’t have the electoral power—get it. Stop thinking gov and media is someone else’s problem and build a new coalition.

I’m unsure this crew understands how challenging this is going to be but I’m happy to see them more formally enter the arena. The tech industry needs better ways to process and organize criticism and opportunity. How this project, and others like it, develops an audience will be revealing.

It’s time to build.

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