Borderless Online Collaboration of Native Peoples and Native Projects in the Web3 — Brief probe into DAO
Many years ago, “mainstream(big) media” dominated the world of entertainment, news, books and magazines from large publishers. A handful of companies controlled all the content that most of us read, viewed and listened to. In order to be part of the conversation, we have to be employed by one of these media conglomerates or make ourselves important enough to be present in the stories they told. Every day we watch pre-scheduled television programs, listen to pre-recorded radio programs, read newspapers written by journalists on editorial orders, read books and magazines established by large publishers, and even spend evenings at the cinemas, watching films distributed by a small number of studios.
However, the Internet changed everything. It was a very slow and tortuous process, but over time, the media was decentralized. We found many different types of content that we loved. More importantly, much of this content isn’t owned by traditional media companies, more like it’s written, spoken or filmed by ordinary people like us. So, in a sense, the Internet has given people the confidence to produce their own content. Today, people are happily consuming the content produced and distributed by these content creators without having to suffer from the lack of information that traditional companies have for various reasons.
This is the age of the Creator Economy, a very different age.
The Stages of the World Economy
A century ago, people lived in an industrial economy, the era of manufacturing. Most people (men at least) earned money demonstrating their physical prowess in some form of a factory (or in “modern” agriculture, taking advantage of improved farming practices). Most people earned their living by making “stuff.”
By the 1950s, People had been through a depression and a second World War and were looking at new ways to spend their cash. Turning into a consumer economy. People began to earn income by performing services for others. Trade became more globalized, with people wanting a wider variety of ‘stuff” from around the world. Traditional media, television, in particular, showcased the latest and greatest, and repeatedly encouraged people to spend more on consumer goods, to “keep up with the Jones.”
What is the Creator Economy?
As the Internet continues to evolve, the basic paradigm of the Internet has changed. Instead of using it only for information collection and storage, people have found many new potential uses, such as social media and video sharing. The Internet has provided people with the opportunity to express themselves online, and the Creator Economy has evolved from there.
In many ways, the Creator Economy consists of people performing their dream jobs. It gives people a chance to specialize in their passion. A generation ago, People might have had to go to work in a traditional shop, office, or factory. At night you could come home and engage in your preferred leisure activity. They might have secretly hoped that they could become a professional in their favorite activity. Some actors, musicians, and athlete succeeded in their dreams. But most people simply played their games, engaged in their hobbies, or passively consumed content in their leisure time, unpaid, often losing a considerable sum of money to their leisure pursuits.
And now, more people can make money from their passion and their dreams. Who would have thought that an average student could sit at home and make a living playing computer games? And how many amateur writers would expect that they could make a more substantial income from their craft than professionals?
All these changes are the “Creator Economy”.
The relationship between DAO and the “Creator Economy”
In the past 2021 annual roundup reports, whether it is A16 or Messari, if there is a part about “the hottest label prediction in 2022”, the two keywords “DAO” and “Creator Economy” will be seen. The reason is that DAO’s natural attributes determine which is the best carrier for the “Creator Economy” today (or even in the future?).
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is initially a simple concept: both an organization, created by an idea and driven by developers, that automates business functions and processes by leveraging all the basic principles of smart contracts and blockchain. The core idea is to flatten the complex business processes that organizations get stuck in and facilitate the transfer of assets to a very future-proof direction of digital interaction (I’ll call it D2C), also called “complete decentralization”. By replacing intermediaries (centers), DAOs act as digital intermediaries providing transparency and scale, giving them the status of organizations without the need for entities, groups, governance, charters and other forms of collective action of traditional organizational structures. Developing today, while traditional centralized organizational structures are being challenged, the growth of DAOs is giving rise to a new Creator Economy that brings together artists, lawyers, self-publishers and creators from around the world to create ideas.
In a license-free crypto-economic system based on blockchain and Web3 technologies, DAO provides a unique structure that can naturally support creator economies — community tokens. As a hub of interests for creators (individuals or groups) and their communities, community tokens not only decouple traffic and implementation, but also greatly improve the availability of community resources. With the help of community tokens, community support for creators is no longer a one-time consumption, but an asset interest in the form of an investment and a corresponding return (short-term or reward) to the participants who co-create the community. Through this structure, creators can fully utilize their talents and time, gaining flexibility and income that can be used to contribute to the development and building of the community. Creators and DAOs embody a natural governance structure that I call “Borderless Online Collaboration of Native Peoples and Native Projects in the Web3 “.
Some suggestions for realizing the true borderless collaboration between DAO and the “Creator Economy” in the future
1、Provide wider ownership and convenience for creators
Ownership comes in different forms: creators are increasingly focused on having a neutral channel of communication with their audience and expect to have a direct monetized relationship with the end user. Some creators have also created their own websites, possibly self-hosted using their own domains, to build more direct fan relationships. Creator and user ownership of data, relationships, content, identities and interactions will weaken platform lock-in and lead to a shift in power from platforms to participants, allowing them to operate outside of a few platforms.
But we can go further and give creators and users control over their own destiny: the software itself can become community owned and operated. In a crypto network, this might require the allocation of tokens that confer governance rights. And in the Web2 platform, user ownership could take the form of participating in the community as an investor and advisor (possibly enabled through tools such as Fairmint, Republic, or Cabal). For DAO organizations, having creators as core team members gives creators more incentive to contribute to the communities they co-own, provides opportunities for creators to make decisions that contribute to the success of the community, and creates incentive alignment between the platform and its participants.
Regarding the content itself: While most Web2 platforms do not claim ownership of user content, they grant the platforms the right to use, distribute, and modify their works. Instagram’s terms of use, for example, state that “You hereby grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, reproduce, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content.” In other words, users are effectively handing over control of how, where, when and under what circumstances images can be reused to the platform — losing ownership and control, resulting in the devaluation and commoditization of their content. But we can go much further down this path of controlling our destiny. We can decentralize the whole thing, including content management systems, content storage, and the domain name system.
2. Trusted neutral creator mechanism
Vitalik Buterin writes about the importance of having a credible neutral mechanism, in which he describes that “a mechanism is credibly neutral if, just by looking at its design, it is easy to see that it does not discriminate against or oppose any particular mechanism.” The four elements of trusted neutrality are
(1) don’t write specific people or specific results into the mechanism,
(2) open source and publicly verifiable implementation,
(3) keep it simple
(4) don’t change it too often.
Another way to consider credible neutrality is the idea of a “veil of ignorance”. In this thought experiment, citizens are asked to make choices about society from behind a “veil of ignorance” without knowing their gender, race, ability, taste, wealth, or social status. Accordingly, applying the “veil of ignorance” to creator platforms allows people to test the fairness and equity of policies, monetization mechanisms, funding, and product mechanisms.
It is easy to see how today’s Web2 platforms lack credible neutrality and cannot reason through the “veil of ignorance”, the algorithms that determine what content is displayed are not publicly verifiable, and the removal of certain creators or content is arbitrary. Facebook’s (now renamed Meta) oversight board, for example, is an imperfect attempt at credible neutrality, with 20 people in charge of their content review board department, all of whom are actually appointed from within the company.
By contrast, Mirror WRITE RACE (for example) is a weekly public voting process in which current users of the community-owned and operated publishing platform Mirror decide which new members to bring on board. The team wrote: “Are we, the Mirror team, the sole gatekeepers of the platform? Is this fully consistent with our values? Do we even have the time to do so? The answer is no, no, no.” While potential members may not like the results, the process is open, neutral and publicly verifiable.
3. Creator-friendly business model
The business model determines the incentives, which in turn drive the content created by users. Offering a more direct monetization model (users paying creators) can encourage creators to align their content with the value of the end user, rather than creating content that maximizes view time or goes viral. In addition, platforms should set a minimum commission fee rate. Bill Gurley outlines the strategy behind platform fee rates in his article, “In order for your platform to be the ‘defining’ place to trade, you need industry-leading pricing” He also outlines an example from Priceline Group that allows participants to increase their commission rate for better placement. This is in stark contrast to most creator platforms today, which set commission rates unilaterally, sometimes even at the expense of creators’ profits.
4. Interdependence and solidarity of creators
In today’s Creator Economy, which exists on a centralized social platform, creators face direct competition with each other for fleeting attention. Going forward, I hope to build better community platforms and more healthy competition mechanisms that incentivize creators to support each other, used to replace the current situation where one creator’s success is at the expense of another.
DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant
Fund Address: DAOrayaki.eth
Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes
Grant Amount：100USDC.
Category: Web3, DAO, Collaboration
Contributor：Shaun@Daorayaki
