Restructuring Discord into positive-sum

Goals

To create a positive collaborative environment, we need to build a Discord onboarding flow that encourages people to have skin in the game in order to meaningfully participate in the creative process.

The aim is to remove the bystander effect and to establish a community where everyone is literally invested in the community’s success.

This means that most channels except for a few (welcome channels, verification, help/bugs) will be locked down. Those that have a role that was either earned through past contributions or purchased as a NFT will be able to unlock all the other channels where the real activity happens.

Roles

It helps for new and old members to self-identify their specialties, especially when they first join. It’s like choosing a class in an MMO. The most popular bot for reaction based role selection is Carl-bot, here are some examples from Metacartel and Raid Guild:

Here’s what the interface looks like for setting it up:

I think its a good idea for the roles to not deviate too much from whats been established across several major DAO discords, came up with a starting base:

Welcome to the Webaverse Discord server. Please select as many roles which describe you.

:art: Artist
Painters, modelers, musicians, memers, videomakers, etc

:tools: Builder
Can speak with computers to make them do things

:triangular_ruler: Designer
Imagineers of how we interface with machines (UI/UX)

:writing_hand: Writer
From scribing notes to writing stories, specs, and guides

:bridge_at_night: Bridge Builder
People who bridge communities and help create more powerful networks

:mega: Shiller
Those that communicate the memes of Webaverse to a wider audience

Collab.land

This is the most popular one for unlocking roles with fungible and non-fungible tokens. Usually Discords will create a separate channel with the topic as: Type !join to verify your $<coin> token holdings and get access to the full community chat.

When users type !join in the channel, the bot will DM them a link which opens up a website that asks you to connect your wallet in order to verify the tokens you own that it will assign roles for. There are tiers, so if you have enough tokens (erc20, 721, 1155) you will unlock multiple roles in 1 swoop.

As soon as you invite the bot to the server the bot creates a private channel for admins to setup. This is how it looks like for a server admin to configure various roles based on tokens:

The downside here is that users will be expected to have a crypto wallet installed, such as Metamask, and to of purchased / receive the tokens. This leads us to the NFT Discord bot…

NFT Bot

The NFT bot removes the friction of needing to install a wallet in order to use crypto. There is also an unlock command similar to collab.land that has a few open issues left to make it practical to use:

• https://github.com/webaverse/app/issues/1214
• https://github.com/webaverse/app/issues/170
• https://github.com/webaverse/app/issues/1037
  • It currently has hard coded start/end ids: https://github.com/webaverse/ethereum-bot/blob/300fe0e3d8519984573a0652ef0f3fb6d4dfba79/discordbot.js#L576
  • Need to make it user settable

There are some tradeoffs involved with just using the Discord bot, mainly that the sidechain network doesn’t have value streaming through it - that is mostly on mainnet and polygon.

The upside has several benefits:

Earning NFTs for unlockable roles: when somebody is contributing we can measure that XP (through sourcecred, already setup) which can be converted to SILK which can be used to purchase sidechain NFTs from the server store. We can also reward NFTs through other off-chain contributions, like creator program / GH sponsors / etc.

Metafactory distributes $ROBOT when people purchase things from a store by asking for the person’s ETH address during checkout. We could do something similarly by using Discord ids.

Rewarding people with SILK which can be used to purchase NFTs that unlock Discord roles seems like a fun way to onboard contributors into the community. I think for now collab.land can be used since the NFT and the results wouldn’t change at all even if we had mainnet/polygon token unlock for the NFT bot.

Design

There are currently a couple NFTs we designed for the first batch. The idea was that these keycards could not only be used to unlock roles in Discord but also places (https://github.com/webaverse/app/issues/803) inside a virtual world (or the app itself, keycard access for alpha testers). There is already a perfectly looping gif / webm for these designs.

The branding and marketing strategy is to be decided. I can produce a high quality video / blog post / tweet storm to explain the value one gets with having one of these NFTs.

[GaladWarder]

IMO “what we do” is more powerful that “what we want”.

Absolutely true; this was typed up stream-of-consciousness; intended as an example more than a literal proposal for an elevator pitch.

In general, the more active the verb the better - so yes; ‘what we do’ is definitely preferable. That verbage could easily be adapted while keeping the aversion to buzzwords, though.

[avaer]

As for tiering my plan was much earlier involvement of community in the creative process.

Once the foundations are laid there are many ways to immediately contribute and be rewarded for it, that align with the bigger goals.

For example, model bounties, narrative drops, dev meets can already happen. I’m in favor of a lightweight approach where a lot of things are tried, especially on the creative side, rather than just selling access.

The cases where we are selling access should look a lot like patreon, that is step 1 is to make dank content (not just a key card but something like a fleshed out character) and step 2 is to sell it, which we then turn to deeper and continuing contribution loops.