# How to Build a Thriving Community in Web3 | Benny Giang, Weilei Yu, and Toady Hawk

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 48:24
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-_jzpwWV6g3U
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jzpwWV6g3U

## Description

Join Benny Giang (Future Primitive), Weilei Yu (Story Protocol), and Toady Hawk (Nouns) as they discuss the tips, highlights, and hardships of creating digital communities along with the key choices they've made to keep their communities engaged.  

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## Transcript

let's do this hello welcome everybody to e Denver it's wonderful Saturday morning and I'm very excited to moderate this panel on web3 communities my name is Annette I work as developer relations at last protocol and I'm very excited to moderate the panel for you um let's start with introductions of the speakers so you guys introduce yourself and then let's start with the questions uh hello everyone uh well you here uh I'm uh uh leading ecosystem and growth story protocol uh I've been I guess in we3 since 2017 uh mostly focused on ecosystem bootstrapping and growth uh before story I spent a few years at D Labs where I L the launch and a consistent growth of story uh flow blockchain uh and you know uh have uh you know a few hundred consistent Partners launch strategize and also work with a lot of uh mainstream IPS along the way and that's also where I met uh Benny uh so yeah me and way go way back back uh so I was part of the team that launched crypto kitties in 2017 uh at e watero and then formed Dapper Labs uh and then I continue to work on cheese wizards and Dapper wallet and NBA top shots uh and along the way that's where I met way way joined depper labs and we became friends and we talked a lot about communities and and what it meant to to grow them so uh yeah right now I have my own companies called Future Primitive uh we're building on the ERC 65 51 standard token bound accounts where we give every nft their own wallet SL account uh and so yeah that's what we're working on right now awesome let's start with the first question I'm wondering what is web three Community uh for you and how do you start building your web3 community just can you just tatch up on The Primitives of web3 communities and like how do you guys building your communities or uh yeah I can take a first step of that um the communte is like a very Broad and everything encompassing term now uh in3 like every project says that they want to Bo trouble Community every project says they want to grow a thriving Community but at the end of the day like you know uh it's important to Define what community is so that you know you can actually Target the right users right and grow in the right way um funny enough back in 2017 with the Ico boom Community was any token holder anyone who was willing to buy into vision and hold your token and you do anything to please them right and then we had a the bad like a Long Winter like you know 2018 to 2020 and then Community became uh anyone who believe you project deep now to hold the 90% down right uh valuation of the token and the few builders that remain that to actually build on top of all your protocol project so uh but along the way like you know Community also meant the C cult committee right NFD holders all the p with crypto kitties right leading the way but also like NBA right fans uh know the fandom and then with B Apes you had a a whole new meaning of community so uh I feel like you know it's very important for every project to understand what truly committed means to them and definitely overweight that above anything else right because there's so much noise nowadays right especially with u the new wave of uh uh you know talkking farmers and air drops it's very hard to get through that noise uh and for story protocol right like we' been a protocol later and more specifically we the programmable IP layer um our community is going to be the builders uh and uh you know uh application Builders Founders uh you know protocol Builders who can actually integrate on on top of us and then our layer you know above them is the creators and the users so that's how you know we Define our community how we uh prioritize everything right uh what we do yeah I think way did a great job in mapping out like the different changes the the way I think about it is like is there a difference between marketing and Community where marketing you use similar instruments like a newsletter you have a website you might have uh maybe you run some ads and stuff like that uh that's you know in the web 2 era there was like there was less companies that were like had communities right you would hire the head of marketing and they would do the initi app the activities to grow the users um or community in the web 2 context could be like you have a newsletter that you you know write every single week and people subscribe or they pay you or they donate and you know that would be kind of classified as marketing right and so the biggest differentiation I think between marketing and the web to error to like what we now called Community is it still includes all the marketing things all the whole marketing uh tools and instruments Etc the methods um but now you have the arduous task of dealing with other people in the community that have shared ownership and uh there's also a focus on transacting right while if you were a subscriber of a newsletter you do it once and you just keep receiving newsletter but now um you're part of a blockchain you're part of a protocol uh it's not only enough to just buy the tokens you need to transact you need to engage um fully on chain and so you know Community now has evolved into this Broadband area of marketing Plus+ plus uh and uh it has a lot of different intricacies depending on whether you're a protocol or a consumer crypto product or you're a devell uh Community Etc how do you go about marketing uh for the community what's your like favorite way how to approach Community VI marketing yeah I've thought a a lot about this um I feel like the best communities feel like an awesome group chat with like your best friends you know where it's not too big it's not too small but the conversations are uh you know they can be slightly technical but you can learn something right and uh you might meet your new best friend or your new friend in this community uh even though maybe the topic is about uh eth or something like that so I always kind of start building communities through creating a a a a group chat right uh so typically I use telegram or you could use other things um I I have a whole different area around Discord which we can probably talk about uh uh uh of the history of it and like how it became the thing and then now um I think a lot of people have Discord fatigue so I've primarily I think what has worked over the last seven years since nfts were introduced and since creating the crypto kitties Community is group chat uh and uh that's still the method that I still pursue today uh well it's hard to uh add anything more valuable than what Ben just said uh being one OG uh crypto no just OG in terms of like NFD space right launching crypto kitties by understanding the evolution behind it uh I totally agree like uh used to be like uh Community was more like a distribution channel for a lot of web CH uh so very marketing focused and uh you might hear their voice for feedback there was no way two-way communication right that that was deep enough to influence the product uh in a meaningful way uh but in web three uh starting with crypto kitties but uh NBA topa boab Zuki paji we're seeing how the community now is at the center of the product strategy uh and more than just pure marke distribution they are your evangelist right they help you Market uh your product so there's this shift of of like you know what community means and and what type of Focus right like now Community is not just a marketing department it's like the the funding team right like the the product team Focus um and it all started with a simple notion of uh how can we combine you know what we love about crypto ownership to what we love about people which is relationship and connection right and I feel like uh Benny was there the Forefront of EV right with cryto it is and and that literally Unleashed like entire new notion of community building like oh I'm wondering what are your favorite web three tools to manage communities do you guys have any are they like any web three tools to manage communities ah good question uh I I tried to use money over the years uh because uh you know what's your favorite one uh I I would say like um I started with telegram because back in the uh all day I saw that was the OG Channel but that was uh impossible to manage like anyone that tells you manag your community VI telegram is uh impossible fit you can have like a small groups but if you have like more than 1,000 Community right like it's very hard like to have a truly like you know deeper conversation Discord was like the uh good transition to it like you could have a separate Channel common teams topic or even like you know a thre uh later on um so that was I think like where culture can be harnessed from the community and that's why a lot of nft used that as the goto place um there was another uh uh tool that came out later called orbit that I I kind of really liked because uh they pioneered kind of the orbit love kind of uh tears right like to uh measure and qu quantify like you know how do you measure like one Community contributor from another one and then will pass through this Twitter GitHub contribution try to T all that together so I feel like that was one the first tool to allow more like a comprehensive overview of uh uh you know and I know like there are few application that came out after orbit that does a similar way but with like a much more like you know targeted Niche area right whether it was for developers alone for like you know the broad token holder community and stuff uh but to be honest going back like you you want to always like simplify Community manager in instead of segmenting through like multiple channels so now my preference is like Twitter and Discord like almost like simplify simplify right like um but then I feel like we need have measurement tools on top of it but without forcing the community to take extra steps more like on the backand management so that that's I guess how Howa so you want me to tell you a uh a startup idea that's going to become huge so someone should actually build it so there's a TED Talk that uh talks about designing Town squares like uh if you've been to any kind of town square there's benches there's like a common area where maybe everyone's hanging out uh there's like uh you know areas around the trees that you can throw a little picnic cloth and you know I think Urban Design has like humans at the end of the day we interact with each other and there's already so many things that have been built uh around us that we can actually draw influence from so there is a Ted that talks about Urban Design and how like Twitter is like a Town Square where everyone's just shouting down with a megaphone and everyone's just standing there listening to it and shouting back and and that's how Twitter is designed um and a group chat is like you're in a picnic and you got five people and you're talking to each other so the multi-billion dollar startup idea is a community app that scales up and down uh based on the engagement or based on certain controls of the manager right it could start off as a group chat between five friends and then kind of grow up into like a a bigger group chat that can have broadcast channels and then if the community continues to engage it evolves into channels and like something like Discord that have different topics that you could go into maybe it has a form output and then the thing is the number one mistake is Discord at a certain point it it's really useful when you have in uh consistent demand and consistent engagement when that falls off Discord feels like the Town Square is fully empty like during the pandemic when you look in at Paris like the the the the the main plaza and it's like empty it looks really eerie and creepy right so we should shrink the space down and then kind of increase the ability to interact with somebody so uh an application that can go up in terms of like complexity but also simplify whenever the community wants to kind of just shrink it down right so um yeah that's kind of how I think about tools and currently there is no to I've been in the search for a very very long time uh crypto Kitty started off as a telegram group I still uh as I have the admin control of the cryptokitties telegram group it's at cryptokitties we started there and then we migrated to Reddit uh and we were like oh maybe Reddit would be good because people can upvote Etc and that wasn't really good and then we moved to Discord people would be surprised but uh Discord as the central tool for communities uh was not not the thing until crypto until we decided that it was uh the place to be people were using rocket chat people were using slack I use rocket chat use rocket chat yeah like they were using all these other tools or and Telegram and crypt as an nft project we had the most amount of users and we're like all right we're going to go to Discord and then axi did that and then everybody else did it and now it became the standard but I always say question the standard uh it doesn't just because the tool worked at one point doesn't mean it will work forever and so I'm still in search of that perfect solution um if I can add a little bit yes please build both Ben and I will invest uh and uh I think that was also like some experimentation on crypto voxo and on Cyber right by pun 65299 and actually I be very curious to see how that evolves uh the biggest limitation there which I love like metaverse like you know kind of Bridging the Gap is that is misses like the scaling capability right like like you can do like small meet ups at you know on crypto boxo but once it it grows like 100 or thousand people it's very hard to have both like the kind of megaphone property but also like deeper conversation right with each other uh so yeah please build it we will love it um I'm wondering what's your favorite uh tool to manage Discord uh as you mentioned that you pretty much live on Discord as well and Twitter what's your favorite tool or B to use and like how do you go go about like you know managing different like channels in Discord and how do you go about the channel fat you yeah I I I pretty much to nut of Discord now uh but at the time we built a few Bots ourselves there's like some token gating bot and like raffle bot and and stuff like that there there's there's there's a ton of um Bots that you could plug in uh and use like collab land and all of that so um I think latest we switched guilt uh for this this one of the project called stepovers but um I I would very very I I've been telling my the the person who runs the community for staple verse of like hey we should just close the Discord let's just go back to to like Telegram and just cuz there's just not that many people like throughout the day there's maybe like 50 50 uh messages or something in the general chat every other channels are dead and I'm like well either close all the channels or just close the Discord for now temporarily move it back to Telegram and keep it tight and keep the flow going and then scale back up when you need it and again it's kind of cumbersome to switch from all these tools there should just be one that can actually go up and go down right uh yeah I feel like that is uh uh probably one of the uh wisdom that many few understanding community building right like feel Comfort comfortable to down size your community tools or channels right like you might have like a hype lunch that requires like 50 channels because you know 10 language channels meme Twitter Quest channels Etc but once you reach like maturity or even like know kind of a Down growth level right like in terms of like shrinkage of your community because there 10 other hype project they are like racing behind it's okay to strink to close channels right it's not a sign of your project dying or like you know uh getting less hype but it's more concentrating the quality of conversation so uh I do agree with Benny like no if you projects reaching out maturity or even like stalling like for certain period get like two or three channels get a very concentrated conversation going make it very easy for any new member coming in knowing exactly where should they go to get the latest instead of you know having to browse a 50 Channel because for people who have been in the space long enough right like uh me and Benny we have like 100 servers or or thousand right like uh why every project is special in in own reason like people have a limited amount of time and and probably only if you're like a court team members or founder you browse every channel in your server like that's one lesson learned right if you have more than 10 Channel expect people to just glance at it uh and it's okay if you're like super hyped project you can keep going but don't feel afraid of shrinking down like that's actually will lead to much better conversion and engagement you know overall um yeah one thing I want to add to is this last phase I think the last 2 3 years of the like there was a boom period a lot of projects depended on they just kind of put all their eggs in one basket of like all right we're going to Discord and Twitter and uh they didn't capture emails or they didn't capture phone numbers or wallet addresses and then uh when the down period came they and the Discord started to to to die uh they were like oh how do I let people know about some of the new things we're launching well you're kind of stuck right you could send out a tweet but not everyone will read it you could send a announcement in Discord but everyone's kind of phased out so now you lost a critical uh Rec contact Channel that's where the marketing comes in so you know contrary to certain beliefs like there is the decentralized perspective of like hey we never want to know or have any info about you but you know um like it's hard to really receive updates you guys all signed up for E Denver you guys flew here or you're watching on the stream and considering it well it's because you saw an email that told you that e Denver 2024 is happening it told you the date told you all the amazing things that are happening email and phone numbers and wallet addresses are still critical and they're part of the community stack if you miss one of them you're actually shooting yourself in the foot yeah uh to that point like uh marketing has been Hyo for the past 30 years right like teams spend like billions on how to drive higher conversion more engagement so my suggestion to any marketer commun manager is like don't reinvent the wheel right take whatever is working web true already but expand it extend it with web3 capabilities don't cut off like you know all the web3 tried and true strategies that works for some reason because we are still in the mid space right whether we like or not but add what we 3 can augment Community uh co- ownership right like uh culture mtic culture right whatever you want but just don't forget there's a a whole industry that optimize you know for conversion retention and you know use engagement so uh yeah uh don't don't shy away from you know just because of we3 methodology what do you guys think about using nfts to grow your communities like you know nftd airdrops um pointing out more to like pops like what do you guys think about like giving way ups for people attending Community calls and like how do you see that as like engagement com do you guys see that as Community is much more engaged when you uh give away pop for Community call or do you guys like how do you guys perceive that and um I would like you to touch up on also if you guys like what do you guys think about like popups for like whether that's like for conferences whether that's for Community calls whether that's like you know even first scavenger hands that we all have uh around the venue as well I mean Anette you you you have all the wristbands on from uh maybe previous events or maybe just this week cuz there's plenty right and I think that's like people collect things all the time like uh things that may not have any value like old coins and postage stamps and stuff so like uh I think think an nft to me is a native internet object right it's an object that uh is purely digital it's made up of zeros and ones it's verified to be on on on the blockchain and it doesn't hurt to to receive it especially if it's free now uh I think the the larger thing is like are free uh nfts uh free nfts drive better retention or engagement versus ones that you pay for uh that's a different area right um but I think if you were a project building something you should actually have strategy for both right something that's free that's consistent you you show up here you do this you walk over here you drink of water you you know do a little dance you get something for it right uh people people like getting that and it and the way I see it is it's a data point that's on chain that computes reputation uh it computes engagement and you can query the blockchain be like oh Annette looks like you show up for the last five calls looks like you walked around the whole stadium and tapped all the poops uh like that's cool like we know on that's more engaged than way cuz way didn't want to walk around and tap the poops so we're going to give Anette a free t-shirt and wh sorry you don't get a t-shirt so that's like how I would think about free poops but the paid poops would be more of like the premium offer right where it could go all the way up to A4 million dollars for like a board ape all the way to like $100 and you can kind of play with these different pricing tiers and of course if you spend A4 million dollar on nft uh I assume you're going to be extremely engaged because your money you you gave them money right so I think you should have both of those strategies for sure yeah um totally agree and uh I would say like uh I I heard like a great wisdom from you know some um like Ser entrepreneurs about also like you know uh marketing experts that human nature doesn't change right like if you look at the past Thousand Years history a lot of uh mistakes but also grandio inventions that all rely like they all reli on human nature for recognition reputation greed right like also the the eagerness to collect and eagerness to signal right within a community you standing your passion uh your status uh so the things like uh uh uh what is like a pup and or like you know NFD to reward participation or a B A instead of RX uh you know uh to Signal your you know part of a a niche Community uh that plays back to a human nature and my uh usual suggestion is like any incentive that you want to build to improve engagement retention or like participation just go back to the human nature of why that matters and how that motivates people and Y 3 is a great way to lower the friction to it because if you wanted to do like in a physical way it's a very complicated so that's why W3 actually has very good for certain Community engagement but the real goal behind it is still like the human drive for something right like uh and I feel like people often forget like why you're giving out those and who you're giving out to and the motivation behind it uh so if you can keep that one in mind every to will be powerful you know for the goal that you're trying to achieve um so yeah that's my take but Anette actually I would love to ask you a question if you don't mind like you know uh you you have been working right in the space for a while and you deal with a lot of developers you know in in your role so and just like what what is your take about you know the developer community and and and what what they care and how do you engage them right like because that's uh one the toniest question right in the space like honestly I would say the best way how to engage with the community's memes just like make a meme or like create a meme that is specific to your community or like to your project or like find like a component in your project which ideally if it's like a emoji and then like try to build from that emoji Meme and then like just like share it with the community and then engage on Discord telegram Twitter and that's like the way um how I would say is the best way to go about it but when it comes to more of like a Builders Community um then actually atin has a build Guild and that's the best way how to engage uh with the builders I guess or find yourself like a builder communities and try to build like a challenges for them or build like a bounties or even like great way is to add a good first issue in your GitHub and then make a marketing campaign or like a community growth campaign around the good first issue where you encourage your uh Community or like your Builders to interact with your protol and then attach um sort of like value you can even do bounties out of that you can even do heatons um for engaging with B I have a question for the two of you we're going we're going to reverse track now uh way started this trend so I'm going to continue it uh what did the two of you guys think about what are the things that you shouldn't do with a community like uh like things that you've seen that are like yeah this this doesn't work or this kind of creates the wrong incentives like what are things that you shouldn't do I would say wrong way of Designing airdrops I think we've seen a lot of airdrop hunters and they like everywhere especially is like the Bull Run came and you know they're like everywhere um but the worst way is to just like give people something for free just because you know just because I can because you know what will happen next is they will sell your airdrop and that's for them a free money I feel like the way how to go about it is try to find a way how to get the user retention and try to like Engage The users as much with your community as well or like with your protocol uh but don't try to go too much above your way and like create too much Loops creates too much user friction and you don't want to do that because you want to like have engaged Community but you don't want to make them like you know run a marathon for you so you need to like whenever you are designing whether that's airdrop or any sort of develop experience you need to be very careful about it to make sure that there are not too many hopes that they have to overcome because every single hope creates more user friction whether it's from developer perspective or general Community um I think we could compile at least you and me and Benny uh on on a lot of things that uh that will make you scratch your head uh in the past Cycles right like uh of course um first of all don't lie to your community right like uh there is a a fine line between over promise and under deliver there's a fine line about lying directly to your commune on things you you know obviously is not true um and that matters if you care about the commune right uh because uh the the crypto circle is very small especially for communities that truly care and and want to have projects right whether it's like as a holder as a uh evangelist as a you know uh um Builder Etc uh like once once you burn the trust uh you know it's very hard to get gain back and by lying can be uh like a variation of it right like you you overpromise like you know a strong reward mechanism and then you lit cut back and like I've seen like many trying to do like a um pre-launch drop uh air drop right and they gave out like you know very generous uh uh percentage and then they realized that drop was so successful that oops you know you know they felt like they have given out too much value and then they before they unlock they literally just cut the uh allocation to half right and you're like okay you know uh how do you how do you want the community to trust on anything else you want to promise in the future right uh so that that's one thing uh that should be obvious but I've seen like you know repeat it multiple times and like you know uh maybe we'll see many of that backlash in the point system where you promise a lot of value behind points and and that happens so that it's like oh you know what points are not redeemable for the supposed token that you have been hoping to F uh the other part is like don't make it too complex uh I mean I I was like a victim myself like trying to over engineer like social engagement via incentive model like oh yeah let's uh hype our Twitter account for one month Str right like you do like gleam.io uh campaigns you do like you know a lot of uh retweet contest all those things uh because uh if the commity gets used to the knowledge or concept that your momentum is over engineered and they're the one behind it it's very hard to show like you know organic traction and uh uh proof points right social proof points afterwards uh it takes a while for them to regain their trust that hey this is not another campaign you ran some corner of the world that's like artificial momentum instead of organic traction just because they help you do it for like two months straight right like so there's a lot some those psychologic things that is easy to use in the early stage that actually bites back later and and we open up our Discord and like there was a lot of uh social farming and like you know uh Ro farming and and was very nice and uh rewarding to see but at the same time I I try to you know warn the team like hey uh let them have this fun for a few days memes and like you know uh sharing like a tweet quotes or like retweeting hours but let's lower the expectation what that means because we we'll we'll come back biting us later data so those I think are the things I you know noticed myself but what about you Benny like you you have uh you know managed some of the biggest nftd communities and like you know like launch strategies you invest a bunch of them so what is on the biggest mistake well I I I'll say way pretty much answered everything there but I have a controversial question for the two of you that kind of relates to it okay so should a community be made out of humans or Bots because we're moving to a future of autonomous agents onchain agents every there's all these platforms now like Galaxy and there rabbit hole that's become boost and uh I don't what do they call these platform engagement or whatever I don't know like Eng like um yeah so there's all these platforms and I'm pretty sure most of them are not humans sitting there doing a swap clicking the button right so in in the future do you think it's okay that communities can be made up entirely full of I guess NPC I call them NPCs uh versus Humans what do what do you think that was actually supposed to be my question as well I wanted to no I wanted to ask you like what they think about like buying users on Twitter and like inflating numbers because I've heard that there's like a lot of group sheds where you can just like ask people to follow certain accounts and you will give them some part of liquidity of your project itself uh but regarding your question um I think the future where we are heading is you will have like a smaller group chat of people who are just friends and have like the core Community itself that is very engaged and then have some sort of another layer of it which will be just like a Bots and it will be maybe like a you know engagement but still like Bots or people who will look real but won't be real just to like keep the wheel going um as you can see the Twitter became um kind of like next level Rabbit Hole where if you don't listen the algorithm they will go against you and then you will lose engagement and then if you have like you know if you want to share something really cool you will not get engagement because you um sort of like fell off the loop um and the algorithm is pretty much going against you so I feel like that's the future where we are heading pretty much like core communities and like a bigger communities form around that which will sort of like look good for the wider Community or like for the public but then like have a core Community as well which will be purely engag uh very close to the team and I mean I think that's actually where the ambassador's programs came in handy as well where U Ambassador is pretty much just sort of like a community of people that are very close buil and tied to the team itself and engage and they're sort of like trying to communicate the visions of the core team itself to The Wider community and educate them so then the ambassador program is essentially like a middle layer between the Bots or like the wider and not probably fully organic built community and the core Community or like the core team itself so I feel like the ambassador program is probably like the best middle layer between the Bots and or like the general Community I would say uh interesting question um so uh we we for story protocol we we are tackling what we call a programmable IP right space um and by programmable we mean like uh allowing anyone both a human machine to be able to pass the rules and the conditions around any type of content usage right whether it's like non-commercial commercial license remixing derivative Etc and the reason why we want to index on the both machine readable side right uh is because you want to make the IP programmable for software right any uh application layer been on top of it to easy remix in an authorized way but also for the eventual AI agents uh so that they can understand every time they par index the content whether they are authorized using the training and what are the conditions attached to it so then they can filter the content and match the conditions uh and and you know uh and also reward the credit properly or give attribution right whatever the conditions is um So within that context uh you know that's how we envision Bots or agents interacting with uh creators so you can see a Creator creating content that may be more popular among the AI agents because it gives like a certain attributes right to the training F tunity model and the question is like is that that Community versus like a human remixing or sharing on social network and my true sense is that as long as the Bots follow the desire or the terms of a Creator or of a project in our sense right because if we want someone to build a very interesting application and it happens so like a AI agent can build the application via autogenerated code right who are we to say that's better or worse than a human doing it if the smart contract is open source verifiable right and audited which could be like they could actually pay in in cryptocurrency uh uh like you know Sher Holmes or like some other like commit auditing to Le audit this myart contract without revealing like AI generated contract right so I would say we have this interesting Paradigm where if there are rules around like every action that is machine readable interpretable I'm okay if uh some the community is B versus human uh because that will contribute to the value of cruel and Improvement right because if a AI makes a model that generates steady income revenue for a crater then I I don't think the crater will complain right like that is not human versus human so that that's how I interpret it and I would I would think like who gets to be a citizen of the internet right um uh as humans we are born in a country and maybe we move around and we have a passport or some sort of birth certificate that is issued out by the government that is running the country that you're from but the internet is a interconnected web of cables that connect the world and the biggest question is just like who gets to live there right I think that right for web 2 prior to to crypto or blockchain I think the answer is yeah we want to connect all the humans around the world it's like the telephone Network like a human should pick up a phone on the other side when you dial a number right but now we're entering into an era where internet objects internet uh onchain agents um digital currencies are all Native to the internet and all of those and then there's also governance structures that are also uh you know in the forms of dows so almost all the infrastructure for fully like senent like AI or onchain agents can essentially be a citizen of the internet along with humans right and maybe even Beyond so I think it just kind of brings into that question of like when you create a community is it for both sides or one side if you want it just for humans are you going to do kyc uh with your passport just to get into a telegram is that is that a weird thing uh or you just open it up and just accept that uh you might be talking to gbt 4 uh in a Discord and think that it might be your best new best friend but uh it's a it's an agent uh gb5 yeah gbt 15 so yeah it's it's a really deep thing to think about for sure that's actually a really cool way how we like went from like web 3 to actually like AI um okay I do have like maybe one last question for you what's the one advice that you would give to a community manager or like a developer relations person who is looking into building or growing web three Community what's like one or like one of the few things that you would advise them to do to build successful web Community if you want to build a community I'll just say it's a lot of work it's it's tiring it's like I guess if you r a charity or not for profit it almost feels like that it's tireless work you don't always get complimented or people appreciate the work you do you're always here like how can I help you and how can I make this better for you and you're always serving them you're like a you're like a onchain public servant to uh to the community so I think my number one advice is that you be prepared mentally and physically to engage with the community I'm sure there were like thousands of side of events uh that were put up at e Denver way put one up yesterday I put one up uh earlier this week and I I I'm sure way and and everyone here feels the the tiredness of like socializing and serving people food and making people feel comfortable so if you want to run a community just mentally prepare yourself to like give a part of yourself to everybody else um and find that balance like whether that's like going to workout or like reading something because uh you know it's an endurance race and you can tell the the best community managers are the ones that are always giving they're always like here to support people and they don't have any kind of ulterior motive while the worst managers are the ones that are like like taking advantage or like you know doing a doing something quick to to make a quick Buck right so uh do it for the long term and really care about people at the end of the day yeah um for very successful communities I would say it's literally like a political campaign uh you start feeling you have the power over the community and you feel like and power like everything else like you know corrupts over time so I've seen like the opposite right like super successful Community managers sometimes they feel like they're almost like a politician uh where they uh have like this inherent power to influence but also dictate who gets in who who who's not uh across whatever like you know um incentive programs or like you know quests that they launch so on that side I would say like uh please uh keep in mind that everything that comes with the power can also be taken away when the community realizes like you know uh things get a bit too much out of hand um because you know the crypto space is very fluid uh and the same with funders right uh because uh there's a a high risk of like funders are I would say like in3 funders are the committee head to some extent and Community Mees are extension of that so uh uh like the social influence can be a a double Ed word in that sense right like uh and many Founders try to rally the community for their own political agenda that often is not I think the right way of uh using the community on the other side uh you know like I agree with uh uh you know uh everything that Benny said about like you know U uh the hardship of managing a community like uh like if you just think that being a community manager is just like socializing having good chats with people and just like you know hang like hanging out with your friends right uh please rethink about it because uh you will get burned out very quickly but also you will get like disappointed very quickly on the sheer level of uh superficial conversation or you know people coming with agenda right like trying to get the air drop trying to get the road trying to get ear location is a very materialistic kind of a uh you know relationship but in order to move forward like at least in my old day I used to always focus on the 10% the 10 10% of people who are here for the right reason the 10% of who are willing to help you grow the project the 10% who align super align on your vision and passionate and who show up for your boring talk for your boring like office hours and who are willing to build on top of you when when you know it's just only a vision and and you're just has building the RS right so focus on the 10% to motivate you to serve the remaining 90% right like that's I would say the the best way to not get burned out and not get very disappointed or or or deluded by the by the space so you know for any existing new community manager out there you know there's hope Ben and I have been in the space for many years and many years to come and you know uh we see hope but you know uh please you know take care of yourself because it's very hard job the same for you Anette yeah I wanted to add that um probably build attaching your hobby uh into your community is also a great way how to continue growing and whether that's like you know organizing some sort of Gab nights or doing maybe like a yoga mornings or some sort of like you can take that into like virtual as well as in personal level as well um so try to like play around like one thing which you love um and try to build a community around that as well whether that's like a book club um or like any sort of like hobby manga anime or like you know you can even build a community around like you know have like a meme Channel or have like a post yourth kind of Channel and just like try to find like a common ground for um your community whether it's like within your own team or like within like one thing which you enjoy and that way your job will become much more more enjoyable and that way you build much better relationships within the community especialist of we the community is kind of like hard to manage and it's everywhere but finding your own tribe within web 3 is what keeps us connected and what keeps us together and I feel like that's the reason why there are so many people at it n as well because the one thing which connects us together is uh ethereum and blockchain itself and I'm very happy that there are so many of you guys and I hope that you guys are enjoying in Denver conference as well and thank you so much for panelists to um have this amazing conversation with me hope you guys enjoy these engaging questions thank you Annette for moderating and wh great so yeah thanks everyone yeah thank you [Applause] everyone