Warning! Highly experimental media!
By Olga Grinina and Vasily Sumanov
Having worked for a bunch of years in the blockchain industry, at some point we felt poison crawling up our veins -
the toxic vibe of fake ICOs and media payolas
that some of you - crypto enthusiasts, digital nomads and whatnot – might also have experienced at some point. Scam ICOs chasing the hardcaps, corrupt influencer faces preaching about building the next big thing at every other pitching session, corrupt media outlets eager to publish virtually anything and label it as ‘organic PR’ for a certain amount of BTC. Crypto-dummy CEOs and CMOs jumping on the crypto bandwagon in hope to make a quick buck, John McAffeys and pretty female ‘ambassadors’ who know little to nothing about the technology and finance. The space is poisoned by ‘ex-heads of investment’ from some second-hand Wall Street bank whose talk is torture for the mind of any sensible person. And all that BS has shaped up the reality that we’re all living now.
Our pain is the scarcity of good content. News migrating from one media to another, press releases and paid ‘organic articles on Cointelegraph about ‘how this new amazing project is disrupting this and that’. Finding a piece of quality becomes real challenge, even everybody’s darling Medium is flooded with generic copycats, so props to Stefano from tokeneconomy.co and some other rare minds for keeping it real!
So, we thought we needed a place for all of you guys – a growing squad of creatives and digital wanderers driven by the gig economy – to have a chance to connect and educate. We came up with this weird name, because we yet don’t know what the F technomads.wtf will turn into. One thing for sure, this will be a place for creatives who are fine with being atypical and digging for answers.
We figured that we need a truly experimental approach to create a new independent source of content for mindful people like us. Like, we’ve traveled across three countries over the last week, and gotta say it feels kinda mad. But a true revelation was meeting a bunch of like-minded people at Berlin Blockchain Week last night, which got us thinking about what it is truly like to be living out of your suitcase. A dream came true, or a never-ending succession of hotel check-ins? Is this becoming a new normal, or people like us are the mad ones who will never confine themselves to the comfort of one home and office life? One thing for sure: all of those creative believers and practitioners do not fully realize how the hell they ended up living this life. Engineers, developers, designers – all coming from drastically different backgrounds (some are coders by day and djs by night) are all in fact at the forefront of the gig economy and post-industrial transition.
First blood
No, you got it all wrong.
We are not yet another Telegram/Medium/Media outlet. We’re not a social network either – because we also hate endless newsfeeds of meaningless information. We are actually a hybrid new form of self-driving community that is here to produce and consume the content. Unlike Netflix, we value quality over quantity - we want the content to be rather low volume, yet purposeful and coordinated within the community.
Okay, here are some of our fundamentals. And the most exciting part is that there’s no playbook, because today’s decentralized community is open-source and experimental by nature. So, our media/social network/whatever you call it is work in progress and fun.
Crystal clear blue water for content. No more ads and shady PR-mentions.
Internal incentives design (a motivation system)
Contributing strong original content is always awarded. Strong content cannot be produced within one global framework such as Medium or Steemit anymore. Instead we suggest posting to Technomads with links to the original source by motivating you to find, select and distribute content inside the system.
Smart commenting (hence - educating others) is always awarded.
Editors, reviewers, designers and all other contributors are to be selected and controlled by the community, as well as by algorithm of penalty system set up as the part of token economy.
Achievement drivers
Oh, and since we got a token engineer on our team passionate about incentives and stuff, we’re gonna introduce tokens, badges and other achievement motivators to figure out what works better in terms of community motivation. Tokens are not to be used for investment purposes, because we’re sick of it. They would be distributed as freebies to the wallets of supporters, readers and contributors to #technomadnotes from the shared rewards pool.
Yes, you heard us right: we will have a token. Or maybe not, as we’re testing the waters.
The recap: our ambition is to build a self-driving system able to generate and retain good content, at the same time engaging strong and intellectual community. Remember, there is no place for dummies. Not into crypto or economics? No prob. There is also place for art, music, health and biohacking, cool events like Berlin Blockchain Week, and – get excited – you can offer your own topic for coverage too! Naturally, the ultimate goal of every media – whether decentralized or not - is to influence the minds, and we are no exception. However, in our case, this control is to be exercised by virtue of the community, not the board of editors with popularity becoming a the result of our collective effort.
wtf-token
We are big fans of staking approach to token design. And our grounding is this : those tokens when logically applied to the system are working as incentives/penalties, at the same time being the source of cash flow for the network owner person, provided that the owner throws in enough tasks to the network. Another pro is that basically you don’t need to make a token transfer on frequent basis (as they can be staked in contract for a period), so it reduces a transaction cost and the load on the blockchain network. We don’t have the final token model with crafted checked out against stress tests details at this moment. Nevertheless, basic principles are quite simple:
All the things mentioned in the previous section – contributing/producing/ reviewing/editing and writing - are to be rewarded in crypto, not in tokens. Tokens are used for staking to obtain the right to contribute with their main function being staking to limit access to those activities, at the same time penalizing bad actors for Sybil attacks: in case of the attack tokens are burnt.
The reputation level of the contributor inside the system is also recorded to distributed ledger as ‘common achievement’. It can be marked as ERC721 token, providing personalization. This is social motivation in gamification system. Such awards are designed as rewards for reading, understanding, smart commenting and helping others to understand the topic.
‘If you’re non-profit, where would you guys get the real money to award your community of contributors?
Not out of the air or a money printing machine, of course. Our logics is this: good content leads to strong intellectual community, strong intellectual community creates new pieces of good content and ever-growing follower base - and all that repeats in cycles. And as we all know, community is the king in postindustrial economy. It is also easy to foresee that strong community around Technomads would soon become a sweet target for innovative protocols/companies/events. But guess what: instead of selling press releases and paid articles aimed to guide the community in a shady manner, we are introducing a liquidity pool. Liquidity pool is a contract that collects all donations and thereafter transfers them to wallets of project contributors according to their activity on trustless basis of automatic execution. If anyone wishes to support our project in future (yet, we wanna make it clear that now we are not attracting any investments, only support to compensate for our operational costs), they also can send some ETH to the smart contract.
Die hard
This one is about being meaningful and cool over the course of one’s life. If you like our idea and project, you are very welcome. Come play this game of digital reputation with us where the weapon of truth is fighting the bias and corruption.
No bullshit, real talk
Our ambition is to build a self-driving system that can generate and retain good content at the same time engaging and educating strong intellectual community:
Carefully selected filtered content build by collective creative effort.
Educational and non-profit, since once an investor comes in, he gains control over the media – that’s where all those ads and corrupt articles are coming from.
All the nitty-gritty detail of our system design is under development now. Watch this space. And follow us on twitter.