Goodbye Belowsearcher; hello Undersearcher
Over the past year, I’ve used this Belowsearcher alias to Twitter and blog about cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin and Cardano. On January 22nd, 2019, sending someone a Twitter DM with the draft link to my latest article on Cardano seems to have triggered a filtering algorithm, which got my account suspended. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get it back since. On January 31st, 2019, I was named a ‘Content Creator Ambassador’ by the Cardano Foundation, which caused commotion under some community members felt uncomfortable with an anonymous account being labelled an ambassador. This, combined with the fact that Hackernoon is leaving Medium and some anticipated upcoming demands in my private and professional life forced me to reconsider if, what, how and where I want to continue contributing to the cryptocurrencies space. In this article, I explain some changes in my alias, Medium blog and community participation.
A new alias
My previous alias, ‘Belowsearcher’, is an intentionally bad translation of the Dutch word ‘onderzoeker’, which means ‘researcher’ in English. Due to the association between science and curiosity, I found the picture of a cartoon monkey called ‘Curious George’ and his binoculars quite fitting.
About one week and three rejected appeals after my Twitter suspension, I decided to create a new account called ‘Undersearcher’ — a slightly different word play with the same underlying meaning. Although I had gotten attached to Curious George, I figured I would also need to use a new profile picture. George was quite affected by the news that he had to go, but eventually sacrificed his spot for a different monkey, this time with a magnifying glass.
A more tentative approach to Twitter
Unfortunately, the new Undersearcher account got locked before I was even able to complete the profile, despite using a different e-mail address. Apparently Twitter recognized some of the description in the bio and/or my IP address. I filled in my telephone number to unlock it, shortly after which it got locked again, but I was able to unlock it by clicking on a reCAPTCHA box to confirm I am in fact human. Since then, the account seems to be OK. I decided to use the account as I normally would, and after a week of testing my faith that it will remain unlocked has grown to a level that I’m comfortable using it.
However, the fact that Twitter immediately locked my Undersearcher account means it is apparently already on their filtering algorithms’ radar. Since I don’t know what got my Belowsearcher account suspended in the first place or what the ‘repeated violations’ they mentioned are, I am not sure what exactly I can do about it myself. Although I want to be able to voice my opinion, maybe I can do it in a way that is less likely for Twitter’s algorithms to flag it?
Listening to Jack Dorsey’s (Twitter’s founder) interview on the Joe Rogan podcast today gave some insight into this. Jack mentioned that their bots look at behaviors like retweeting, quote tweeting and mentioning in their aims to filter out things like spam and harassment. Although I’m quite convinced I never did either, maybe a retweet, like or mention in the wrong conversation might have contributed to the accumulated ‘violations’?
Although I have no evidence it will make a difference, I’ll try to just stay away from conflicts with my new Undersearcher Twitter handle and think twice before I like or retweet something, particularly messages with a negative tone. I hope that will be enough to keep my Twitter account live and kicking. If I do ever change my Twitter handle again, I’ll make sure to update the Twitter link on my Medium profile.
The Medium Partner Program
As mentioned in the introduction, Hackernoon, the tech blog that I posted most of my stories on over the past few months, is leaving Medium soon. It is possible I will start using their new platform once it’s live, but for now I decided to stay on Medium.
Filling the gap on how to reach (new) readers was one of the reasons for me to join the Medium Partner Program. Articles that participate in this program are still freely available (e.g., when no account is signed in, they’re fully available), but once the signed in account holder has read a certain number of such articles, a message is shown that the account holder needs to sign up to a Medium Membership ($5/month or $50/year). Since this is Medium’s primary revenue stream, it is more likely that articles participating in this program are featured on their own channels and distributed through the homepage, in topics and their mailing lists. For instance, my latest article on Cardano was the first article that I submitted for the program, and it immediately became featured in the cryptocurrencies topic.
Another benefit is that when people with a Medium Membership clap for a participating article, a portion of their fees are divided over the authors of the articles that they clapped for. This means authors are (indirectly) rewarded by the readers themselves for writing quality content that is being appreciated.
Are rewards a bad thing?
Besides considering to join the Medium Partner Program to fill the gap that Hackernoon will leave behind, being named a Content Creator Ambassador by the Cardano Foundation forced me to consider if I would be willing to accept rewards for my content. Cardano Ambassadors are active community members that “go above and beyond what a normal community member might do, by offering regular, consistent, and positive contributions to the project”. Currently, being listed on the website and a tag on your profile on the forum are the only benefits to being a Cardano Ambassador, but offering rewards to incentivize community building and ecosystem growth are being considered.
All humans are biased — myself included. Even if you think you’re aware of your biases, there are other biases present that you are not aware of. For me personally, the alarm bells therefore particularly go off when someone says he/she is unbiased. Knowing this, it is important that as a reader, you always make up your own mind. I take pride in presenting factually correct information with links to resources, but don’t take me (or any other writer in this field) on my word and make sure you always verify the primary source of information if there’s something on the line. The crypto-memes “DYOR” (Do Your Own Research) and “don’t trust, verify!” (suggesting people run their own full node in order to verify the blockchain) actually apply well here.
My motivation for writing these articles is threefold:
- Learning: Articulating your thoughts and findings can help to identify gaps in your own knowledge and help restructure your learning process.
- Verifying: Sharing the results of your learning process in public helps you to verify if they are correct, as people will tell you when they’re not.
- Teaching: Sharing newly gained knowledge in a less complex form creates a learning pyramid that helps others in their journey as well.
I value being independent and free to voice (constructive) criticism highly. After careful consideration, I realized that being labelled a Content Creator Ambassador by the Cardano Foundation will not limit this. In the contrary; Cardano actually embraces constructive criticism, as it is built off of it via the academic peer-review process. I am also not dependent on any of the revenue the articles would bring, as I have a full-time career ‘on the side’ and do not aspire a professional career in the cryptocurrencies space. My content will be publicly available here on Medium and people are free to reward me through claps or via the tip jar on the bottom of the page — or not.
Focusing on Medium and Twitter
Over the past months, I’ve tried to stay up to date with all Cardano’s most used channels, such as its official forum, Reddit and Telegram. During this whole reflection, I also reconsidered to what extent I want to continue participating in all these communities, as it is quite time consuming, and I am quite busy in my private and professional life too these days. At some point, I realized a couple of things regarding my social media usage:
- I spend a lot of time reading the same things.
- I spend a lot of time filtering information.
- My contributions through articles are probably more unique and efficient when it comes to added value than my contributions through fora.
Realizing this, I felt it is best to significantly cut back in my time spent on the fora mentioned above. A motto that I keep referring to in life is “quality over quantity”, which I hope to apply by focusing on Medium and Twitter for now.
