I am not the world.
Whether my readership matters to content creators is subject to many variables. So what I am writing about here is a ‘wish list’ for 2024. It isn’t a ‘demand’
I am not in a position to make demands.
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But here, I am outlining the things I wish can change in web 3 (Social Media Based) content creation in 2024:
Advice to new enthusiasts trying to ‘preach’ what Blockchain, Web3, NFTs, Metaverse (Non Exhaustive List) are.
The volume of products intending to market as ‘Web3’ began to scale from 2020, so we are now close to four years down the road. While there are always new people ‘coming of age’, the mass ‘listening’ market has already become educated, with only the residual technophobe component, gaining awareness more slowly.
People relatively new to writing in the space should avoid these topics, unless they are practicing engineers, technical product owners, project managers, product technical writers, or are a seasoned migrant from some other aspect of industrial journalism.
There are way too many people nuanced in the technicalities and nomenclature, who, while they don’t always agree, are often very strong on the facts that support their perceptions of ecosystem models.
Those not wishing to suffer from Imposter Syndrome should not write like Imposters.
Instead, better to ‘shadow author’ news content from the Apex online crypto ‘rags’, focusing on business and market aspects rather than defining technical fundamentals, and allow the primary content to do the ‘heavy lifting’
I expect greater things from experienced content creators in 2024 –
In the online world, editorial content hardly exists any more. ‘Advertorial’ seems to rule, and all the best things in Web 3 that are happening are never going to get enough exposure, because the Apex virtual ‘rags’ will only print what they get paid to print.
What I can’t understand is why freelance unpaid social media content creators frequently just summarise or plagiarize what those ‘rags’ carry though…
It isn’t the web3 news for the week, or breaking news because those apex rags say it is… they’ve been paid for that.
I spend about 20 minutes every day reading what the rags have to say, so its not helping me when others regurgitate it.
By echoing the Apex rags, platform based voices are just adding extra volume to what those rags got paid to do, and getting nothing in return besides some modest SM metrics.
If serious content creators want to grow notoriety in online platforms, they would be better unearthing rough diamond content and be their sole voice.
Tell more of the stories that completely fly under Cointelegraph or Decrypt radar , and I will be happier.
Adopt the Web 3.0 approach to personality coverage.
In the eras leading up to the data ‘Silos’ – (Google, MS, Apple, X, Amazon, Meta etc), unless there was something really bad that happened, as personalities, big business people were never ‘news’. Years could go by with no mention of the CEO from Chevrolet, United Biscuits, Citi Bank, British Steel, TATA or Bharti Airtel.
Then the age of the Silos came, and whether it be Gates, Bezos, Musk, Zuck, Ma, Jobs and many others, if they scratched their nose, somebody wrote about it.
Then Web 3 came, and the start of that was undoubtedly Bitcoin, still the largest market cap cryptocurrency by some margin.
Not only did Bitcoin lay down a marker for the whole industry to follow, it’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto also set down a marker for a new approach to media coverage of Web 3.0 personalities.
From all the coverage of SBF, Changpeng Zhao, and pseudo counterparts like Gary Gensler, Elizabeth Warren and Christine Lagarde , we would be excused for thinking we have awoken from a dream in which the phrase ‘web3’ was mentioned and now it is the cold light of day.
Cryptowriters need to move with the times. Just as the volume of news covering Satoshi Nakamoto so should be the coverage of lesser mortals – ‘Less is more’
Crypto writers talk about ‘Silo’ platforms more than they talk about Web 3 ones.
Web 3.0 is intended to promote a decentralized internet where users should have greater control and ownership over their data, yet crypto journalists are clinging to the SM Silos with dear life.
It should go without saying then, that if someone claims to be a web 3 content creator, they should be an advocate for it as well.
It shouldn’t be ‘Heck yeah, I’ll write about it cos I can’t think of anything better to do, but yeh don’t really expect me to believe in it, do you?’
So you would expect web3 journalists, to be early adopters… to be the ones that go there first, long before mainstream adoption.
There are many Web 3 platforms out there.
Mastodon, Entre, Audius, Minds, Diamond App, Chingari, DTube, Twetch, Akasha, and Diaspora are just a sample.
But I see when so called Web 3 ‘content creators’ create polls here, they will feature Silo Platforms like LinkedIn, X, and maybe Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Telegram or Tik Tok…
They will hardly even mention the ‘half way house’ – Discord.
How can anybody claim to be a Web 3 content creator and not recognise that ANY… NOT EVEN ONE… Web 3 Social Media platform exists when doing a poll? Content creators are expected to be at the forefront of raising awareness in their field, not following what others are doing.
Binary Arguments, Thesis, or Comparisons
I hope to see less binary arguments in 2024
‘Those of us in the technology community, sit in the midst of a conflict between our binary heritage and a relativistic world we partly helped to create. As such, we have a responsibility to avoid letting the increasingly complex discussions about the impact of the digital revolution become one of comparing extremes. Our binary underpinning has shown, through the huge diversity of the way technology is used, that this is a world composed of shades of grey, not simply of black and white.
We see examples of this every day. “Is social media a good thing or a bad thing?”… It’s the same with artificial intelligence, with big data, with the impact of mobile phones on children. In Einstein’s shadow, technology has enabled almost infinite nuance, yet it is so often reduced to existing on opposing ends of what is in reality a spectrum.’ – Bryan Glick
Bitcoin v $USD
LinkedIn v X
EVM Compatible Networks v Solana
Too much binary.
Hopefully 2024 will see Content creators approach Web3 with more spectrum level comparisons. A horse race has to be more than two horses!
So – Writers for Web 3 and Crypto please listen to my wishes!
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