Ethereum Social Governance Shouldn’t be Left to the Birds
Twitter today is one of the primary places where Ethereum Social Governance takes place . Don’t think ProgPOW should be implemented? Tweet about it. Want to rally the troops to fund EIP-1559 on GitCoin? Tweet about it. Want to show you are the most influential Core Developer? Point to your Twitter following.
Yet Twitter was never created to serve such an important process as Ethereum Social Governance. In fact, the platform dramatically hinders our community’s ability to come to an effective consensus.
Purely from a features stand point, there are many problems with Twitter. First off, Twitter ineffectively gauges what the community thinks about the various issues the Ethereum community faces.
Even if someone tweets a poll in an attempt to gauge the community’s sentiment on a specific issue, that poll is not shared throughout the entire community and by the end of the day is usually buried far down in the depths of people’s feed. Participation in these polls are stifled based on Twitter’s timeline, and furthermore, decision makers can’t be expected to spend their time scrolling through historical tweets in order to figure out what the community wants!
Secondly, Twitter gives those with the most followers greater reach in pushing their message. Follower count is not a merit-based metric by any means. Just because one has the most followers doesn’t mean what they have to say is meaningful.
In fact, follower count can be inversely related to quality of content. Usually, someone gains a lot of followers because they are entertaining or generate outrage, which leads me to my next major point.
Twitter’s entire social platform is meant to generate outrage. Why do you think scrolling through Twitter can be so exhausting, as you see people left and right constantly virtually screaming at one another?
Outrage yields views, views yield ad spend, and ad spend yields revenue. As has been said many times before, Twitter is not serving us as users, they are serving our data to advertisers on a platter. Outrage is the worst emotion to optimize for when dealing with such an important issue as Social Governance.
What is worse is that Twitter doesn’t even like the Ethereum Community. Since the Twitter hacking fiasco, prominent Ethereum projects such as myetherwallet still have not gotten their account back. Respected community leaders such as Nick Johnson still have their accounts suspended for no reason, as have important information sources such as Week in Eth News.
And where is our fricking Ethereum emoji?!
Twitter should not be the main place where Ethereum Social Governance occurs. Ethereum Social Governance needs to be on a platform that is specifically built for the sole purpose of Ethereum Social Governance; it is too important to relegate to such a destructive platform as Twitter.
We at The Ether (www.theether.io) are building a Social Governance Experience for the Ethereum Community that far better upholds our commonly held values.
Join us today!
