Project Profiles: A Whole New World of Community Interactions

Hopefully you are here because you've looked at a world full of problems which have been caused (at least in part) by centralization, and (correctly) decided that the solution is decentralization: to redistribute power, for social good, and in order to put control over the means which we use to communicate back in our hands - this is where Ethereum World comes in.

Anyone who has worked in the communications, community management, marketing, or customer service industries knows the utility that comes from the effective use of social media tools. Prior to the advent of social media, individuals working these jobs would have to pour a lot more resources on handling incoming phone calls, checking generic email addresses, and opening real, printed and written mail. Obviously these things still are a part of the modern customer service query-handling mix (maybe not so much the latter one), but we now have these new tools which have fundamentally changed the way that our roles are undertaken.

Through the establishment of brand and company profiles on social media networks, we have shifted a great deal of inbound queries to somewhere where they can be a lot easier to manage; this being said, the context within which these conversations happen is radically different. Many of these tools are used by people to converse in near-real time, it is because of this that people's expectations of interactions with companies, projects, and other organizations have fundamentally changed as they have been brought into the sphere of other, unrelated conversations.

These entities have responded in kind by being more reactive and cultivating more of a personality online, whole departments in modern offices are now devoted solely to content creation, digital marketing, and customer service through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This is a heady mix of different tools that can be a drain on your time, as well as continuing to push content onto networks that do not really have our best interests at heart. I have no interest here in attempting to convince you that your Ethereum project should drop all of those social profiles and move everything over to Ethereum World at the earliest possibility, but I'd like to outline from my position as a communications professional going on for nearly eight years now the kind of benefit you'd get from setting up your project/organization/non-profit/whatever-brilliant-contribution-you're-making profile on Ethereum World. Here goes...

The dogfood

Let's start with a big one: dogfooding.

Ethereum has the potential to radically change (and is changing) all of these things and more, but to do it we all need to come together to swap out tools and engage in a truly revolutionary act of decentralizing as many things as possible. Supporting the creators of decentralized tools through using their output is in a sense a key part of a greater act of creation and change.

Companies using Facebook's advertizing capabilities jacked it up and turned it into the surveillance capitalist hellscape that it is today. You can see here how the paradigm was shifted: the companies decided that the network was a good thing to buy into collectively, they did this, and then the negative effects ran wild.

Projects engaging with Ethereum World is an act of us eating our own dogfood that sidesteps what these networks have become, rather that the net negative that comes from many projects jumping into and bolstering the power of a centralized platform, let's all share in the benefits of engaging with a decentralized one.

On top of this there is the thorny issue of identity in the Web3 space: for those who wish to be known, how can we provide them with a portable identity? Many have chosen this route:

Which we fully support, so much so that ENS names will be a way of creating profiles and filling in data within Ethereum World alongside 3Box, which has taken a similar problem and approached it from a different angle.

N.B. I thought I'd also just leave a note here to appreciate how clever .eth names on Twitter are for bringing new people into the Ethereum space as well as:

As many people writing on social movements and mainstreaming have pointed out, a pivotal part of a meme entering into collective consciousness is it being seen; these actions are brilliant examples of how to get people on the outside asking questions about what we're up to. This is an important way that we can use things like Twitter as tools to draw more people and interest into the space.

The quality of conversation

We wouldn't be the first ones on record to say that the quality of conversation when it comes to crypto Twitter can be kind of lacking. For sure, there are a number of individuals and projects who are putting out solid content, and engaging people in useful conversations as well as bringing in newbies with their .eth beacons, but drop #Ethereum in the search bar and you'll instantly be transported to a world of token spam and irrelevant content.

Our sample of 54 responses across Telegram and Twitter cited noise as the second-biggest problem with the main social networks.

We're not saying that this kind of material is going to instantly evaporate when you add Ethereum World to your mix of tools for communication, but this will be a place where we work to improve the signal to noise ratio, and unlike the opaque controllers of the big networks we're currently so deep into as community builders, this will be a place that we build together.

Together we can open up a space that promotes this quality Eth content, as well as avoiding black box actions like...

This being said, keep your other public-facing Web2 profiles. As already intimated, the transition into a new way of doing things will be a slow and careful process. The old guard of extant social currently have the network effects, but in time people will see that we no longer have to have these necessary interactions take place in a space governed by the actions of shareholders in smoky rooms.

The innovation

As explained in our Devcon 5 presentation, one of the really cool pieces of functionality that we are trying to bring to bear with this project is to have different dapps potentiate each other through the act of chaining them together:

Experience Ethereum’s synergy flowing through your conversations as you combine multiple decentralized apps in new ways. An explosion of emergent interactions is within reach!

We are well aware that a rising tide lifts all boats, and syntheses between projects are of the utmost importance when it comes to the act of our big, wonderful ecosystem growing in all its organic Ethereum glory; this new awareness of pain points and usage could develop into a very powerful tool when it comes to identifying projects that you could benefit from having closer conversations with.

That new, heretofore unthought-of piece or potentiation of functionality that comes from the mixing of project x and project z is happening in the public square, replicable by any interested onlookers, and communicated through the very act of using it. Just like a hot take moves through Twitter with as much speed as it has the ability to spark something in its readers, a combination of dapps has the potential to mimetically create a new way of doing things.

Ethereum truly is greater than the sum of its parts.

Additionally, you never know how the functionality that you've built is going to be used in the wild. The Slinky was originally a tool for stabilizing instruments on ships; bubble wrap was designed to be wallpaper... as one person, a team of ten, or a team of 10,000, you'll never be able to second guess the things that the people using your tool will do with it, and we see this flowing as a great way to see what's happening in the wild, what's being said about it, and the amazing new things people are doing with the product of your hard work.

So we look to a future with the promise of exciting, new tools on the horizon; just like the communications, marketing, and customer service professionals of the past jumped at the chance to pick up emerging technology to bring them closer to their fans, customers, and markets, we hope that many will see this as a chance to make their mark and shape the way these interactions work going forward, bringing to it their deeply-held convictions about decentralization, openness, and transparency.

If you think you'd like to be a bigger part of this in the early stages, why not get in touch with us.