A brief history of FWB development: minimalist principles, progressive decentralization
Original title: "FWB Archaeology: Minimalist Principles, Progressive Decentralization"
Original author: zzao33.eth
This is the first article of the "FWB Encyclopedia Series", a brief history of development. It will reveal the ins and outs of this largest social DAO from the perspectives of origin, development stage, and reflection. For the other two articles, please refer to the following link:
FWB member experience: events, benefits, resources, contributions
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FWB brand philosophy: use vibe to unify products, media and Business Value
If you have been in Web3 for a while, Friends with Benefits ( FWB ) should be familiar, September 2021, a16z, etc. Investing in FWB at a valuation of US$100 million, this crypto culture club is still a star in the web3 community. When we talk about creative workers, virtual and real social networking, Generation Z, and digital cities, it is unlikely that we will bypass this OG.
If this is the first time you have heard of this mysterious organization called "Friends with Benefits": FWB is a social club that adopts a strict review system and must be approved And hold Token to join. "It is full of artists, thinkers and creators who lead the transformation of Web3. In the eye of encryption and cultural collision, use web3 tools to build communities and cultivate culture and creativity, and explore the next version of the world."
Because of the application and Token threshold, FWB is always a little mysterious, and it is unavoidable to suspect: elite? high? false name? Coupled with the already confusing web3 filter, the public can't understand it even more.
It’s all said to be amazing, where is it? (It’s just the name, okay?) (Don’t talk to me about vibe)
Seeing is believing, this series strives to fully present the past, present, and future of FWB, including Almost all FWB-related links as of May 17, 2022 are convenient for on-demand jumping and detailed reading. I hope it will be of reference value to all kinds of people.
Statement: Some of the materials in this article are compiled from information and interviews published by Friends with Benefits in public and semi-public media, and do not involve internal confidentiality or member privacy , The comment part is a personal subjective opinion and does not represent an official position.
From BrandGuidelines
FWB is considered the first Social DAO, the first groundbreaking Land uses collab.land in discord, introduces the Season quarter system in governance for the first time, the first offline Token access control system, first appeared in the New York Times under the name of vibe, the first decentralized social identity system, It has shaped people's initial imagination of cultural DAOs to a great extent, and is the real creation player.
Origin
FWB started with one person, Trevor McFedries.
Born in 1985, the California guy is young and promising. Started to be a DJ at the age of 19, then signed a company to release an album, entered the top ten of Billboard, was awarded the "Best DJ of the People's Choice Award" by Paper Magazine, performed at Lollapalooza and Coachella music festivals, and shared the stage with Chris Brown, Kesha, Katy Perry, etc. .
Those were the first few years when the internet was eating up the music industry. Trevor was a programmer before that, and at 22 he was already in and out of executive offices discussing the future of the industry. In 2010, Trevor became an early employee of Spotify, serving as an important media-technology link. Since then, he has done various cross-integration experiments and used software thinking to operate artists.
In addition to music, Trevor is also engaged in technology entrepreneurship. He was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bad Robot and founded Brud and serves as CEO (has been targeted by Dapper Labs acquisition). Brud is a "cross-media company" that "creates media shared by the community and collectively builds the world". It aims to create virtual characters in story-driven digital media and has produced a phenomenal ins virtual model Lil Miquela.
MiquelaWith 3 million followers on Instagram, NFT will be issued on SuperRare in 2020, showing In the Mirror Official Guide.
Trevor always stands at the intersection of creative media and digital technology , and has for many years With experience in community building, he has always been good at doing social model experiments with interdisciplinary thinking. In 2021, when he chatted with his old friend Jesse Walden, he talked about the current "Forever 21 economy"-creative workers have to to a fair return, while spam content piles up like a mountain on platforms that copy each other.
They put forward a hypothesis about the "creator economy":
Now everyone is scrambling to publish paid content in fixed pools such as Substacks, OnlyFans and Patreons. Is there a better solution to make the entire value return path the shortest? Co-build a value-added space in a collectivist way? After all, the real value of a social network comes from the content people create on it. What if the people who really create value also own the entire system?
- via Consensys interview< /p>
Having entered the encryption world in 2013, he is keenly aware that the technology of connecting dots into lines has appeared, and jointly owns social Groups may be able to essentially complete the integration of income generation.
In September 2020, he issued Token $FWB on Roll, used collab.land to verify the wallet, created a FWB discord server, and set out to answer this question.
Read FWB's community Manifesto: Where our favorite tech and cultural communities meet.
From FWB official website
Isn't this just Trevor's own genes? Many people often avoid the "founder" when talking about DAO, but DAO is not an ideology, and the mission is by no means created out of nothing. It is good to say a few more words.
Development
It started as a small social experiment, easy to start: Trevor sent some Token recruits powerful friends from all walks of life, researches production and copyright with musicians, invites collab.land engineers to upgrade plug-ins, invites industry leaders to teach investment, and distributes remuneration through SourceCred.
Many friends are using encrypted wallets for the first time, but in a comfortable and trustworthy environment, everyone is very enthusiastic about how to assign value. From the initial active trading teaching and music production, a hundred or eighty interest groups have sprung up, and word of mouth has swept the world. Quickly jumped to become a business star. In February 2021, FWB's fully diluted valuation is about 140 million US dollars, and the membership threshold is as high as 10,000 US dollars.
Things were not all smooth sailing, on March 14, 2021, the Roll platform was attacked by hacker attack, social tokens including FWB suffered heavy losses, Token price plummeted 98 in one day %.
On March 18, FWB launched 1 million new Token $FWB pro replaces FWB classic and reorganizes the treasury. The price of Token has dropped, but the vitality has not been lost. There are already more than 3,000 people on the waiting list. At the start of the second season, the core team announced the start of an application system, and all channels can only be unlocked if the committee approves it.
This is the beginning of divisional division - yes, the governance structure was not planned at first, but as the community Needs evolve naturally. The following is Alex Zhang's preliminary explanation on the emergence and evolution of DAO in the third season :
· FWB was created by a hard-core agitator who had a vision and started inviting close friends to Discord.
· As friends bring more friends, certain contributors start to step up and take leadership roles to facilitate the build.
· These contributors become the first tier of employees, incentivized by responsibility, status, and token grants.
· The group gradually transitioned to a DAO to manage the community treasury.
From left to right: Season2, Season3, Season5, now
The picture shows the team structure in each period, from the initial chaos to the current fine division of labor, how is it What happened gradually? Let's take a quarter as a unit to see the governance focus and highlight moments of each stage.
S2: Slow New Friends slow expansion
Community priority, existing Priority is given to member experience and intrinsic value. Open Strict membership application review.
1. There are two committees in this quarter: the host committee responsible for membership matters, and the governance committee specializing in community governance.
2. Treasury diversification (Treasury Diversification)
Received $700k investment, exchanged $70,000 FWB for funds from Divergence, Variant, Collab+Currency, Nascent, Polychain, The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures and Galaxy $700,000 donation to Interactive.
Swap $7900 FWB for $4380 WHALE - Further coordinate the two leading social token communities in an effort to develop the industry and support positive-sum games.
3. Call funds and hire industry experts in the community to build.
4. Focus on developing a decentralized curation platformFWB Gallery, covering planning, incubation, and profitable NFT galleries.
5. Start the Member Directory project (later the Member Directory Bio).
6. At BTC Miami held its first official offline IRL meetup!
S3: Creative Cooperation
Going offline, focusing on products, Form a digital city.
The initial plan for this season is to divide into four teams: Membership, Product, Media Editorial, Treasury, the actual results To be more precise, the community contribution rate has increased by 7 times:
From Mirror on September 30, 2021
1. Landed a batch of community products: for online Verify the encrypted wallet access control system Gatekeeper, community dynamic real-time Kanban FWB pulse, gallery FWB Gallery, its own media editing platform WIP (Works In Progress).
2. Hold the first Hackathon
3. Accepted three well-known media interviews: RA, Consensys, Defiant.
4. In Paris and New York with ETHCC, Art Basel hosts official party, GateKeeper is here.
S4: Locally Grown roots
Deeply offline, lowering the threshold, Established SubDAO
1.a16z led several institutions to invest 10 million US dollars, "Fundraising in a Community-First World", voted in
3. Differentiate city SubDAO: New York, London, Los Angeles. Carry out local activities and layout according to the city in a relatively independent way, have a local city hall, the first batch of digital city-states
4. Openscholarship project, allocated $18,000 worth of FWB Token , distributed to Creatives, check out the progress here.
5.FWB NFT DAO project was established, and 250,000 USDC was allocated for the construction of NFT DAO. The goal is to operate relatively independently from FWB DAO in half a year to one year, with its own Token and incentive mechanism.
Season5: Social Spaces full set of social spaces
Focus on products and increase city pilots , first business experience
This layout is ideal in the industry, right?
1. Event Key and progressive decentralization of the "top vibe manual": In addition to the three SubDAOs, members in various cities are also eager to move, but in order to avoid empty and deviant activities , to issue 10 urban event pilot Event Keys, provide guidance (with a large set of SOP-like documents) and financial support, with the purpose of exploring more robust ways of urban expansion without destroying core values.
2. Legendary member rosterFWB Bio, finally completed the beta version this season, and is currently in internal testing. This is the first decentralized identity system case in the field of web3 culture.
3. Launch your own fashion brand peripherals, negotiated business cooperation with Hennessy and Reebok, and plans to "buy" the well-known Chinese restaurant Hop Louie (still under discussion).
Season6: Collective Growth
Member maintenance,
1. The Community Governance Conference 2.0 was held in April, and the voting mechanism was discussed (not easy to share)
2.< a href="https://snapshot.org/#/friendswithbenefits.eth/proposal/0xbec91990ee10e9ce937a11cb634b7f89d82e46b7dc894d71565e9b08a7c2bf98" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Disc Ord cleaning, further open the workflow, increase the guidance of newcomers positions, reducing the difficulty of participating in contributions in an all-round way. (Pro-test! Special! Don’t! Good! Understand!)
3. Open "Garage" funding program, one theme per season, members can apply up to 10,000 Experimental project fund in USD, held by Token Anyone can vote, and the Garage will also be available as an app in the coming weeks.
4. Become Opensea's first official partner, received $250,000 curatorial sponsorship and 3-day home page planning rights
5.8 Monthly FWB FEST, global gathering, early bird tickets sold out in five hours < /p>
6. The business cooperation with Reebok and Hennessy will be implemented, and a creative community will be developed to participate in Business cooperation model:
From Town Hall video material
Simple route
On an unknown route, the important thing is not what you can do, but what what not to do.
The development of FWB is fast or not fast. A single product and governance structure are brought out, and other professional teams will give you (copy) them in minutes, but they do It has always maintained the industry's fastest, most cutting-edge, highest-quality innovation level and user experience. To carry out target selection and resource allocation in such a long-term and stable manner, the consensus must be short and concise. The Community Manifesto says it all:
The rights of creators, the use of technological tools, and the experiment of Token access.
Succinct targets can greatly improve the signal-to-noise ratio. In order to understand more intuitively how consensus can help DAO eliminate noise, let’s take a hypothetical example of what FWB could have done but failed to do over the past year:
No Doing Web3 system teaching
Very, many DAOs are doing this, and even have a taste of Web3 = interdisciplinary learning.
As everyone knows, for creators (especially artists), blindly learning is likely to be a kind of "laziness" and procrastination. It is not necessary to know "everything" to do things. Comprehensive learning is not just what everyone needs.
Teaching is good, but it neither stimulates members to create, nor does it need to recruit new ones. There are plenty of ready-made professional resources on the Internet. The point is, if this was really what the community members wanted, it would have been done long ago. No explanation required.
Don’t be a Twitter socialite
FWB Product Manager Mike Bodge said bluntly: “Yes, We don't hang out on Twitter like everything needs to be known. We do smaller, beautiful communities, so community always comes first."
In terms of media, FWB is a high-quality long article platformWIP, and Newsletter "too long to read", one is quality, the other is practicality.
web3 seems to be important to run twitter by default. However, tweeting actually does not directly improve the community experience, nor is it a technological innovation, and it runs counter to the community that Token has access to, so it is not ranked, and most of it is done within the community. (Maybe it’s really not short of money for the time being...)
Unhappy not too much
Just now What I said is not fast, the wording is gentle, let’s see how slow the slow place is:
The business has been tried for 6 months, and now I have just cooperated with two Talk about cooperation with traditional brands. The member directory was proposed a year ago in Season 2, and now it has just started internal testing. The IRL offline digital city-state that has been talking about has only three cities so far, and Event Key has been open for more than four months now. NFT DAO has to wait a year. where did all the time go?
I have made some products that do not seem to have much technical content and do not make money at all: Offline access control Gatekeeper is technically not difficult, Discourse is replaced by Upvote, SourceCred Switch to OurCred...
I organized some activities for the brain: buy coffee together, play disco together, and write about where to go in Miami...
But looking back at the three main points (creators, technological tools, and Token experiments), too hasty business will hurt the new creator economy that is still in its infancy, and tools are to strengthen Community connections are not used to make news headlines. Random activities will dilute the quality of Token and the community. Although it is very cool to be bigger and faster, it is not in line with the core values. So, procrastination is procrastination, and pigeons are pigeons. (Again, you can say anything if you have enough money...)
Inequality
See A great Twitter thread:
Decentralization is not unorganized chaos. Just because a DAO has a centralized structure does not mean it is not a DAO. This is too ideological.
As we have seen, at the beginning, FWB DAO refers to the one-layer structure that manages Treasury, and since the application system was opened in the second quarter, FWB and Egalitarianism and everyone can participate draw a clear line. In the article summarizing FWB’s development process, Alex defines the decision of FWB as follows Models and properties:
In Web 3, while ownership is decentralized, optimal decisions are not.
The success of the Web 3 governance model does not seem to be a thousand people making a thousand decisions, but a thousand people choosing Create a small group of leaders to make decisions for them, and support those leaders through use, distribution, and feedback.
Currently, FWB is somewhere between a digital co-op, a Web 3 start-up, and an internet city best suited to function as a representative democracy.
——Alexander Zhang
The rights of creators, the use of technological tools, the experiment of Token access. These three simple principles allow FWB to have a clear layout and vision, and to flexibly respond to the immediate needs of members. From this perspective to understand its development process, we can see the value of concise consensus.
Of course, not everyone agrees with this approach, and this approach may not necessarily be successful. Everything is easy to discuss, if you have any ideas about it , You can read the original text of the link in the article for more details. Learn more about FWB's past and present.
Original link
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
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