Hey there!

I’m Keenan, I previously led community efforts at DXdao, the largest on-chain-only DAO which has since dissolved in a dramatic spectacle. I’d love to tell that story someday if there is interest!

Today though I’d like to talk a bit about how, particularly in small to medium-sized communities, meaningful information is becoming harder to find and is likely not even reaching you. (Long live DYOR).

What's The Problem?

Cryptocurrency is inherently flexible, there isn’t an independent place where communities create their token, DAO, coin, etc. As a result, the means used to communicate with one another often differ between each project. Sometimes it's Discord, sometimes its Twitter (and some days its X, lol). Telegram, Medium, Reddit, Githubs and a whole lot more. If you have been in the space for some time, it’s not uncommon to have a dozen or more social services to sign up for and pay attention to (this gets far worse when you start exploring crypto-born social media projects).

When you focus on one service, it’s a battlefield for your attention. In Discord, for example, admins will often point you to opening all notifications, splitting notification types into severity and pinging you for absolutely everything. Before I realized this was a problem, it would be a weird day waking up without three digits of red notification bubbles.

https://i.imgur.com/B9IaTbj.png

No wonder most servers have some kind of anti-ping emoji.

This is just Discord too, every social service has some sort of algorithm or game for community leads to play to get information to their community. Don’t play the game? Don’t work around the algorithm? Sorry, the latest change to your favourite DEX is only going to be seen by a fraction of interested users. Most communities stretch their messaging super thin and throughout as many of these social avenues as possible because crypto culture says there isn’t a standardized information source.

The realistic outcome for all of this is simply user burnout. When I’m on Discord, chances are low I’m going to interact with three digits of notifications a day; on Twitter, I might never even see the information. Weigh all of that against the fact that I am a power user, also. A more casual user is going to see a lot less, and god forbid trying to indoctrinate new users to the space.

And how about spam n’ scams?

Cryptocurrency is an absolute breeding ground for both, and they further muddy the information in the space. It has been, is, and likely will forever be profitable for bad actors to find ways to siphon user funds through the aforementioned social tools. To provide another specific example with Discord:

• DM spam/scam – One of the most common scams, the victims will unknowingly think they are the recipient of an airdrop through impersonation. Sometimes this isn’t even sold monetarily; there have been reports of “potential candidates” phishing through infected “resume” PDF’s. I’ve personally been impersonated before also, with the fake account asking my colleagues for funds, or a more innocent pretend payment.

https://i.imgur.com/UtTf5eR.png

Lucky me, its my 8th Debank airdrop announcement of the month!

• Bot permission workarounds – If not properly configured (and in many cases, even if it is), Discord bots can be used as avenues of breaching into servers and faking legitimacy. Never interact with links from a bot, even those you trust!
• Hyperlink redirection – This was highlighted on CC only a few days ago! You can now embed links within text (and therefore other links) within Discord. There is a warning if you are paying attention, but remains a massive risk.

So, what can I do?

Manual Changes

The lowest hanging fruit is to manually prepare each of your services for the worst-case scenario. To continue using Discord as an example, familiarize yourself with the “Privacy & Safety” section of your settings such as DM spam filters and allowing DM’s from server members. Most of these alterations are NOT retroactive and only apply to new servers, so you may need to make some manual changes to get it where you want it.

https://i.imgur.com/Qf3fO1s.png

Stay safe!

Security Bots

If you are unfamiliar with how to stay safe on Discord, there are plenty of teams working on solutions. Highly suggest Pandez Guard; its a great tool to keep servers secure while educating users at the same time, prompting you to do the most concerning manual changes needed with Discord.

I’ve also had decent experiences with Captcha.bot; some servers even opt into a complete token gate using a tool such as Guild.xyz

The NOW Solution

The best way to tackle all of the social information and attention issues I’ve mentioned in the current crypto environment would be to pull information together in some way from all social tools that requires minimal input from you as a user.

Outposts is a small team (of which I am advising!) building community tooling to aggregate community information and distribute it as you choose, which currently comes as an email twice a week. It fixes attention by letting you opt into specific communities where their information is fetched from anywhere and shortened into easier-to-digest snippets… plus it circumvents spam and scams by not requiring constant attention to the services that are most targeted. I’m obviously biased, but I am very passionate about this topic and highly suggest giving it a shot. (Plus I believe the team is running a limited beta, so only about a hundred slots currently).

https://outposts.io/

https://i.imgur.com/jL3a3zd.png

A section from my last update email.

For the sake of accuracy, here are a few other projects that are in one way or another tackling similar issues.

• Wonderverse
• DAOLens
• Cronos.News

The FOREVER Solution

Personally, I think the permanent solution to these issues starts with a fundamental culture change for crypto. In recent years, the core fundamentals of cryptocurrencies have fallen by the wayside, sacrificing decentralization for what is often a quick-buck or shortsighted solution. This is another topic, and I won’t dig too deep into it here, but eventually crypto enthusiasts should congregate to on-chain and decentralized solutions, including social media platforms and DAO’s (Bonus points for both)!

A good collection of teams focusing on this to some capacity:

• Lens Protocol
• gm.xyz
• Snapshot
• mirror.xyz
• TaHo Wallet
• GovernorDAO

So, what do you think? Is Discord as unusable for you as it is for me? Or am I just getting old? ????