TL; DR
Full story
What do you get in return when you contribute to an online community?
On Web2? You get a warm, fuzzy feeling about being part of something bigger than yourself, and maybe a cosmetic badge to put on your profile picture.
In Web3, the vision is that you get all of the above, plus a tangible digital asset (crypto) that will encourage you to contribute further over time.
It’s a bit of a strange concept, and one that sets off potential alarm bells…
(For example, will financialization bastardize the underlying community, creating a bot epidemic?).
That’s always a risk, but that doesn’t mean that tokenized communities haven’t been built in the past with some success.
The FortniteBR Subreddit has rewarded its contributors with $BRICK tokens for a while now, and it’s still going strong!
The only problem is:
FortniteBR’s rewards system is patched together because Reddit isn’t designed to support community tokenization.
That’s why the launch of River protocol we noticed.
It is essentially a toolset that allows builders to create their own tokenized community platform.
Think Discord, but with fully integrated tools that allow users to:
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Contribute to earn
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Cast votes based on their total token holdings
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Send encrypted private messages without an intermediary
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The ability to own their data (instead of Discord, Slack, Facebook etc.)
Will this dethrone the major Web2 community platforms?
Probably not.
But that’s not necessary. The crypto space is one big network of users eager to explore cryptocurrency platforms.
That means River Protocol builders should be able to build a user base quite easily.
Neat!