There's been a list leaked recently by zachxbt of some influencers and the cost to get them to shill your tokens/project, I mean this is web2 after all, beside some adrevenue that twitter might offer them, how else are they going to capitalize on the blind followers they've amassed?
It's just kind of sad the games we still play, it's a two sided game as well, these people aren't out there actively looking for projects they actually like and invest their own money into, they're just playing the numbers game in terms of attention and waiting for projects to come to them and pay them to bring light to their project - which they along with the influencers then abuse to dump on the masses they've lured into buying their token.
Why do we play these games?
I remember in the early altcoin days, people were so adamant about making sure early distribution was fair and that devs would explain any and all funds being used on their public and transparent addresses, else the masses would just move on and look at other projects. Now of course Steem was one of the few ones that cheated this system hard yet many stayed and hoped they'd do right by the community (aka the ninjamine, which we now know they tried to fuck that up as well), but I feel like it's only gotten worse over the years. Either through exchange launchpads, VC's/angel investors and all kind of dirty web2 tricks you may not know about but become more clear now as payments may be easier to trace due to blockchain compared to banks back in the day. Has web2 always been this dirty and we're now just seeing it drip into this space?
Now okay, you may be thinking I'm setting myself up to talk about how fair zing token launch was which I've probably talked about more times than posting any actual news about the game, but I thought I'd post about some other things that I'm going to be trying not to do with the project. Some things maybe you may expect of me not to given the time I've invested here and hope to keep my sheet clean in the foreseeable future of the chain, but maybe some things you may not think of that I may think of now as I'm writing this post on another sleepless night while wondering how many points I may have forgotten by now as I wrote these few paragraphs. Let's see.
Before I dig in, I just wanna point out one thing that makes Hive different compared to the above - in a way. Sure you could technically still privately "pay" people to shill your projects without leaving a trace here on-chain, but can you imagine how easily this would leak here compared to on web2? Someone with proof of having gotten paid could just make a new account and post about it, I'm not able to mute this account and any downvotes would just get it more attention - which on web2 could easily be swept under the rug that's about to be pulled. You have a persona tied to the projects here, if you look at a more longstanding project like splinterlands, I could name 10 usernames I know have a lot of value parked there and are investing more over time and I know these are real people placing more skin in that game from their hard-earned hive or outside value. This, among the censorship free nature, gives things a lot more trust that you're not stepping on a minefield that's about to implode as soon as you make a sizeable investment or that the people running the projects aren't just going to bleed you dry over time by selling through other accounts secretly, etc, since everything can be traced. For instance, if you took a look at my account, I think the only time I sold zing was to place half of it in the liquidity pool, other than that I've just been buying for almost 2 years now in different ways (delegations, alpha vials, staking or direct swap.hive to zing swaps.
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Anyway, after having been in this space quite a long time, I thought I'd write down some things I don't see myself doing in the future to keep the project as fair and genuine as I can.
You won't see me
- pay users here to shill zing or the token, aside from them wanting to do so on their own or the 5% referral rewards they may get from your purchases
- pay outside users to shill zing, having similar leaked messages or lists pop up online of me having been involved in such activities would quickly destroy my reputation on hive
- print tokens out of thin air for promotions - this devalues investors, myself included, just to create a short term value going to people attempting to promote the project, most likely all sell pressure.
- balance distribution in a way that favors myself more than others, to give you an example here, LP rewards have been one of the most rewarding aspects of zing as of late, yet I'm not active in the pool personally and we have reduced staking rewards since last update (which means less staking rewards for a lot of my zing). I could easily make these changes but it'd be unfair to others and devalue those who are mainly interested in the token more than is needed. While we have been trying to make adjustements that'd get the project more funding, we've noticed there isn't much left to come in at this point in time, so we won't be making more changes in that regard until the project is further ahead.
- sell out the project/IP to other entities, this project is mine and I intend to keep it that way, sure we may do partnerships, collabs, etc with others but those would have to come with mutual benefits while staying true to the points above, i.e. not diluting investors by printing tokens out of thin air to give to partners. Everyone will have to invest like anyone else has or purchase tokens from the markets by other crowdfunders if they want skin in the game.
- give up on the project, some of you who may know me well may know that I dislike giving up on projects I start and run here, especially those I spend a lot of time developing as it feels like a major waste and disservice to hive itself. More than that, this is something I've been planning and looking for the best time to start for almost a decade now, sure things have gotten in the way or not ran as good as they could have, but taking things slower than planned doesn't mean we stop or give up, as long as it's in my power it won't be a project I give up. Even in the worst cases where no one else wants to play it, I plan on maintaining it at my own cost and seeing what the future holds for it.
- do shady things like getting people to FOMO into the token even if it has gone up a lot or try to convince them to buy the token rather than invest in/fund the project which helps pay for development - or on the other side of things, purposely try to get people to sell off tokens so I can buy them cheaper on secret accounts, etc. Use alt accounts to prop up the price of the token, corner some creatures/cards, hide information for selfish reasons, etc. I've tried to be as up front about things as I can and I've been posting quite a lot about things, potentially to a fault or where you may get tired hearing about it without any substance to show for it yet. Either way, point is you won't see me trying to do things that'd get my hive reputation in trouble, sure not everyone may like me or agree with some of my stances or actions on here, but that's kind of an impossible task.
I swear I had more points in the back of my head before I started writing this but it's kind of escaping me now, maybe I'll write them in a comment if I come up with them after a sleep.
If this project does well, I hope it means it'll bring a lot of value to hive. Oh, that's another point
- get paid to move the project off of hive for another chain. Sure we may list the token on other chains for interoperability but it'll always have its birth and native token on hive and I'd try my best to get people to use it here rather than outside with hopefully less fees and the potential to earn to be part of the community by being social here.
I also hope it'll do well for everyone else and those in between who are involved or invested in the project and have helped crowdfund it. I'm in a way considering all the hive I've spent on zing as "locking it up" for a long time, think 3-5 years, even then I kind of doubt I'd get rid of most of it. I may play around with some liquids here and there if movements call for it, but end-game is kind of my goal similar to my hive stake. The way I envison zing is that hopefully as many regular people as possible are involved rather than institutions, exchanges, being the ones controlling the price and getting the lion's share of fees and future distribution.
Either way, I'm kind of blanking on more things now.
This post may come off kind wrong depending on who's reading it, I'm not trying to build myself up as some kind of awesome ethical person and trying to get you to invest or buy into it based off of this post, please don't and take some time to think about it if it's in any way asking you to do a kneejerk reaction. I'm just voicing some things after the depressing stuff I keep seeing on other platforms of what keeps happening with what we call "web3" outside of hive, the shitstorm of memetoken casino's, rugpulls, shills, manipulation, overreactions, tribalism, etc. I'm kind of glad I barely have the time to follow on happenings outside of Hive whenever I dare to take a look there now and then.
Thanks for reading, stay safe out there.
Have you been following anyone from that list? 😂 Lucky me, there was no one on that list that I've been following, so I didn't have to block anyone. You can't trust anyone these days, and it's sad when you see people selling their integrity for $500.
I did look through it actually but nothing looked familiar. Heard many felt the same way.
Yeah, not disclosing you got paid for the post can end your career in this industry.
yeah as it should.
Honestly nothing surprises me on web2, shilling game for payment or merchandise is probably one of the cleanest thing there... I mean come on one of them asks 500-1000€ to play a round of a steam game together, an other got paid 4000€ to insult a plant... If they do that there is demand, people are not normal to go for this...
I bloody hated when in an other game a founder fomoed and then everyone got screwed, I'm glad not to see that here and yeah after all the time and the difficulties I'm sure you're not gonna resign now
Were you ever aware of the Koinos project that some of the old Steemit Inc devs worked on? It was a super cool project and they did a truly fair launch... which meant that the team has as much chance as anyone else of mining the initial tokens. Anyway, the project didn't go super far, and that was mainly because both exchanges and influencers were just not interested in looking at it at all unless they got paid ridiculous amounts. Fair projects essentially have no chance in this ecosystem.
Myeah, I mean influencers can still get paid in other forms of money, doesn't have to be the tokens you've ninja-mined so they can "double profit", both by getting them cheap and then dumping on their followers pumping them along with owners.
Koinos, it was thought to be fair, but a few entities were mining it early on with GPU miners which we were told couldn't be mined, until they admited that yes some had been mining with GPU but didn't update their mining software to allow everyone else to do the same. Also one hiver here used up a lot of a project's resources and funds to mine koinos with amazon servers, so myeah, not as fair as they made it out to be, but some things just get lost to history.
Also, eth fees at the time meant most regular users couldn't claim their mining rewards cause they'd have to pay like $20-200 fees in eth, lol.
Ahhhhhhh, you're right... I wasn't in it too deep and wasn't technical enough to understand everything going on at the time, but you're right, I do remember some chaos about all of that.
But yeah, my point was that influencers and exchanges just weren't interested in helping them out at all without those big payouts.
Sure, I don't think I'll be trying that route either way other than offering referral links that already exist and potentially some unique healer skins to some partners & their referrals, will post more about that later.
and yeah, I got a bit too deep into the koinos story, maybe I still hold a bit of a grudge that they didn't wanna continue working on hive once it was finally free, lol
just checked out the koinos chart, ouchies.
Yeah, I bought some Koinos around $0.17, and it went up to over a $1.50 I think... but now it's pretty worthless with no hope of recovery.
What an interesting story. I was also a little annoyed that they didn't develop on Hive. Hive seems to be ugly when they stop paying them, like they did Dtube, Dlike, Dlive, and all the D apps, haha, even Fundition. There are so many similar cases, with projects and even creators. That's why I always wonder, which dapps would fold if they lost funding?
That's a good question, I guess we're still in the early times and there's a lot of people building here not because of the uniqueness of the chain but because they can get funding here.
Would you consider traditional ad-revenue spend in a bit to get non hive users to come to hive for the game itself?
As in - advertise the game (in the same way that any game would be advertised traditionally) in order to get more users?
Or are you content with the user-base that hive brings?
I definitely wanna advertise it eventually when it is ready for normies and they play it without knowing that it's a game connected to the blockchain or crowdfunded through one. In the end it'll be something like the game letting them know that the items and creatures and other stuff like currencies they hold have real value if they wanna convert to a hive account, if not then continue playing, all is well. If they however wanna find out more then there'll be more to do and more potential with some sort of benefits if they bother.
The blockchain should always be invisible :) All about the game!
It all comes back to money. Back in the day people actually cared about the fundamentals, so it was easy to overlook tokens that didn't have their stuff together. Then people started making crazy money and all the use case and token distribution checking went out the window.
This is a sensitive topic. I don't see any harm in paying for advertising, but I appreciate transparency. If someone is paid to advertise a token, that's fine by me. I watch the ad knowing it's paid for. Personally, it doesn't bother me; one has to eat.
But disguising a paid ad as "organic commentary" is despicable. The worst part is that it works. Many fall for it, and often, it ends in scams, sullying the crypto world.
I don't know what I'm doing, but I look great doing it!The sad truth is that it's almost impossible to be "successful" in crypto without these practices. Otoh, not every project needs to have the ambition to go to hundreds of millions or billions, it's fine to have project tokens that don't make their holders rich af, but are just fun and offer users a good time.
It is nnoying that many people are just focused on making money instead of actually building real value in the ecosystem.
What makes something valuable is that it's hard earned. What's easy becomes worthless... For something to become popular, it needs to be widely used. Making a game both popular and valuable isn't easy. Holozing is a quality project... Airdrops for real players may be necessary initially to turn it into a popular game.
A very very good approach. We take the long view instead of chasing the quick wins. Overtime I'm hoping all brings good value to Hive and the broader community too
Hive is an awesome platform where the shilling of products or projects doesn't really need to be paid in my opinion because if the advertisement is done well and entertainingly, then it will pay for itself through upvotes from people.
Staying away from "pay to promote" is a strong move. This will keep the project’s growth organic. Even some don’t even bother to address these issues. I loved the commitment to Hive first. 😃 I really appreciate your transparency on this. 🌷
What is truly undeniable is your effort and contributions to the development of Hive above all else. Your game project, which is based on the Zing currency that you intend to launch, if it is destined to succeed, then it is an automatic success for Hive, as was the case with the Splinterlands game, which caused a huge shift in the Hive project and increased people’s knowledge of Hive through it, and this is what I believe will happen with your project.
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I trust you, brother, and I know you'll achieve something good with your project at Hive. We're here to support you.