Should I make this into a graphic novel like Why's Poignant Guide, with Flux & ComfyUI?
Maybe a video series with @livepeer?
The importance of communicating well never gets old. It’s painfully obvious when the material gets complex
Explaining web3 and AI by listing off technical components and endless stacks of jargon to regular people, no matter how eager they are at the start… doesn’t work
Right now I’m juggling social accounts, features, and interactions on @orb, @hey, @buttrfly, @yup_io, Bluesky, Threads, Warpcast, @fireflyapp, Zora, Discord, IG, YouTube, SoundCloud, LI, and I don’t even know what else. There’s more, but it’s way too much to deliver what they’re meant for.
We need more apps to experiment with new use cases.
But how do we solve the interoperability problem? Where’s the selective publishing and easy content switching?
How do we get to a web that’s a bit more enjoyable …and sane?
That feeling of what's wrong with viewcount chasing social everything is when you say something that's real to you, but get back silence. Or a few comments from bots. Nothing genuine. No one racing to collect and save what you make. No satisfaction from the empty likes. No clue how to adjust when 9 to 5 is all gone to randomized downsizing, delays, and denials of service.
We're ghosted by algorithms all day, told it's a skill issue, and stop trying.
We're too worn down for friends, or will be soon enough. But we can still react, and talk about it with agents, if not each other yet. Maybe that can be enough to start holding the same space again.
Everything is a communication design problem now.
Even your codebase, when working with agents as peer programmers that either waste or save tons of time, depending on how well you structure your talk sessions with them.
Earlyish days still in onchain art. Rare digital art panel at Rise.
Chelsea, NYC (2018)
Long overdue, but finally testing yup. Not in love with the UI, but does it cross post well?
Long post, mostly open ended questions, reflecting on what’s needed in the hackathon.
Why am I joining the @lenshackathon? Am I joining?
How do I even have time? I can't submit the app I just started building with @livepeer even though it's entirely @lens (plus Farcaster and Bluesky) focused. But I could do something with music video streaming since I’ll be working on that in the livepeer AI ComfyUI hacker program anyway. (Will see how much interest there is for it…)
Taking a step back, there's a more pressing question hanging in the air for all of us here.
What's wrong with social media that Lens and any other web3 social protocol or app experience hasn't hit a really satisfying or transformative solution for yet?
For me, it’s a kind of spillover community activation friction that comes back to: What's today's social media used for?
In no particular order, without sugarcoating it, here's how I see it:
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Trolls, rage, misinformation, scams, and bait. Which are exhausting, but reinforce the idea that only a few big companies or regulators can solve it
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Value extractive platform lock in. But that still sounds too abstract to most legacy DAUs to override their crypto cringe response
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The only hope for content monetization where you can at least imagine yourself going from 0 readers, viewers, listeners, subs, or followers to actually earning a living from your own creativity, charisma, effort, and media savvy
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A place to ease loneliness and friend to friend communication that doesn't feel so algorithmically manufactured or constantly transactional
There's real conflict and tension between those. Maybe they can't all be solved with more thoughtful communication design, better products, cryptographic proofs, and decentralized tech. Maybe they can.
Working on a Livepeer app recently and getting more active in that community, I've been asking the same kind of questions but around the root of "why video?". I think it applies to everything here too, though. "Why any content?", including the random thoughts we share here instead of in some long lost paper diary.
What's started to make sense of it for me is: "Whatever you watch (read, listen to, etc), you can see yourself doing. You become what you take in and react to." We become who we know, in not so trivial ways.
Maybe that's too rooted in an emotional design perspective. But what I can't help thinking about every time I see a post about @orb, other Lens apps, or what's needed for future activity, volume, and adoption, is going back more than a decade ago to when everything seemed simpler, and massive follower accounts were rare. What was it about Hype Machine, Turntable.fm, all the other apps-as-places so many of us obsessed over, that's missing from whatever the web is now? Can we even get it back? Can we do better?
I don't have the answers, and haven't seen them anywhere else yet. Maybe just asking the questions can help invite them?
