What is web3? What makes it different?
This is probably the most often asked question among friends interested in what I’m building. ‘What is it? How is it different? What’s driving all the interest and growth?’
Web3 is taking the world by storm. Buzzwords like NFT and DAO are beginning to permeate mainstream culture, funding is pouring into the space by the millions, but why?
Communities are the driving force of web3.
To those already in web3, this seems like an obvious notion; but it certainly isn’t the web2 way of things. There’s something about web3 that is just different.
What were previously subscribers, are now stakeholders. Web3 is ushering in a new meaning of the term ‘community’. In the days of web2 we’ve seen passive participants, providing a few dollars per month to an animator, the free allocation of a prime subscription on twitch, even cheaply buying into an unfinished game on Steam. In contrast, web3 has members coughing up hundreds if not thousands of dollars, just to be part of a… community?
What drives these members?
The motivations of web3 communities are just as diverse as the participants. Web3 has a wide landscape. From degen art and social clubs, to projects attempting to shake up societal concepts like college, to those that have banded together for a cause. If you can imagine it, there’s probably a community for it, and each member their own reason for investing.
Web3 makes this far more interesting than any Patreon could fathom. The key to web3 is holding ownership in a community, this ownership holds unique utility we haven’t seen from web2.
- People buy into DAOs to have direct say in the governance of a project, who gets paid what, what are we building next, who are we hiring? This community drives how the project is run.
- In other instances, people join a community and then proceed to work for that community; projects like ScribeDAO have members that directly contribute their skills and time to drive the product to be successful. This community drives how the project is built.
- People buy NFTs for many reasons, to flip for cash, to ‘look cool’, to get access to merch or whitelist opportunities, but how can an NFT collection meet any of these criteria without a community backing them? The community comes first, the community drives hype, the cashflow and clout come second.
It’s the decisions, the hard work, the hype, from the members, supporters, and investors behind a project that ultimately drives success. No successful Web3 project exists without a loyal community.
How are these communities built?
While the product, art, or mission may be a driving factor, this alone is not enough to get a project off the ground. A talented team, or a large influencer backing a project can bring along their own fans, and that’s a start, but you can’t just throw 1000 of your greatest fans into a discord and expect a “community” to form. Without care and nurturing, a community can fizzle out in no time.
First hand we’ve learned, and through research we’ve confirmed, that the hardest part of web3 is not finding the most powerful mission, nor creating the greatest art, it is in fact, building the strongest community to support it. Behind each successful project is a talented group of community managers that built these communities in the first place.
💡 Those responsible for social in web2 are building the backbone of web3.
As a team that spent the past couple of years building for communities in the podcast space, naturally, this was our calling.
Over the past few months, we’ve spent hours upon hours talking to those that not only participate in, but also to those that build these communities. Our goal is to uncover the greatest pain points of community building in web3 to see how we might lend our expertise.
Read about what we’re working on in our next post 🎉