Dunbar’s SoFi Community Token
I know what you’re thinking — another token (just what we need), hype, fear, greed, here hold my $BAGS.
Lets unleash another social token rug pull by some anon dev claiming 100% fair launch while vampire mining another decentralized anon running proof of mom’s pudding 🍦 running on a single node run by single point failure company XYZ running on Jeff B’s AWS.
It’s just an idea guys check it out 😅
One thing I’ve learned about online communities is how powerful the network effect is, but on the other edge of the blade within a short amount of time you have so many connected “friends” posting baby pics on your feed that you feel like an alien landing on PLUTO. You remember these people, but the context and intimacy are all gone.
You’re not the only one feeling this way — I feel this way, my friends feel this way, even Mr. Zuck himself feels this way.
Facebook and the other platform’s growth goal of “invite 7 friends in 10 days” caused a big ol’ negative effect and we should really solve for this. I mean Facebook users’ average number of friends is 338! Seriously can you even count that many of your friends by name? Don’t even look at LinkedIn’s 500.
So imagine a perfect world, you open your social chat room to find that everyone in there is talking about things you’re interested in. Engaging in meaningful discourse, tantalizing content, and relatable current events. Not just memes though we all love a good meme. (Also please don’t tell me to go look at Facebook Groups. Join one of those and you have the same problem — 500 people you don’t know).
Well here is the root of the problem that’s preventing this.
- We meet a lot of people IRL and on the Metaverse
- We add them to our digital group ie Facebook
- After some amount of time these relationships become stale
They become stale because people change — you, me and our friends.
- Some people become ghosts and don’t post at all 👻
- Some people have kids and move on 👶
- Some people stay in the fantastic 20s and party on 🍾
There are countless reasons why your online relationships change beyond recognition and its a gradual imperceptible change until one day; You’re the odd one out.
So if we had to redesign this awesome-sauce people machine how would it work? Are there any examples of a better solution out there?
Yes, indeed there is!
Enter British Anthropologist Robin Dunbar who determined that 150 is the approximate number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships with. He used various data points including hunter-gatherer tribe sizes, primate band sizes, size of the neocortex relative to their group sizes — blah blah read more here.
Dunbar explained it informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
Now that we have a group size target it still doesn’t solve the problem of friendly relations going stagnant over time.
Say hello to Dunbar’s community token (lets give it a ticker) $DUNBAR and a bitcoin meme…its official!
This token gives a friend access to a chat room on Telegram/Discord using Collab.land’s bot for tokenized access.
Next let’s program this fictional token smart contract with a few rules.
Engagement Rule
If friend has not posted any meaningful content in 3 months, then remove that friend.
But how do friends invite new friends without going over the 150 limit? Let’s make another rule.
Invite Rule
Each friend is given an extra token, also known as a membership, to give to one of their friends. That extra token must be used within some arbitrary amount of time, say 2 weeks.
Voting Rule
If a membership is not used then that membership is sent to the friend that invited that friend, so on and so forth. If no friends in that “friend lineage” use the membership then it returns to the token contract where the group can vote on who should receive the extra membership. We can use Snapshot for off-chain voting and listen for that governance event.
Well how does this all kick-off?
Seeding Event
The “seed friend” receives the first 150 memberships and sends them to their besties or colleagues or community. The “seed friend” has 2 weeks to send them and for those new friends to post meaningful in the chat room, if not then the memberships go to the token contract to be voted on.
Oh no! It sounds like even I could lose access and control to my own creation?!
Yes exactly! And thats the beauty of this design. It is a living, breathing, evolving organism that will not tolerate staleness and lack of engagement from its friends. This incentivizes friends to continue to engage with each other over time and for those that do not — a new, more engaged friend of the network is added. Ooooo scaryyyy 👻
It’s entirely possible if YOU, the “seed friend” are not engaged then you too can lose access. Ahh 😌 isn’t this so fantastic. Imagine that your creation could float through the Metaverse and one day become the social container for a group of highly engaged K Pop fanatics that discuss the intricacies of BTS lyrics.
Last but not least…
Gift Economy and Rainbow Colored Money Rule
This token should be programmable-y worthless. Program the smart contract to use a bonding curve that sets the value to something extraordinarily small say $0.0001. The only value of a membership or $DNBR token is the value that stems from the community and its internal usage. This keeps the community free from the greed and negative sides of crypto that we are all too familiar with and it keeps the community focused on what matters most to them.
Camila Russo from @DefiantNews explained it best in her experience with an anonymous contributor that gifted her 64 ETH for her book.
Crypto-gifting is the yin to crypto-capitalism’s yang — intrinsic, the part of the iceberg that’s underwater. **
As the story goes ^ we should not forget where we came from — focus on the true value, not speculation or greed and instead allow gifting to be the primary mechanism for moving memberships to new users.
The End
Did I miss anything? I’m sure I did. Feel free to post your thoughts and if you’re interested in building something like this hit me up on Telegram @thealexhidalgo
Improvements
Quadratic voting — Polkadot is using this to solve issues with low voter turnout. Let’s borrow this.
BrightIDs — who knows it might be a good idea to have unique users in Dunbar.
Gas costs of moving memberships — I haven’t solved this problem. Maybe everyone gifts some money to the token contract upon joining to cover costs. Any ideas?
Posting meaningful content — what constitutes posting engaging content in the chat room which would allow you to stay “active”. Does writing “Hello World!” count?
