094. F.N.H.H. A diamond in the rough or a diamond a dozen?
If you’re just emerging from a deep slumber, you may have missed the whirlwind of both excitement and criticism that has accompanied the release of the Diamond app — a new app built on top of DeSo.
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Good evening,
Welcome to another @BitsTODAY Friday Night Happy Hour! 🍻 Somehow this week felt like a long one. Might just be us. Might be the moderately fraught environment that has been percolating among DeSo users since this week’s announcements dropped. Think we could all use a drink to take the edge off with some bevvies / humor. Let’s do eeeet 🤙
Bits on the menu tonight:
Ubiquitous UX drops: referrals to nowhere? ❌
Clout controversy: a diamond in the rough or a diamond a dozen? 💎
Quick hits 🎯: DeSo games, community reps, and creator vaults 🔐
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout️: Today’s numbers from @designal and @bithunt ⚡️
First rounds on @designal! On the menu? Details on all the movers and shakers today on DeSo. Whose coin price is up? Whose is down? Let’s see 👀
Ready for another round already? Let’s call @bithunt. They’ll hit the bar and hook us up with deets on which community projects are hot vs. not 🥵🥶:
#2 Ubiquitous UX drops: referrals to nowhere? ❌
If you’re just emerging from a deep slumber, you may have missed the whirlwind of both excitement and criticism that has accompanied the release of the Diamond app — a new app built on top of DeSo that now rivals bitclout.com as the main place DeSo degens hang out — as well as incentivized referrals for DeSo users to invite their homies to DeSo ecosystem. If you missed those releases altogether? Catch up in @BitsTODAY edition 093.
We’ll get to the controversy re: Diamond in greater detail later. On the UX front, the release of referrals had many folks jazzed about the opportunity to earn up to 3 $DESO quickly 💰. Still, there were tons of questions about the functionality of referrals (and other things relating to Diamond). Let’s have a look at some of the discussion from the past 48 hours, shall we?
One question a lot of folks had with respect to referrals? How’d the core team decide who is eligible? And why? While we were left in limbo for a few days (since Wednesday) here’s how @nader described the thought process today:
OGs certainly appreciated the gesture. Unfortunately, some of said OGs who had access to the referrals live in geographies that aren’t currently supported by the verification process that you have to complete to receive the incentive from referrals. While perhaps not avoidable, that’s a bummer.
Even more problematic? It appears some referrals were being claimed in manners that suggested bots were harvesting the rewards 🤖. @tijn, @brootle, and @ItsAditya were hard at work testing out hypothesis and investigating this in the second half of the week 🕵️
Even some of the folks who you’d think would be most excited about the prospect of more DAUs had sober (surprising for this Happy Hour!) takes on why the referral program seems flawed. Here’s @ribal, the creator behind @cloutfeed, stepping beyond the UX side of things to discuss the economics:
To complicate matters further, another feature that was giving users heartburn? The tutorial, which many new users joining via referrals reported was buggy if not entirely unusable 😞:
Unfortunately, the confluence of these factors concerning the referrals, the tutorial, and other factors like sharing of personal info across apps led sentiment downhill 📉. DeSo OGs weren’t shy in expressing their dismay either 👎. The referral program as it stands right now doesn’t seem like it’s going to meaningfully bolster DeSo’s DAUs with users who are truly engaged. We hope we’re wrong 🤞. For now, the DAU count today was flat around 3k.
#3 Clout controversy: A diamond in the rough or a diamond a dozen? 💎
Many folks were excited by the release of diamond app, what with bitclout.com looking like an ancient social media relic 🏺. Equally however, we’d be remiss if we didn’t give voice to community questions and *concerns* if you will about Diamond 💎.
On the 13th, an article went up on the DeSo website (here) discussing the $1M investment the DeSo Foundation made out of the DeSo Octane Fund ($50M total) to help Diamond grow 🤝. You can read the post here.
After an initial rush of at-first-blush excitement, folks started to ask more and more questions about the terms of the investment and implications for future DeSo Octane Fund allocations. Productively, leaders like @tijn compiled questions that arose and which, if answered, would provide a better sense of how allocations will be made + what’s happening behind the scenes 💪❓:
Other folks weren’t so charitably inclined. Coupled with the concerns we outlined in section #2 above, many people on DeSo weren’t sold on the idea that the whopping $1M investment in Diamond was money well spent 😅:
It’s fair to say it’s been a challenging few days, as @CyrusAbrahim is by no means alone in his outlook. On the flip side, if you’re looking for a contrasting, more optimistic opinion, you know you can count on @Krassenstein to try to keep us positive and energized ⚡.
Zooming out, regardless of money is being spent well on referrals or on Diamond app, it’s also worth appreciating how far things have come in a short few months. We still remember when we were excited about the ‘re-clout’ functionality on bitclout.com… Perspective isn’t an excuse for the fact that certain things could potentially have been executed better, but it can help us keep our heads up and eyes forward. Onwards.
#4 Quick hits 🎯: DeSo games, community reps, and creator vaults 🔐
As the number of apps built on DeSo grows, we won’t always be able to spill as much ink on all the things that happen throughout the week as we have in the past. Probably for the past — unlikely anyone really consumes all of @nvo’s bloviating at this point 😂. So, new section here + new approach, where we catch you up on a number of other items quick-hit style. Sound fair? 👉
Gaming on DeSo. Starting in 3… 2… 1… 🎮
Not one, but many games are set to launch on DeSo in the coming days. And, as is increasingly true of gaming, you can win real money while playing 💰:
The second game? @DeSo_News had a nice write-up on it and its creator, @Aikon, in a recent medium article (see here). While it’s still in development mode, @Aikon envisions building an entire ecosystem of games under the umbrella of @DeSoArcade. Highly recommend ya’ll check out the article! 🕹️
Community representation — taking initiative rather than a backseat 🗳️
Considering everything we’ve covered today? There’s probably never been a better time for the community to ramp up its own involvement in steering the future of DeSo. In fact, it’s always a good time for that when it comes to a project that aims to be decentralized. Fortunately for us, there’s folks who are taking up the call. Earlier this week, @JasonDevlin spearhead an announcement of a new “Community Representative Program.” 🙋♂️
Organized community feedback is something the core team has openly asked for, yet that’s challenging for them to organize, what with being focused on developing the blockchain and a million other things. That’s why what @JasonDevlin et all are working on here is critical — if we can take the task of sourcing feedback out of the core team’s hands, well… then we can at least be sure they know what we want and what’s on our minds in the future 💡. And we can ease their load a bit and speed up decentralization in the process 👍.
There were multiple ‘office hours’ about this new initiative today — anyone get a chance to tune in? We’d love to hear how it went. Sounds like we’ll also be able to catch up via recording 🎙️:
@flickapp to the rescue — ‘Creator Vaults’ are a bright spot on DeSo today ✨
To close on a strong note, @flickapp dropped some exciting news over the past 24 hours, rolling out their new product called Creator Vaults. What are the vaults? Vaults allow creators to easily offer premium content for fans, with NFTs acting as the keys to exclusive music, images, or whatever other types of content creators have on offer and want to store inside the vault 🎶📷✍️.
To boot? @flickapp is buying $50k in access to vaults over the coming weeks. That means they’ll probs make it rain on early adopters like @GDvirtualgalleries 🐋💦. Ready to check it out? You can get working on your vault on @flickapp’s website here. 🔐
Get home safe now, y’all. Hopefully next week’s Friday Night Happy Hour can be more of a chipper affair again. We’ll see where the wind blows us 🌬️
@BitsTODAY