Over the past year, I have seen a lot of initiatives to encourage developers to build new projects on Algorand. While having legitimate projects is certainly important for success, it is not enough on its own to ensure victory. To illustrate this point, imagine that five legitimate projects suddenly appeared. If there is no one active around to use them, they cannot thrive. The community needs to be ready when they appear otherwise it can be pretty demotivating if there’s a lack of engagement.
I have noticed that there is currently a low level of engagement and activity within our community. This is not to say that we do not have a community at all, but rather that most people are lurking and not actively participating. I am not an expert in this field, but it seems to me that engagement is crucial for creating a network effect. The official discord has many helpful people, but the general discussions are not very active. From what I’ve learned in the past communities, what needs to happen is active community discussions where people learn about each other and bond. I may be missing something, but I’m not sure there’s such a thing around.
At the moment, the discord is much more similar to stack overflow, with the most common pattern being:
A: How do I do X?
B: Run this command
The activity on reddit and here is also similar, with people mostly lurking resulting in many topics without any engagement. While I think this is normal, there is a great benefit if we start doing a little more. It doesn’t take much to write your opinion on something and hit the reply button. If we take 5 minutes every other day, and then transition to taking 5 minutes every day, we have doubled our engagement. But there is more - the more comments there are, the more likely other people are to have something to add to the discussion and this is key. When we take the time to engage with others, it encourages them to do the same. As more and more people join in, it forms a virtuous circle that benefits everyone. A similar effect happens on Twitter - if we increase our engagement by becoming a little more active, things can start to spiral because the discussion spreads. It’s not just about tweets and replies, likes and retweets function similarly.
We don’t want to spam reddit or twitter, but meaningful comments can provide a huge boost to community engagement. I am not suggesting creating fake engagement, but rather that those of us who believe in Algorand would bring great benefits by slightly increasing our level of participation. We’re good at different things. If writing is not your thing, you can still contribute in other ways including painting or even playing around with the latest AI technologies like DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT which are providing us with new ways to produce engaging material for the community.
I don’t think this is an Algorand Foundation issue, it’s the “someone else will do it” mindset which is a part of every community member to some extent. I am confident that we can significantly boost our community involvement and content by putting in just a little extra effort. We all know it’s much easier to talk than to do things so I’ll start off. While some may see it as silly, I believe memes are a very unique, memorable and engaging way to share a message. I will begin by sharing a few. Please feel free to share them with others in any way you see fit.
I’ll use this thread to periodically post new memes. I’ll try to make at least one each week.