In order not to have the same fate, we need to go for the long-term.
imagens: pexels
Brief:
How short-term helped us to make wonders and compromised our credibility.
How Creators may say goodbye for the Hype.
How to think Web3 creations under long-term strategies.
Let's go selling 10,000 NFTs and get rich?
Sure thing!
Creating 10,000 artworks takes too much time, so a computer will generate thousands of models by combining hundreds of traits, and we'll call it Generative Art!
They may look bizarre sometimes but… Who cares?
Let's mint it right in the marketplace so we don't need to worry about smart contracts. After all, who cares about rules in codes that will last forever in the blockchain?
Most important is that we gonna strike a sold-out in one day, get rich and famous, and fill our pockets in the greatest hype of financial speculation of history thanks to the magic of Web 3.0.
But hold on!
What if millions of people have the same idea? 😳
Burning our pants for an extra boost.
Calm down, friends. Just kidding!
But that's how we (the Creators of Web3) are seen by most of the world.
It's amazing what we have done at the dawn of our era. The lives of millions of people have been completely transformed in a very short time thanks to Web3.
Seductive short-term promises, however, take their toll.
Thirsty for delivering results at the end of the day, we got lost in our own goals:
We starred global cases of success that lost 90% of the valuation in the following week.
No time to think about what happened! It's solved with palliative solutions or hiding problems under the rug.
We've saturated the market with useless utilities, while purchasing decisions are based exclusively on hype most of the time.
We broke the promise of “Community First”, with arbitrary decisions about royalties, CC0, and bridges between blockchains.
In this full of doubts environment, people of value watch from a distance.
The door is open.
Many want to enter but fear it too.
Web3's credibility was compromised at many points in this initial sprint.
We are like the charcoal burner who throws his pants into the furnace to give an extra boost to the locomotive.
Friends, we need TIME.
Say Goodbye to Hype
This sacrifice was not in vain.
With short-term strategies, we could overcome obstacles in the dense forest
and open up the dirt roads we run today.
It was amazing! But it's time to pave highways.
Start by saying goodbye to the hype.
It may be fun to spend a weekend or two in a tent on the beach, but to raise children, people look for a home on solid rock.
There are obstacles whose solution is not within our reach as individuals. For them, we need to allow time for the ecosystem to get mature.
Take a look at social platforms for example:
If Discord's UX is a maze for advanced users, for a newcomer to Web3 the Minotaur itself seems to be lurking around the next corner.
Twitter struggles with immature management, increasingly politicized bias, and (OMG) creators threatened with suspension for posting links to other platforms.
Everyone agrees that this restricts access to the audience and under qualify the creator's work. It's hard to lead something in a business environment like that.
Decentralized platforms such as Lens Protocol and Blue Sky are coming. Their potential may make Discord and Twitter obsolete, but we must allow time for that.
Time is also needed to:
Consolidate the role and natural vocation of each blockchain;
Regulate and reduce exchange rate fluctuations for cryptocurrencies.
Make it accessible to the general public;
Adjust laws such as shared intellectual property.
The Role of Creators in Long-Term Strategies.
Our market will change a lot when "all these little things gonna be all right". Until then, we creators have our role to get the Web3 business environment more mature as well.
And we can roll up our sleeves right now:
Before delegating the life or death of our project to a 3-day sold-out season, what can we do to keep it relevant when all this turmoil is gone? [Believe me, this will pass.]
Instead of keeping our NFTs breathing 15 days longer with a new silly utility, how about exploring our audience's dreams and desires, becoming the perfect way for them to come true?
Before convincing people of the value of art produced by machines at the touch of a button, how about exploring the human heart and creating art from a group’s culture? Turn each piece into a living symbol of something they believe in? PS: It's ok to count on the help of machines for that too! 🥰
Rather than exhausting our energies to engage people in our communities, why not give people a chance to tell their own stories? Giving voice to the warmth that speaks silently in their hearts, booming by themselves the desire for engagement?
Instead of resurrecting old Soviet dilemmas like "useful art", why not focus on making our art interesting?
Instead of telling the world that we're worthless by giving our NFTs away for free, why don't we show our value, so people pay for our NFTs? Why not turn every audience wish into a new income opportunity?
Attitudes like these protect us against momentary storms and gradually build the credibility that our ecosystem needs to become increasingly relevant to new audiences, creators, and investors.
When Web1 was born, América Online gave free CDs away with access drivers for ordinary people to access the internet for the first time. So many kits were distributed by default, that if we sent Earth's garbage to a satellite in space, it would shine more than the Moon, because of the CDs from América Online.
It worked for a while, but this giant no longer exists like before.
We have the choice between learning from past mistakes or seeing our work perish in the same fate.
Yes, fren. Being a Creator in the early days of Web 3.0 is quite a challenge.
But, as Naval Revikant put it, 40-hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes:
Train,
Sprint,
Rest
and Reassess.
This post is the 01 of 04, written for the Bankless Academy Writing Cohort with Grant Nissly.
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