Hi, I’m Emilie, and I’m launching this newsletter, Connection Engine, to discuss reflections and lessons on community building in a digital world. If you’re a community builder or just curious about community work, you can join the fun by subscribing below!
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I’ll start off this issue by saying that everyone’s experience in a web3 community is different. You could join a DAO and be completely electrified by the energy. But you could also ape into an NFT project with little utility and be frustrated with the false sense of value. I’ve been a member and a manager for such communities so my reflections are through the lens of both the builder and the critic.
Let’s dive in.
Should your company be thinking about web3?
The answer is easy here: yes. But thinking about what web3 could look like for your company and rushing to build a web3 community for your web2 product are two very different things.
I’m going to be honest here—I think it’s a terrible idea for web2 companies to use web3 features, like tokens and NFTs, to artificially inflate community growth and engagement. I say this for several reasons:
This is a quick hack that might 2x your community growth, but you’ll see the cons of this quickly (an unengaged community, members there for the wrong reasons, no sense of shared purpose or value).
If you don’t put in the proper time, thought, and team alignment into your project, you’re trying to build an already sinking ship. You don’t build a better internet overnight, and you certainly don’t do so with solely the profit of your business in mind.
If you don’t think about what you’re going to do with the resources coming from your web3 project (a successful NFT project could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars) you risk losing early (and great) members that, again, will see this as a cheap growth gimmick and a web2 project masking as web3.
I’ve seen many web2 companies launching NFTs without a thoughtful approach or throwing around web3 tools to raise funds for the business — which goes entirely against the shared ownership aspect of web3.
I have strong feelings about this because I think it could potentially ruin the game for those really trying to build out web3 into a better, more resourceful and more human internet. It also ruins company reputations.
So how should you be thinking about web3?
The potential for community-powered magic in web3
I think the potential for community in web3 is huge. There’s a certain magic that happens when people organize around shared values and collaborate to bring ideas to life — and you don’t need a blockchain for collective human action. Communities have long existed without any technology, and will continue to do so even as technology advances.
Web3, however, can help solve a few issues currently faced by communities today. In web3 communities, all transactions are transparent, and value created together is distributed according to predetermined conditions set by a smart contract, not by a few people at the top of the hierarchy.
“Essentially, DAOs are owned by the people who create value in them. This is a radical notion and one with real consequence; by expanding beyond the traditional notion of who should ‘own’ an organization, DAOs empower a broad ecosystem to take action and create value on its behalf.” - The Generalist
This could be huge for the future of work especially as employees experience a degree of transparency that isn’t muddled by the bureaucracies of corporate life (while also earning multiple streams of income from various affiliations).
If you’re wondering what this might look like, Ben Schecter breaks it down in “The Future of Work is Not Corporate—It’s DAOs and Crypto Networks.” A snippet:
“In the future, it’s likely that the average person will not work for a company. Instead, people will earn income in non-traditional ways by taking actions such as playing games, learning new skills, creating art, or curating content. This kind of shift in how we work is not unusual or unexpected — the idea that most people would be employed by large corporations would have seemed crazy to someone in the year 1800.” - Ben Schecter
Just imagine how much freedom and power can come from a future where we aren’t tied to one place or one person for our livelihoods — the potential is incredible.
A thoughtful approach to building a web3 community
Going off my issue on engagement and patience, a web3 plan for your company or community takes time. A web3 community means you introduce web3 tools into your community’s infrastructure, so you’ll need to consider a few points.
Will you need to onboard members new to web3? How will you do so?
You need to provide your members with the right context and frameworks to be successful. A great piece of advice here by David Spinks is to start small. Don’t ask for too much too early (this applies to all community building, not just in web3):
There are tons of great resources for web3 onboarding. Check out this piece on onboarding as wayfinding and this inventory of onboarding practices.
What utility are you providing your community through web3? Will holding an NFT unlock future perks?
Will features of web3 be useful to your members? If you launch an NFT project, you should have a plan in place for what kind of utility this will unlock down the road. Whether product discounts, invitations to holder-only events, merch, or access to exclusive experiences, your NFT should come with some clear benefits from the get-go.
Just because you can launch a token, does that mean you should?
Tokenized communities are complex. Learn more about the pros and cons before you decide if launching a token is best for your community. There needs to be a reason for your token, and a reason why people will hold it or buy it in the first place.
Linda Xie has a great piece on social tokens if you want to dive deeper:
“Another risk worth noting is that once a social token is issued and freely traded, it is subject to market fluctuations which can at times be heavily driven by speculation. This can potentially negatively impact a community. It’s important to think through how having a freely traded token can affect community morale and cohesion. There are ways to alleviate this issue such as making tokens non-transferable in the early stages, as the community is forming, as well as introducing long vesting schedules to ensure that community members are long-term aligned .” - Linda Xie
Check out this piece from Forefront on what makes tokenized communities valuable. Love this insight in particular:
“The unique, killer feature of tokenized communities is the rapid incubation and funding of community-led projects. Tokenized communities turn members into entrepreneurs, creating a network of projects, products, companies, and sub-communities that are working toward propagating a common meme or mission.” - Jihad Esmail
How does incentive design play into your community strategy? Will it attract the wrong members?
Incentive design is tough (I’ll get into this in another issue). Mostly because it’s hard to explain human motivation and what drives us to do the things we do. Are you yourself driven by extrinsic or intrinsic factors? You probably need to consider the context to answer this question.
We are all motivated by different things at different points in our lives and during community work you often wonder if people are there for the right reasons (cue the signature line from The Bachelor). It’s important to figure out how you’ll provide value to your members and whether the incentives align with your overall community strategy.
“Good incentives can increase participation rates and a sense of ownership in all DAO operations. A DAO that is leaving too much work for too few people is not in good shape.” - Ben Perez
There are many things to consider when building in web3. Do so thoughtfully and because it will help your members, not because you want to call yourself a web3 company.
If you’re trying to figure out where to host your web3 community, I’ll speak briefly about my experience with Discord and things you can do to make it a better experience for your members.
Discord tips & tricks
I have a love-hate relationship with Discord. On one hand, how awesome is it that most of the web3 community is gathered on this platform that makes it easy to connect with others, share web3 projects, and collectively build a new world?
But Discord is also a centralized company. As Packy McCormick and Mario Gabriele point out, “A centralized chat app seems an odd place from which to launch a decentralized revolution.”
On top of that, the platform can be overwhelming, messy, and anxiety-inducing: the notifications, the chaotic energy, the million “gm” messages, the bots. Oh the bots. Imagine joining a busy server for the first time. Yikes. But there are a few things you can do as a community builder to make your server more user friendly:
1. Organize your channels
Your Discord layout should be extremely organized. Create your categories wisely and limit only necessary channels to each category. Less is more — get rid of any inactive channels and launch new channels only when your community is ready.
When naming channels, keep it clear and concise. Personally, I love the below “emoji | description” format — it’s easy to scan and quickly find what you need:
2. Use bots to help with scheduling, membership, invitations, and other commands
Discord bots have a bad rep — and for good reason. There was a period in December when I was getting at least 15 spam messages a day (not to mention bots trying to hack into my community’s Discord server).
There are a few no-code bots though that will make your life as a community manager much easier and are relatively easy to set up. I will note that you should never grant a bot admin privileges or the power to manage roles (you can deny these privileges when you invite the bot to join your server). Some bots I find to be useful:
Sesh for calendar management and scheduling (also great for polls)
MEE6 to help with moderation, alerts, and leveling
Invite-Role Bot to automatically assign roles based on the invite URL (helpful if you’re inviting members to a private channel within your Discord)
Collab.land for verifying your blockchain assets and getting access to holder-only channels
Craig the voice channel recording bot for high-quality audio recordings of your events
Other integrations, such as Zapier or Memberful, as necessary to facilitate your automations
All of these have tutorials online but might require a bit of trial and error so test them in a moderator-only channel first.
3.Secure your server (and encourage your members to do the same!)
This is especially important if your server is an NFT community — hackers frequently target these communities and send spam links that compromise crypto wallets. To prevent this, as the server owner you should:
Have all moderators turn on 2FA to make sure no one else can log into their accounts
Make your server private
Encourage members to turn off direct messages in the user profile settings and provide details on how they can secure their assets
No platform is perfect, but I think Discord does a decent job of building async communities in web3 while maintaining some sense of intimate human relationship- building very different from the clinical feel of a workspace Slack chat or other platforms.
“If Twitter is the internet’s town hall, Discord is its hidden network of comfortable lounges, dingy basements, and smoke-filled back rooms. It’s where companies and DAOs are built, bonds are formed, schemes are hatched, alpha is leaked, and fortunes are won and lost. We spend more of our lives in cozy classrooms, crowded restaurants, and friends’ living rooms than we do in large stadiums. Humans didn’t evolve to live on stage.” - Packy McCormick & Mario Gabriele
If you’re curious on more web3 tools, below are some I’ve used and others that might be helpful for you.
Web3 tools
Infrastructure for web3 communities:
Collab.Land: Verify assets with a tokenized, community-management system
Top.gg: Find the right bots for your Discord server
Upstream: Launch a DAO with no coding or technical experience required.
Manifold: Have ownership over your smart contracts (great for launching an NFT collection). No code needed.
Coordinape: Simplify how you handle compensation and rewards in your DAO.
Bonus: Check out this amazing DAO tooling matrix from Rob Sarrow.
As you can probably tell, there are still lots of questions about web3 and the very important role of community in this new landscape. As a community designer you should familiarize yourself with the possibilities — web3 will heavily rely on well-designed communities and people-powered ventures.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of community in web3, onto more community building tips in my next issue. Until then, thanks for being a part of Connection Engine!
About me
I’m Emilie Kormienko, community designer at startupy. Why am I doing this? To share my learnings on community work, to learn more myself, and to make new internet frens :)
Want to read more? Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my newsletter here.
Have a community question for a future issue or just want to chat? Email me at ekormienko@gmail.com.
Great job Emilie! 👏👏👏