Time to Build New Set Communities for NBA Top Shot
As we cycle through another bottom, it’s nice to stop and take stock of how far we’ve come as a community since those dog days of Summer 2021 at the end of July when Top Shot FUD was all we could hear and some of us decided to step outside of our shells.
I have told the Hustlin Showroom origin story too many times to count so if you need a recap, check out DadMoves’ article from the old Packrip Media Blog.
Now is the opportunity for the next wave of Top Shot, All Day, Strike, and Flow community members to step up and build. Whether it is a new Twitter account or a new Discord server, building a set community in the Web3 space is incredibly fun and extremely rewarding (a likely idea for my next blog).
If you are interested in the reason why you should build a set community and what makes the Showroom the perfect model and support system, keep reading.
The reason the Showroom continues (besides its incredible team of mods and admins) to thrive is what I am interested in discussing with readers today. I am an urban planner by trade, obsessed with the ingredients for innovation and economic/community development. It’s been my job to explore why and how communities succeed. This interest is what drew me into the Web3 space, as I thought it had the ability to unlock the potential of so many different types of communities through the agglomeration of talent and passion.
As a sports fanatic I believe Dapper Labs has found success creating a mass onboarding platform for NFTs because they tapped into the best kind of community in the world: sports communities.
Sports communities are the best because they are based on shared values that its communities weren’t given but had to earn. We all have our opinions on how games should be played or managed, but at the end of the day, the ability to have a dialogue on what values make athletes, teams, and organizations great demonstrates how much we have in common.
I have found this simple phenomenon has the power to make a major impact, as sports have the capacity to not only be a tremendous networking tool, but also incredibly useful in breaking down cultural divides that are incessantly reinforced throughout society today.
We’ve all had that experience of talking with an acquaintance who we know we do not see eye-to-eye with on some important issue. But through a common understanding of a sport, we can see what values this person possesses in order to build trust.
Even though sports communities are some of the best communities in the world they are incredibly underutilized and inefficient. There are so many barriers for fans today when we consider their inability to connect with even a few other fans; whether it is away games, the offseason, increased ticket/booze/parking prices, the suburban sprawl that removes the option of walking to a local bar for a game, keeping up with rising housing prices with more work and responsibilities, the quality of watching a game at home, the ongoing pandemic, and countless other complications.
Web2 exemplified the power of these communities. Fantasy football has been incredible boon for the NFL that has turned so many of us into fans of the NFL and specific players instead of just our one hometown team.
The fantasy community is an exciting place to connect but it is also disparate. It is spread out in the sense that one can interact on Twitter with known experts to receive advice on building lineups (shoutout @rotopat @podfather @numberfire @4for4john) and then hurry back to their small, gated league to take advantage of intel. I personally interact with the community, but I don’t have enough skin in that game to do more.
Web3 not only has the potential to build connections regardless of these barriers, but it also provides community members the incentives and the means to build in collaboration with other members including the experts.
Gathering like-minded, passionate, ambitious, and talented people in a space is also known as economies of agglomeration (think tech incubator) and it’s what the great cities throughout time have done to create innovative and successful ecosystems. However, the agglomeration effect in cities face so many barriers nowadays such as rising real estate costs, NIMBYs, the cost of migration, failing infrastructure, etc., that Web3 communities do not need to worry about.
All of this is an astute observation, and the Hustlin’ Showroom has been a revelation. But so what?
Well, the Showroom is full of Hustlas who have seen what it means to be a part of a community culture that leverages members’ talents and passion to build a supportive and fun space to make its members better. These Hustlas, whether they know it or not, have the skills and understanding to build their own set communities that will appeal to all different types of collectors and provide all sorts of community utility.
One of the reasons we have seen declining account values over the past few weeks is that there are so many new projects and new Top Shot sets worth joining. Now it is time to give these sets and projects community utility so that they can leverage themselves for more because just like @BigN8ive says, “Community=Utility.”
The Showroom will support a network of NBA Top Shot, NFL All Day, UFC Strike, and Flow NFTs set communities and their Discords as they are created. We have been incubating a few Top Shot set communities in our Discord including the Gift, Archive, Game Recognize Game, Fresh Threads and are ready to support Hustlas as they build in a way that supports their community.
This is a call to ACTION if you would like to start a set community whether it takes the form of a new Twitter account, a Discord Server, or even a Channel in the Showroom; please reach out to @hustlinshowroom or @mintjuicestl on Twitter or join the Discord and we will build with you.
