Warning! Highly experimental media!
By Vasily Sumanov & Olga Grinina
Stay away, if you’re a #cryptodummy or an #ico and other shit like that. Scroll down to see what’s up, if you’re a creative digital nomad hungry for carefully selected content not afraid to speak you mind and cause inconvenience, because TechNomadNotes is inconvenience in its purest form.
Having worked several ‘happy’ years in blockchain industry, at some point we felt the poison crawling up our veins: the bespoke corrupt ICO industry that some of you — crypto enthusiasts, digital nomads and whatnot — might also had a chance to experience. Fake ICOs reaching fake hardcaps, scams that preach about building the next big thing at every next conference, corrupt media outlets ready to publish virtually anything and label it as ‘organic PR’ for a certain amount of BTC. CEOs and CMOs jumping on the bandwagon hoping to make quick doe, John McAffeys and pretty female ‘ambassadors’ who know little to nothing about the technology and economics. The space is poisoned by ‘ex-heads of investment’ from some second-hand Wall Street bank whose talk is real torture for the mind of any adequate person (we’re sure you’ve met a bunch of those too). All that crap is shaping up the reality that we’re all are living now, and this is not the reality Satoshi envisioned when writing the Bitcoin WP back in 2008.
Our main pain point is the scarcity of good content. News, shady press releases and paid ‘organic’ articles in top-tier outlets about ‘how this new amazing project is disrupting the industry are migrating from one media to another. Finding a piece of quality becomes real challenge, even everybody’s darling Medium is flooded with generic copycats, so shut out to guys of Tokeneconomy, Tokendaily and Consensys for keeping it real.
So, we thought we needed a place for all of you guys — a growing squad of creatives and digital wanderers driven by the gig economy — to have a chance to connect and educate and came up with technomads.wtf (because we yet don’t know exactly what the fuck technomads is). One thing for sure, we want this space to become a growing squad of like-minded atypical creatives. We figured that we needed a new experimental approach to create a new source of content for mindful people like us. Like, we’ve traveled 3 countries over the last week, and gotta say it feels kinda mad. But a true revelation was meeting a bunch of like-minded people at Berlin Blockchain Week last night. I mean what’s it truly like living out of your suitcase? A dream came true, or a never-ending succession of hotel check-ins? Is this becoming a new normal, or people like us are the mad ones who will never confine themselves to one home and office life? One thing for sure: all of those creative believers and practitioners do not fully realize how the hell they ended up living this life. Engineers, developers, designers — all coming from drastically different backgrounds (some of them are coders by day and djs by night) are all in fact at the front of gig economy and post-industrial transition.
First blood
No, you got it all wrong. We are not just another Telegram/Medium/Media outlet. We’re not a social network either — because we also hate endless newsfeeds of meaningless information. We are actually a hybrid new form of self-driving community and user engagement to produce, distribute and consume the content. Unlike Netflix, we value quality over quantity: we want the content to be rather low volume, yet purposeful and coordinated within the community.
Okay, so here are some of our fundamentals. There’s no playbook, because today’s decentralized community is open-source and experimental by nature. So, our media/social network/whatever you call it is work in progress and fun.
1. Crystal clear blue water for content. No more ads and shady PRs.
2. Internal incentives design (motivation system)
Contribution of strong content is always awarded. Strong content cannot be produced within one global framework such as Medium or Steemit anymore. Instead we suggest posting to Technomadnotes with links to the original source by motivating you to find, select and distribute content inside the system.
Reading, understanding, and smart commenting thus educating others is always awarded as well.
3. Editors, reviewers, designers and all other contributors to Technomadnotes are to be selected and controlled by the community as well as by algorithm of penalty system set up as the part of token economy.
4. We’re gonna introduce the token and incentives too.
Naturally, since we got a token engineer on our team passionate about incentives and stuff, we’re gonna introduce tokens, badges and other achievement motivations to figure out what works better in terms of community motivation. Tokens are not to be used for investment purposes, because we’re sick of it. They would be distributed as freebies to the wallets of supporters, readers and contributors to #technomadnotes from the shared rewards pool.
Yes, you heard us right: we’ll have a token. Or maybe not — we’re still testing the waters.
The recap: our ambition is to build a self-driving system that can generate and retain good content at the same time engaging strong and intellectual community. Remember, there is no place for dummies. Not into crypto or economics? No prob. There is also place for art, music, health and biohacking, cool events like Berlin Blockchain Week, and — get excited — you can offer the coverage too! Naturally, the ultimate goal of every media — whether decentralized or not — is influence the minds, and #technomadnotes is no exception. However, in our case this control is to be exercised by virtue of the community not the board of directors with popularity becoming a collective effort result.
We are big enthusiasts of staking approach to token design. Our grounding is as follows: those tokens when logically applied to the system are working as incentives/penalties, at the same time being the source of cash flow for the network owner person, provided that the owner throws in enough tasks to the network. Another pro is that basically you don’t need to make a token transfer on frequent basis (as they can be staked in contract for a period), so it reduces a transaction cost and the load on the blockchain network. We don’t have the final token model with crafted checked out against stress tests details at this moment. Nevertheless, basic principles are quite simple:
1. Activities mentioned in previous section — contributing/producing/reviewing/ editing and writing are to be awarded in crypto, not by tokens. Tokens are used for staking to obtain the right to contribute with their main function being staking to limit access to those activities, at the same time penalizing bad actors for Sybil attacks: in case of the attack tokens are burnt.
2. The reputation level of the contributor inside the system is also recorded to distributed ledger as ‘common achievement’. It can be marked as ERC721 token, providing personalization. This is social motivation in gamification system. Such awards are designed as rewards for reading, understanding, smart commenting and helping others to understand the topic.
‘If you’re non-profit, where would you guys get the money to award your community of contributors?
Not out of the air or a money printing machine of course. Technomadnotes logics is this: good content leads to strong intellectual community, strong intellectual community creates new pieces of good content and ever-growing community — and all that repeats in cycles. And as we all know, community is the king in postindustrial economy. It is also easy to predict that strong community around TechNomadNotes would soon become a sweet target for innovative protocols/companies/events. But guess what: instead of selling press releases and paid articles aimed to guide the community in a shady manner, we are introducing a liquidity pool. Liquidity pool is a contract that collects all donations and thereafter transfers them to wallets of project contributors according to their activity on trustless basis of automatic execution. If anyone wishes to support our project in future (yet, we wanna make it clear that now we are not attracting any investments, only support to compensate for our operational costs), they also can send some ETH to the smart contract.
Die hard
This one is about creating meaningful and cool over the course of one’s life. If you like our idea and project, you are welcome. Come play this game of digital reputation with us where the weapon of truth is fighting the bias and corruption.
No bullshit, real talk
Our ambition is to build a self-driving system that can generate and retain good content at the same time engaging and educating strong intellectual community:
Carefully selected filtered content build by collective creative effort
Educational and non-profit since once an investor comes in he gains control over the media — that’s where all those ads and corrupt articles are coming from
All the nitty-gritty detail of token economy, operational principles, design and other cool stuff is under development now.
