Clapper Story
January 12th, 2022

1,000 true fans

In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote his famous piece "1000 True Fans" when the subprime economic crisis hit. This is an innovative probe into the creator economy. With 1,000 true fans, and you should produce content for them to consume, and you can generate an income no less than a full-time job. This article has given numerous creators the confidence to build their own fan base and to pan for gold in the creator economy.

In the past quarter of a century, we are witnessing growingly more content published, shared, and indexed on the Internet. The word "creator" is being mentioned ever more often. After all, we have experienced and are experiencing the growth and decline of the tech giants. MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, including Google indexed billions of content and used its free search engine to become one of the world's largest technology companies.

Has Kevin Kelly’s prediction become a reality? The creator economy has seen booming growth. But have creators made the money they deserve? We see that on any creator platform today, only a small number of creators get enough attention. The percentage may be as low as 1%. On some platforms such as TikTok, it may be only 0.1% of creators. Apart from the top creators, few can earn enough income to maintain a decent life. The great value generated by each and every creator and user is captured by the platform. The successful public listing of Facebook and Google has indeed made some billionaires, but none of them are creators themselves.

Where does the problem lie? Why can't the creators who helped build the tech giants make due earnings, yet are still worrying about their next month's rent?

Google quantum supremacy

In September 2019, Google claimed to have achieved quantum supremacy. When a company proudly, even arrogantly, proactively announces its supremacy in a certain field, one can hardly associate it with a startup with a slogan of "Don't be evil".

In the past quarter-century, for technology, what we have seen is more control and prejudice. The internet content censorship and surveillance in recent years is living proof. Today when we review the history of Internet content development, we use the industry-wide categorizing method: The era of Web1.0, also known as the readable Internet, where content is written by editors, and there was limited user participation. The era of Web2.0 gave birth to the readable and writable Internet. At this time, a large number of content creators entered the epoch-making work of Internet content creation. However, almost 20 years have passed since the birth of the first-generation Web2.0 product blog. The Internet seems to be mired in tech giants’ grabbing of users and user attention, and stock price rises and falls seem to be everyone’s only concern. Creators and the users are not at the core of the narrative, only these big techs are.

Who prints the money you earn

You may have heard that the Federal Reserve is printing money faster and QEing like crazy. In the two years from 2020 to 2021, it printed 40% of the total US dollar in the entire history. That’s right! You are “fortunate” enough to experience the craziest era of money-printing inflation in the history of the United States. People have no idea how the future lead us, but in history we have never printed so much money. This inevitably makes us rethink the nature of currency. Countless financial textbooks define modern currency as a kind of credit that can be traded. So has the credit of the strongest fiat currency in the world- the US dollar been undermined in the past two years? Not to mention the credit of the currencies of other countries. Creators labor in exchange for U.S. dollars, and U.S. dollars keep on inflating. The most frustrating thing is not that we know that money printing will go on, but that we are clueless whether there is a cap and how much will be printed? There must be something wrong with it. One person's labor can actually be paid by a green paper that can be printed without limits? Shouldn't something be fixed?

Who owns the content? Where are your fans?

What makes things worse is that as a content creator, you have to rely on a platform, be it Facebook or TikTok. Your content should comply with the so-called "community guidelines" of this platform. These community rules may be adjusted here and there when you are not paying attention, and your content could be taken down and your account can be banned for various reasons. For example, December 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta, so it directly canceled the account of a user with the handle @Metaverse on its Instagram (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/technology/instagram-handle-metaverse. html) , despite the fact that this user has registered and has been maintaining her account since 2012.

Oh, by the way, you may have thousands or even tens of thousands of fans. When you get up one morning, your social account vanishes in a snap, just like you never set up these accounts. Your content disappeared, maybe you can still retrieve your content from a snapshot of a website, but most of the time, it "disappears", just like it has never existed in this world. The followers you were able to communicate with yesterday will not be able to find you today because your account is taken from you.

Web3.0

Today, after 2 decades since Web2.0 was born, Web3.0 is getting known by more people. On the basis of Web2, Web3 evolves to be an internet that users can own.
For the first time, creators can own their creations. What does “own” mean?

  1. Own the content itself
  2. Actually own a share of this platform is simply the platform's cryptocurrency or creators issuing their scarcity NFTs
  3. Own the right to make the rules of the platform
  4. Actually own the content platform

The operating mechanism of Web3.0 is fundamentally different from that of Web2.0. The fundamental source of this difference lies in the decentralized construction of Web3.0. The most ideal Web 3.0 is to run the programmable code on the blockchain to ensure that a series of executions are implemented according to the predetermined design, not determined by a single company or individual decision. For example, your content can be published on IPFS to ensure that no one can delete it; Your creations will be automatically rewarded with the platform's token as incentives. These tokens may appreciate as the platform grows and expand, and you never have to worry about the infinite increase of money supply. The smart contract will define in code the money issuance rules and quantity.

Those who wrote the earliest blogs on the internet, using the service by blogger.com (http://blogger.com/) for example, had their content written for hundreds of thousands of hours disappeared with the shutdown of the website.

Today at 2022, all are set to be changed. The past 20 years’ evolution seems like the prelude to today's Web3.0. Creators are looking for new platforms that protect their rights, and creators are growing in volume at an unprecedented scale. In terms of volume, creators are not simply to publish content, but to obtain their own created value, and can even get the benefits of their own potential value early. All these needs can be well tended to in the social platform of Web3.0.

Creator Token and NFT

In the traditional economic system, only a company can issue its shares. If the company is doing well, it may be able to go public in exchanges like NYSE or Nasdaq. For the creator economy, the creator is at the core. In the Web3 system, creators issue their own cryptocurrency and NFTs to transform the traditional "sponsorship" model into a token economy that more reflects the value of creators. Via the issuance of fungible tokens, or NFTs, the creator is like have gone public. With the tokens bought by supporters, the value of the creator will be better monetized through market mechanisms. Today, tens of thousands of fans sponsor and support their favorite creators on Patreon, but they are not rewarded accordingly or their reward is not tradable. If the supporter gets some recognition like a supporter badge, it can not be sold to another supporter. It is believed that when you sponsor an unrecognized painter and purchase his limited edition NFT, after several years, when the painter grows from obscurity to a famous painter, the limited edition NFT he once issued will reflect the gaining of value. Therefore, the pure "sponsorship" is replaced by the behavior of buying NFTs, and at the same time, it gives stronger incentives for creator economy.

Platform token and incentives

The platform token is an important Web3 feature. This token can be like our daily used dollars but more reserved in its supply. Platform tokens are designed and issued with immutable smart contracts. Under normal circumstances, participants in a community can obtain a certain share of rewards through "labor". When a traditional social media firm such as Facebook was publicly listed, creators on Facebook are not rewarded with one single stock share. Now with Web3 platform, creator can get their due share of platform tokens based on their contribution. It also owns a part of this platform. Here, you are not working for the platform, but creating for yourself. You add value to the platform, and you also get a part of the platform’s added value.

DAO

Well, all these sound great, so who will manage or make the rules for everything?The answer is everyone: any user in the platform. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) breaks a platform's centralized control of creators, enabling creators to collaborate with each other, and make creation and decision-making as a group. Combined with the incentive mechanism of the platform cryptocurrency, it can be understood that the creators are motivated by the platform cryptocurrency, and the platform cryptocurrency represents your voting power in the community. Therefore, users with greater contributions have greater voting rights and make decisions on community affairs. A platform may need different DAOs. For example, a DAO responsible for training is needed to provide introductory training for new users joining the community. Perhaps a public relations DAO is needed to seek external contacts and support for the development of the community. Actions in a DAO may not all be free. Web3 allows actions in DAO to receive certain rewards, such as proposal rewards. For example, voting can also be rewarded. These rewarding is done through smart contracts or be given through a decision-making reward DAO. All contributions to the platform, such as inviting new users to join, helping to increase community activity (likes, following, messages), reporting violations of community rules, and governing a positive community’s behavior, will get platform token airdropped to them. More details will be announced soon, and your contribution will be properly valued!

The puzzle seems to be complete. At this point, we have reason to believe that this is an era when great innovative products are born. Our mission is to be seen, be heard, and be valued. Now it looks clearer on the pathway of building web3. In the past year or so, the 2 million users of clapper spread through word of mouth are the foundation for this innovation. Today at the dawn of web3, we have the most solid foundation to rebuild the creator economy and build DAO , To build a creator token and NFT market for creators. We believe that the age when “content is king” is coming, and we are seeing the dawn.

References
https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
https://future.a16z.com/1000-true-fans-try-100/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
https://li.substack.com/p/the-web3-renaissance-a-golden-age
https://future.a16z.com/nfts-thousand-true-fans/

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