Author: jamesrichardfry, Head of Marketing, Across Protocol
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
I've been struggling with how to write this. Part of me wants to sugarcoat it. Dress it up in marketing speak. Frame it as something beautiful and move on.
But that wouldn't be entirely honest. If you know me, you know I wear my heart on my sleeve and I'm incapable of lying. So here it is, bluntly.
Community is dead. Of course, it wasn't always this way. That goes without saying, but I'm saying it out loud anyway.
I still miss the good old days on Clubhouse and Discord chatrooms. The times we spent hours "vibing" with people from across the internet about magic internet money, the latest NFT drop, the best staking opportunities, complaining about the money we lost, dreaming about the next great project, and actually *building*.
To this day, I'm still good friends with many of those people. Some have even become friends in real life. When community is good, it's good. I miss those days.
Zooming out a bit, what is community? I talked about this for way too long during a recent all-hands meeting, and I could almost hear the eyes rolling from my colleagues.
To share a bit of that epiphany with you, here's my take on community:
A community is a group of people gathered around a shared interest. In many aspects of our daily lives, we have community.
From the school you go to, the sport you play, the religion you practice, the gym you frequent, even the grocery store you shop at.
Some communities are shallow. The group of old men I see at the gym Monday through Friday is a community, but it's clearly very different from the friend circle community we intentionally spend time with.
Web3 or crypto community is no different.
We all gathered around our shared interests. DeFi summer. NFT mania. NFT winter. Cross-chain interoperability whatever. Zero-knowledge proofs whatever.
Whatever you're into, there's a group of people diving down the rabbit hole with you.
Some were there for the financial speculation. Others, from a deep belief and commitment to the early cypherpunk movement. Some crypto communities were surface-level or perfunctory.
Others were deeply profound. I mean, deeply, deeply profound. Like a religious congregation, fanatic following, belief-in-your-gut, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is profound.
We wore the same "clothes" (PFP), spoke our own language (WAGMI), looked crazy to outsiders, and we didn't care one bit because we believed in what we were all gathering to pursue.
Early crypto community was inseparable from belief.
Not just belief, but a deep, gut-wrenching conviction that gave you the courage to get on stage and talk for hours in front of hundreds about why you believed in the founder, the project, the roadmap, and why you were the project's diamond-handed hodler.
Conviction. That's what drove the parabolic growth in the early days. Without community, crypto would be nothing.
Across, by the way, was no exception. The early days of the Across community were the golden days. The vibes were high. There was deep conviction (yes, I'm repeating that word). Excitement, energy, people genuinely caring about the project for the innovation, not for the token price.
We hired people from that community who are still with us today. And some of the early people who stuck around are still die-hard community members, riding the waves with us.
When community is good, it's good.
And then, everything changed.
Fast forward to today. I'm going to make some sweeping generalizations here. Please know that I'm not referring to "all" community members, "every" community group, and not painting with a broad brush. But if I continue to be blunt, I'm referring to most. Vast majority.
The word "community" has been bastardized by the crypto "extractors." In many ways, if you want to know why "the love of money is the root of all evil," look no further than the countless Discord "communities."
Thousands of unread messages a day. Impressive daily active users. Constant social support, until the Token Generation Event (TGE) hits. We all know the playbook.
The vibe before TGE mimics the early crypto community sentiment. Deep conviction. Gut-wrenching fire. Courage to get on stage. PFP and project tags in bios. Ride or die, diamond hands, bullish hodler.
Then, everyone changes.
You go to sleep one night, barely able to keep up with the Discord notifications.
You wake up the next morning, and it's a ghost town.
Or worse.
You find your loyal "community" coming at you with pitchforks and torches.
Over the airdrop.
You see, "community" is no longer community.
It's devolved into endless, AI-generated spam to farm points, for the hope of an airdrop, to immediately dump, then complain about the token price, and call the project a scam or rug (which, to be fair, is often true).
You know where I'm going with this long-winded rant, right?
"Community" is no longer community. You know it. You feel it. The timeline feels off. Discord servers feel off. Podcasts feel off. Twitter Spaces feel off.
Everything feels wrong, like "Con" will never be "Confucius." Everyone reading this today knows it deep down, even if you've never articulated it this clearly before.
Today's "community" is a cheap imitation of the early community that built crypto into what it is. The shared interest of these "community" members boils down to one thing. Extraction. Quick. Decisive. Extraction. It's the poison that kills what crypto could have been, and should have been.
Most of today's (again, not all) Discord "communities" consist of the dregs of the remnants.
Some are genuine loyalists and believers. (To those who have stuck with Across, we wouldn't be here without you. Thank you. You know where to find us, we'll always have a place for you.)
Some, often the majority, are there to extract from the project. I won't dwell on that here.
And finally, those who only appear to complain. Because in every bear market, these specific types of "community" members will kick you when you're down, as if the bear market hasn't affected every team member, and as if we caused the bear market to happen.
Unfortunately, the Across Discord has recently fallen into this "majority" category as well. Our "community" has become something else.
The people who recognize the incredible achievements we've made, the progress Across has pioneered for the entire industry, and who still support us, are tired of being part of this extractive "community" and have left the Discord.
The few who remain will happily move with us to Twitter and other channels. The rest are what I defined above as "community." Yes, I'm saying this with gut-wrenching fire and deep conviction.
Therefore, today, the Across Discord is moving to read-only mode.
This is the first step in our planned, full shutdown of the server.
To the community of believers still standing with us, let's keep building. We have a lot of work to do.
To Discord, thank you for hosting some of the good old days of crypto. I will cherish them forever.
Community is dead.
Long live community.
