A long blog for pages in Web3 Dev Reports - No.1
TL;DR: Web3 is currently facing a significant structural issue within its community. Compared to a healthy, well-structured community, the Web3 community is distorted, and heavily controlled by profit-seekers at the top, leading to a lack of essential members such as content consumers and influential leaders. This imbalance creates a narrow, repetitive narrative focused on profit, which limits the community's growth and innovation.
If we consider Web3 as a culture, it fundamentally shares similarities with other cultural communities worldwide. Traditional cultural communities, such as those centered around language, ideology, or interests, often begin with a group of individuals discovering shared interests. In this discussion, we compare the structure of a healthy community with that of the Web3 community, highlighting the latter’s flaws and deficiencies.
A Healthy Community Structure vs Web3 Community Structure
To understand the development of a healthy community structure, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs provides a useful framework. At the base of the hierarchy are physiological needs and safety needs, which in a community context translate to the basic need for belonging and security within the group. This corresponds to the general audience in a community, where individuals initially come together, finding like-minded peers and forming connections that satisfy these basic needs.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
As individuals establish themselves within the community, their social needs are met. This stage aligns with consumers who actively engage with and support the work of culture creators. Through their engagement, they gain a sense of belonging and start forming social bonds within the community.
Further up, esteem needs are addressed as some members become KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and influencers. These individuals gain recognition and respect through their contributions and influence within the community. They play a crucial role in shaping the community's culture and narrative, driving further engagement and loyalty.
As creators or KOLs producing content and activating the community. Other users gather around these people, consuming their content and establishing their positions within the community. This process of confirming content preferences and forming social bonds strengthens the ties within the cultural group, transforming it from a loose collection of enthusiasts into a structured, organized social group.
At the top of the hierarchy is self-actualization. This stage is represented by the most capable creators and KOLs who stand out and delegate their creative ideas to others in the community and profit from it. These profit-seekers not only achieve personal fulfillment through their creative and entrepreneurial endeavors but also drive the economic engine of the community. This natural evolution solidifies the cultural group's structure into a pyramid shape from bottom to top.
Once the community becomes mature, the few top players could use their abundant resources to drive innovation and shape the narrative. As information and benefits flow from the top down, their ideas are then transformed into prototypes by content creators and tested by the community guided under KOLs, iterating until a widely accepted product aligns with the top players' vision. This new product is then distributed by the community, ideally gaining organic, widespread adoption, attracting more new general public, and reinforcing the pyramid structure from top to bottom.
In contrast, the current Web3 community structure is more distorted. In Web3, the top layer—profit-seekers—formed first. Their attention is currently dominated by a focus on quick profits and speculation, with less emphasis on creating sustainable narratives or roles for other community members. Consequently, the maximizing profit-only narrative from the top leads to a single-minded focus on how to make quick, easy money for the entire community. This narrative trickles down to KOLs and influencers, and then to content consumers, who can extract little beyond profit-driven messages, resulting in a homogenized, repetitive community dialogue.
This profit-driven focus significantly stifles innovation and diversity within the Web3 community. Innovative ideas and diverse perspectives often come from various community members, including those who are not primarily motivated by profit. However, when the overarching narrative centers solely on financial gain, people holding new ideas would feel pressured to conform to the dominant profit-focused trends, fearing that their innovative but non-lucrative ideas might not gain traction or support. This homogeneity can result in an echo chamber effect, where only certain types of projects and innovations are pursued, while potentially groundbreaking ideas that don't align with the profit-centric narrative are ignored or undervalued.
As a result, as this narrative spills beyond the community, it attracts only a small group of the general public—those with high-risk tolerance and a strong desire for profit, often without stable or alternative means of livelihood. It's essential to note that while generating economic value is widely accepted, individuals' methods, costs, and risk preferences vary significantly.