What should Web 3 communities be called?

📺 Corrales and I hosted a chat about what Web 3 communities should be called. Watch the discussion here.

Below are rough notes on the session.

Cory explained how he started with a focus on the creator economy which has now evolved into a deep interest in Web3. Perhaps there is no escaping Web3?!

Why are we asking this?

Mostly because of tokenomics, says Cory.

• The Web 2 way is classic relationship building
• The end goal (regardless of Web 2 or Web 3) always ends up back to the basics of community, it’s about people.
• The alignment is there always, or should be?
• Where he thinks we’re headed is the concept of Web 3
• There are so many power plays happening right now, big players, big investment
• So many people are trying to define it

Cory says, instead of trying to define it Web 3 perhaps we can place value systems.

• Values are still key
• Communities are no longer communities, they are micro economies
• There are so many different ways to connect and interconnect
• Is it fair to call these spaces community anymore or do they become economies?
• To envision greater things from our society.

How are communities not economies right now?

• All the members of the community can make money
• People who participate can make a living
• As a leader you don’t have to come up with the money, that’s the job of the crypto
• It’s meta/radical, if you build a strong community everyone is going to benefit
• People who are part of it can create their own sub communities.
• Does this change the inherent sense of belonging or purpose behind joining a community?
• Does the focus on ownership actually do it more harm than good?

Perhaps the definition of Web 3 needs to stem from a place of meaning:

• The big issue of Web 3 is that it’s kicked off by big players
• Is it top down, rather than bottom up? Even if it is bottom-up from the community perspective, the fact that the big players have so much influence creates imbalance?
• There are no definitions of this stuff anywhere, though some people are trying, it becomes a bunch of people with their own different and customized definitions.

Cory highlighted:

• Any idea can be tokenized - nft, social token, crypto coin, they are digital coins
• An example of Web 3 and how to make money with the likes of Gumroad: People can copy what you make, which means you can’t own it
• Ownership is community ownership, or one person ownership
• A lot of the value out there is the value on community owned ideas
• Our vision of the the community is the value in the tokens

How could a Web3 community name make it more welcoming? And not sound like a clique/too closed a group?

• Portia — Be mindful of who your audience is and be skeptical, take the time to explain it to them first in way that’s understandable.
• Portia — Web 3.0 can appear very assimilated, its important to make sure that we’re approaching this industry with empathy
• It’s important to explain what tokenomics is in ways for other people to understand easily
• Think with empathy and with the needs of other people
• Language is important here — one struggle in Web 3 is that things aren’t quickly and easily defined.
• Diversity means you are comfortably talking about things in our way, being empathetic.
• It’s what the members deem it to be called
• Tilt: has a token that represents the community, they’re trying the experiment, the tilt community owns it, they came up with a definition of it. They are calling it ‘shared success in the community’.
• I think web3 is giving an avenue to scale a shared value system and also equitably distribute the wealth created by the adherence to those values.
• It's also a mechanism to have value more justifiably distributed to the 1000 early adopters. They'd feel as invested as the 10-20 founding members. There’s security in knowing that value generated by them and their can’t be taken away from them— Gautham
• Regulations/laws are basically a set of community values.
• What is the value of bitcoin/eth/nft - they are community values.

Maybe the framing is what should web3 represent?

• The tokenomics brings hope…’The new hope’ ala Star Wars? :D
• Web3 redistributes the value and gives it back to the creators, rather than a traditional organisation itself.
• DAOs - the bankless DAO

What are examples for some communities who have implemented token economy very well outside of mainstream crypto? Who is doing it well?

It would be great to have examples of communities that didn't originate from the crypto domain. I’m looking for ones that originated as a trusting, loving, helpful group and evolved into considering adopting tokenization. Say for eg. @Rosieland tokenising :-D

• Tilt community - it doesn’t rely on the value on the coin.
• How can the value be transferred through the coin?

Will coming up with a different name just be confusing? (Unanswered)

• Curious what the intent and purpose of coming up with a different name is? - Darlene
• What are the implications of ‘web 3 communities’ still being defined as a community? - Darlene

🐦 A post Twitter thread