Members' Gathering Fully Booked | Quadratic Lenster: The Trendiest Convergence of Community Platform and Quadratic Fundraising

#545

GM,

The promotional poster for the Members' Gathering had just been completed, and unexpectedly, the registration was already fully booked 😂 To ensure a comfortable networking environment for everyone on the day of the event, additional slots will not be opened. If anyone is unable to attend at the last minute, please kindly send me a notification via email. I will release those slots to those who haven't registered yet.

In recent days, I've noticed the excitement and anticipation of everyone towards the Members' Gathering. It's incredible to see so many people looking forward to meeting the author. I can already imagine the struggle of choosing the right outfit for the event. Additionally, many attendees are also interested in meeting other participants. Web3 enthusiasts are scattered across various industries, making this event a rare opportunity to bring everyone together. With one month left until the event, I'll send regular reminders. For those who have registered, please remember to keep the afternoon of August 19th (Saturday) free for our visit to XREX Exchange and a chance to chat.

Moving on to other news...

This week, numerous Web3 entrepreneurs have flown to France to participate in the annual Ethereum Community Conference (ETHCC). These kinds of medium to large-scale community events seem to happen almost every month. Just last week, I discussed Vitalik's speech in Canada in my article, and now, within a few days, he's traveled to Paris to attend this event.

I rarely attend such events myself. On one hand, when I travel abroad, it's usually for leisure, and I prefer not to mix it with work. On the other hand, with YouTube providing online live streams, I don't have to worry about missing out on the latest news. The protagonist of this article, Quadratic Lenster, is the brand new social platform that just made its debut in Paris. It utilizes the quadratic fundraising method to amplify small donations made by people on the social platform. Yesterday, I attempted to donate $1 to a friend, and with this donation, they are expected to receive an additional $8 reward from the matching fund.

If you're interested in giving it a try as well, the first step is to obtain a personal identity (handle) on the Lens Protocol.

Open Social Network

A year ago, I introduced the Lens Protocol, calling it a "portable social graph." To this day, the article remains at the top of Blocktrend's most popular content list. Lens Protocol is not like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok; rather, it is the underlying social graph hidden behind these platforms.

The social graph is the highest confidentiality of each social platform, recording relationships between people, such as who X is friends with, what posts they like, and which links they can't resist clicking. In the physical world, this information is known only to the individual. But in the digital world, search engines and social platforms understand us even better than we do ourselves.

The platform knows everyone's preferences, giving them the ability to manipulate our perceptions, just as depicted in the Netflix documentary "The Great Hack," which explored the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The social graph also holds commercial value, serving as the foundation for targeted advertising on platforms. If they discover you've been watching travel videos, they'll recommend flight tickets to you. For those with weaker willpower, that can lead to impulsive purchases.

Regrettably, despite its importance, people cannot take their social graphs with them, and it's even difficult to find out what tags or labels they have been assigned. Perhaps some people don't mind this. However, if we could carry our social graph with us, registering on new platforms would not require us to spend time re-explaining our lives.

Lens Protocol is not a social platform and does not engage in advertising business, so there's no reason to lock people's social graphs. From the very beginning of its design, it records users' social graph data in their personal wallets. For users, having a Lens Protocol identity is like having a digital passport that allows them to move freely between different social platforms.

The following image shows the current social platforms that support Lens Protocol. Lenster's functionality is similar to Twitter, Lenstube is like YouTube, and Butterfly resembles IG (Instagram). Although Twitter, YouTube, and IG belong to different companies, their accounts are separate and do not interconnect. However, Lenster, Lenstube, and Butterfly, even though developed by different companies, allow users to log in with the same Lens Protocol identity, and their content can be displayed across platforms. This is what an open social network is all about.

It's entirely normal that many people haven't heard of these platforms. Currently, Lens Protocol operates on an invitation-only basis, requiring users to queue for registration to obtain an identity. Once users have their Lens Protocol identity, it's like opening the door to another world. Apart from the aforementioned platforms, the protagonist of this article, Quadratic Lenster, is a brand-new social platform that also allows direct access using the Lens identity. Whether friends have joined Quadratic Lenster or not, they can freely interact with each other as if they were on the same community platform.

zoom donation

Quadratic Lenster, a novel social experiment initiated by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, aims to integrate quadratic fundraising with the everyday social platforms people use. The goal is to create a unique social ecosystem. Owocki has pointed out that likes and hearts on social platforms are inherently worthless and endlessly abundant, making them the most authentic "shitcoin." Despite receiving numerous likes and hearts, individuals still feel a sense of emptiness. In contrast, receiving small donations is much more tangible and meaningful.

Readers from Hong Kong and Taiwan are likely familiar with this concept, as LikeCoin is a platform that advocates transforming likes into rewards. Rather than providing data to platforms through likes, LikeCoin allows users to reward creators with LikeCoin donations. The core feature of Quadratic Lenster is its small donation mechanism. However, it goes a step further by setting up a matching fund, enabling users to collectively decide how this fund should be distributed using the quadratic fundraising method. According to the introduction: information missing in the provided text.

Lens users can interact on Quadratic Lenster's dynamic timeline by mutually rewarding each other's posts. These small donations will be matched with the funds available in the pool. Even a small donation of just $1 can have a greater impact than $1 alone because Quadratic Lenster employs the quadratic fundraising method to distribute the funds.

The event is scheduled from July 17, 2023, to July 22, 2023. During this period, users who make donations to posts tagged with #ethcc will enable the post creators to receive matched donations from the fund pool. This rewarding mechanism allows all Lens users to use the quadratic fundraising method to incentivize and support the organizations and creators they admire.

In this event, Kevin Owocki has allocated $10,000 as the matching fund to incentivize users to share high-quality content related to #ethcc, the Ethereum Community Conference. The image below displays the post that currently receives the highest amount of matched donations during the #ethcc event.

This post has received a total of 100 donations, amounting to approximately 306 WMATIC. These 100 donations came from 16 different users, and they are expected to receive a share of 4,590 WMATIC from the fund pool, equivalent to around $3,400 USD or approximately 100,000 TWD.

A potential reward of 100,000 TWD for a community post is indeed very tempting! So, I also decided to publish a post on Quadratic Lenster to test the small donation mechanism. As of now, my post has received 5 donations, totaling 4.1 WMATIC. These 5 donations came from 2 users. Based on this data, my post is expected to receive a share of 21.96 WMATIC from the fund pool, approximately 500 TWD.

However, I must confess that one of the donors is myself, and the other is the Blocktrend member ctting.eth, whom I invited to test this new feature. I also asked him to publish a post. If any of you would like to test the small donation feature, feel free to use our posts for your experiment 😂

Readers who have participated in the previous round of Gitcoin Grants are undoubtedly familiar with the quadratic fundraising method. In Gitcoin Grants, people were allocating their small donations to different projects, while in Quadratic Lenster, the recipients of small donations are posts. Evaluating whether a post is worthy of a donation is much easier than judging the value of a whole project. It is a more familiar process for people, as every like on social media platforms can be considered a form of micro-donation.

Moreover, most people spend the majority of their time on either social media platforms or video streaming platforms. By directly integrating quadratic fundraising into people's daily lives, it lowers the participation threshold. This reduces the risk of encountering the peculiar situation where participation in Gitcoin Grants was too low, leading to the belief that "money is more important than the number of people involved." Quadratic Lenster's approach makes it easier and more engaging for users to participate in supporting content creators and causes they care about.

Quality over quantity

In essence, Quadratic Lenster aims to change people's social behavior through the economic incentive of the quadratic fundraising method.

In the current media landscape, attention is often garnered by sensational headlines, as having traffic allows for ad revenue. However, on Quadratic Lenster, sensational content is not as well-received. If people feel deceived after viewing such content, they are unlikely to donate.

On the other hand, creators with a strong reputation who receive small donations can also benefit from generous rewards through the matching fund. This economic incentive filters out content farms that solely focus on clickbait for traffic. Ultimately, Quadratic Lenster has the potential to cultivate a content ecosystem that prioritizes quality over quantity.

However, it's evident that Quadratic Lenster's mechanism has its share of challenges. For instance, the post that receives the highest matching fund may not necessarily be the highest quality content, but rather the result of having the widest network. After all, the quadratic fundraising method emphasizes the importance of the number of people involved, not just the amount of money.

Currently, scholars are actively researching ways to combat collusion among users. One approach involves differentiating social relationships, where donations from strangers may be considered more trustworthy than those from close friends or family, as they have fewer vested interests. However, to distinguish the proximity of social relationships, a reliable identity system is needed, which circles back to the witch attack issue discussed earlier.

Beyond the identity problem, determining the quality of content is also challenging. In the past, if people encountered bad content, they would simply ignore or block it. But if it's a post that can receive matching fund donations, there may be proposals to introduce checks and balances. It's similar to social platforms having not only likes but also dislikes. However, each dislike would come with a corresponding monetary cost, offsetting some of the effects of likes.

A social platform that only has likes is like a car with just an accelerator. Platforms should not encourage people to "race" and go faster. Instead, they should incorporate a brake mechanism to create a healthier community atmosphere. However, opponents may question whether it is genuinely healthier to encourage people to spend money to dislike others.

Quadratic Lenster is a social experiment with many mechanisms and assumptions yet to be verified. The $10,000 matching fund provided by Kevin Owocki may be like throwing money into the water, but it won't be wasted. It serves as an experiment to explore a brand-new economic incentive for a community platform, representing the trendiest convergence of social platforms and the quadratic fundraising method.

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