My Entry to Online Communities

In early 2011 my parents bought me and my brother a Playstation 3. At the time I was only 10 years old and would overhear kids at school talk about how scary the Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies mode was. I of course immediately felt the fomo and began begging my parents for a copy of Black Ops 1.

It wasn’t long until me and my brother were hot-spotting our PlayStation from my Dads phone so we could play matches online. My first experience loading up online was like nothing I’d experienced in my life at the time. 

“You’re telling me, you can talk to your friends through the internet while playing a video game at the same time?”

I was blown away. Getting on the mic and talking shit to strangers online was exhilarating, especially for a ten year old. 

Fast forward to 2012 and I’m completely down the Call of Duty rabbit hole. I’ve learnt how to mod my games so I could unlock whatever I wanted and was neck deep in the world of Trickshotting. 

Back then I wasn’t even very good at trickshotting, although I was okay at quick scoping, the thing I found the most fun was joining and creating clans with your friends online. 

For anyone who never got a chance to join a clan here’s what we did.

1) Change your gamer tag to show affiliation to your clan, eg. Faze Teji, [FAZE] TEJITOPIA

2) Get a custom clan logo with your name to use as your profile picture

3) Play online with your friends, try hit trick shots and make montage videos for YouTube.

Which was funny enough how I originally learnt Photoshop and how to edit videos. 

Digital Ownership is Power

Now, what does this all have to do with NFTs, DAOs and Web3? 

Well, it wasn’t until the other night when I was listening to Faze Banks on the Raw Talk Podcast that I put all the pieces together. 

Of all the clans to have come and gone, Faze Clan is the one that's managed to stand the test of time and is now even a publicly traded company.

In the episode Faze Clan CEO, Faze Banks explains how we’re witnessing a 1:1 replica of what played out in the clan era. 

“We all talked to each other on Skype and now it’s discord and telegram. I’m Faze Banks, Faze Rain, Faze Temperr.. we all have these weird names that originate from our gamer tags, we were all undoxed. Just like crypto..”

Having your custom clan logo as your profile picture on Skype is the equivalent of having an NFT like a Pudgy Penguin as your Twitter profile picture. It's all social signaling to the communities we belong to.

But this is only the beginning. 

Until now I wasn’t sure why web3 felt so right. 

A few days prior my good friend Max was over at my house and I was telling him about everything currently happening in crypto. 

For context, everyone I meet and anyone that knows me will know that I’m consistently trying to onboard people to this world because in my eyes it makes so much sense. 

But with a hint of confusion still in his eyes after my ramble about decentralized social media Max asked me: 

Why is this so clear to you and not to others?

I couldn’t ever really answer that question until now. 

You see, all those clans we were a part of was an early emergence of online social coordination. What we were doing back then is exactly what we’re doing right now in web3 with DAOs. 

The only difference here is the tools have gotten 1000x better and you can now prove ownership and affiliation to your clan or community and own all your own digital assets, data and upside. 

Nouns DAO or what I call Nouns Clan is one of the best examples how newly formed online community’s are leveraging blockchain tools to build brands. In short Nouns auction a unique Noun NFT every day and take all the daily proceeds and put them into a shared bank account that lives on the blockchain. As of now the Nouns community have accumulated ~$17 million USD in Ethereum. Anyone can make a proposal and request funds from the community to create Nouns related activations that serve to raise awareness for the brand. Before any proposal is passed holders of the Nouns NFT vote of what they think the best ideas are. If you'd like to learn more about the Nouns are doing check out this one minute video below.

In its most simplest form the blockchain is one giant public record keeping book filled with timestamps. All those hours spent on in and around games would now be accounted for on the blockchain. You were the first person to get a certain in-game achievement in the world? That's now provable with the blockchain.

Imagine if back in the day there was a way to pool all the in game currency and XP we earnt into an in game bank account that was able to be swapped to whatever currency we’d like. Half of us would be millionaires by now with the amount of hours some of us put into these games.

Now, If people are already spending billions of dollars every year on in-game content in games like Fortnite, why wouldn’t millions of these virtual economies have genuine monetary value?

The Great Value Transfer

The blockchain shares value back to the users themselves by enabling digital ownership to the ones who make the platforms valuable in the first place, the users. 

Without users there’s no platform.

It's why dozens of the most popular web3 apps have given away millions of dollars worth of tokens to their most active users for participating on their platforms. The majority of these tokens are governance tokens that allow the community to vote on and make proposals about the direction of any of these platforms. Recently, Reddit did something very similar by offering shares in its IPO to the platforms 75,000 most active users.

However, it goes much deeper than owning skins in a video game. There's a complete power dynamic shifting real time back to the people. Ownership is power and never before have we as citizens of the internet been able to reclaim this power through digital ownership.

Regardless of if you put thousands of dollars into FIFA pack openings, Call of Duty DLCs or CS Go cases. You were never able to take the entirety of the value you poured into any of these games outside of any of these in game worlds. 

The same idea applies to today's social media. As a user you're farmed for your interactions and sold to advertisers. All of your data is locked inside the platform and you see zero upside from their gains on your data. 

The blockchain flips the value flow on its head completely. You see platforms like Warpcast are emerging that have been built on open web3 protocols like Farcaster that allow anyone to permissionlessly plug in, pull data and build products for users. 

The best permissionless product we’ve seen built on Warpcast so far is $DEGEN which is a token built to reward the platform's most active users in the form of a daily tipping allowance. Your engagement and activity levels determine how large or small your allowance is for the day. Some of the most active users get thousands of dollars a day to reward creators and at the end of the month you are rewarded back with the same amount of tokens you tipped out to creators. 

This is the new creator economy. 

A ground up open approach where users receive true value for their contributions. It’s never been easier than right now to create an online community and incentivize members to participate. If you’d like to learn about how my friends and I helped create one of the most successful collectives in web3 check out this article here. It explains all the tools we used to pull off over $200,000 USD in sales as an emerging art collective.

Now, if anyone of this sounds interesting to you I highly urge you to join a decentralised community and start participating. This is the future and it's knocking on your front door waiting for you to come along for the ride.