083. A classic chicken vs egg standoff.
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Hello good people,
Happy Labor Day to our friends in the states! Hope that if you did decide to work on something today, it was something you love ❤. Equally, hope everyone had a nice weekend. Things were pretty much crickets on BitClout so we trust y’all were up to some fun activities and adventures in the IRL world 😜.
Anywho, we reckon things will ramp back up soon. Let’s get caught up on everything that’s been goin’ down before we have lift off again 🚀
Bits on the menu tonight:
BuzzClout: Exclusive updates from @bitcloutsignal & @bithunt ⚡️
Ubiquitous UX drops: updates keep 💧ing as we wait for the wave 🌊
Project in focus 🔎: @supernovas pushes the envelope 📨
Community round-up: around-the-horn with MOAR ideas + q’s ❓
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout
Been MIA all weekend? All good, we took a break too. Let’s catch up on which creators were making big moves by checking in with @bitcloutsignal:
To get us even more caught up? We trust @bithunt has updates for us on the community project side of BitClout 🤝. What’s the good word, @bithunt?
#2 Ubiquitous UX drops: updates keep 💧ing as we wait for the wave 🌊
Another slow weekend as far as updates to the BitClout UX and UI were concerned 🥱. Seems like maybe @maebeam and @lazynina et all got to take one day off for Labor Day, though we’re sure most of the weekend was still spent hammering away behind the scenes 🏗️🧱⛓️.
And of course, there’s still plenty that goes haywire on BitClout from time to time, which is to be expected of a 6-month-old platform. Here’s @samhorine live with the BitClout x Labor Day joke of the weekend 😂:
While the core team preps for bigger updates like the re-design of bitclout.com, the community continues to take charge, spearheading and implementing important pull requests. One such example? Over the weekend @paulburke proposed and already received approval for a pull request (“PR”) whereby NFTs will showcase the ‘last price’ at which they were traded:
This data will allow clouters to more easily assess how strong the secondary market for an NFT is. If the last traded price is higher than the price at which an NFT first traded hands, it may well indicate there’s significant demand for the NFTs or for work from the original creator in general 📈.
@paulburke wasn’t done there with just one approved PR for the weekend however. While providing updates on the first PR we described above, he noted that a second PR of his has now been merged as well 💪:
This update means third-party apps for BitClout will need you to grant them the highest level of permission before they can make changes to your profile (e.g. your founder reward %). If you’re already familiar with @paulburke’s newest plug-in, @overridentity, you’ll know that third-party app permissions are an important focus of his; he wants all users to be conscious of and careful with exactly which permissions they’re granting apps before they use them. Make sure to check-out @overridentity and rest assured, from now on, apps will need the vaunted ‘Access Level 4’ to mess with your profile 🔒.
What are other devs on BitClout up to? We’re VERY curious to get more deets on what @danielwilson is cookin’ up… Seems like it could be pretty … liquid:
Further, the legends over at @CloutCast look like they have a PR in the works that will make using their service even more turn-key… Is a @CloutCast integration hitting bitclout.com?? You heard it from @smartalec first…
#3 Project in focus 🔎: @supernovas pushes the envelope 📨
Another set of builders on BitClout who weren’t resting on their laurels over the weekend? @supernovas ✨, the team behind a brand new node designed specifically for exploring and discovering NFTs on BitClout. Their latest update? It makes minting NFTs on BitClout that integrate Arweave, a decentralized image hosting service, HELLA easier:
To be clear, the BitClout core team made integrating an Arweave link into NFTs possible from the start, as they recognized that only allowing for images stored on more ‘centralized’ hosting services and clouds wouldn’t fit well to the decentralized ambitions of the BitClout platform. But as many users experienced in the early days of NFTs on BitClout, using Arweave wasn’t nearly as easy as minting NFTs on BitClout in general was. That’s why the @supernovas update is pivotal — by making it much easier to use Arweave when minting NFTs on their node, they’re promoting greater decentralization while also improving user experience, which is no small feat 🔝.
The @supernovas team had lots more to add on their rationale behind the change as well. Let’s pass the mic to them to give you more details on the update and the rationale behind it 🎤:
And folks in the community were STOKED on this update, as they should be:
In sum? You love to see community projects not waiting around for daddy @diamondhands to integrate updates they’d like to see. Instead, they’re leading the way, building the experiences they want themselves. It’s safe to say @supernovas is a much better place to browse AND mint NFTs than bitclout.com is now… which is exactly how things should go in a decentralized universe. With the BitClout protocol at their core; killer apps can build almost anything imaginable around it themselves 💡.
#4 Community round-up: around-the-horn with MOAR ideas + q’s ❓
It’s no secret. Nor has it been for weeks now. We’re at a crossroads in the BitClout story considering where the $clout price is (down), how many DAUs there are (not that many), and how much engagement there is on our feeds on any given day (meh). To close up shop tonight, let’s take you around-the-horn with a mixed bag of additional ideas, commentary, and questions from the community 🗣️.
First, @ourielohayon rallied the community’s attention around a goal that’s been discussed a lot over the past weeks. While not a novel concept, it’s clear there’s a ton of enthusiasm and need for a community development fund to help projects continue to build even as engagement on BitClout and the $clout price is down. Without great apps, it’ll be next to impossible for BitClout to push through ‘Phase 2’. We reckon this is part of the core team’s roadmap, but hey, always good to keep the most important stuff front of mind ⏭️🧠:
Over the course of the weekend, one of the earliest BitClout pioneers and certified OGs, @JakeUdell, also sparked a lot of conversation and engaged with community members around the question of whether getting other big celebs and power users of social should be prioritized, and if so… what BitClout needs to get these high-caliber type users to actually stay? Here’s some of the discussion we found particularly interesting 💬:
@HPaulson also crystallized what the core of this debate is really about. It’s a 🐔 vs. 🥚 question — what comes first, killer apps and dev-led projects that extend the use cases available on BitClout as a whole, or a vibrant community of users that can attract more users to the social side of BitClout?
Finally, it’s come to a number of clouters attention that even the most core community projects on BitClout aren’t keeping all of their data up to date. For instance, there are leaderboards of creators on @bitcloutpulse that are outdated. It’s likely that these teams are on vacay 🏖️ and aren’t fully dormant… but definitely something that’s worth keeping an eye on. Ideally, if BitClout activity picks back up, so will these projects’ activity levels:
Thanks for tuning in to another edition of @BitsTODAY. As always, ping us with ideas for topics, projects, or any other general absurdity on BitClout you’d like to see covered. We’re always all 👂 and love hearing from u ❤️.
Much love,
@BitsTODAY