24 January 2025
The group chat formerly known as Creative Labor + Value Flow has just adopted a new name:
Return On Attention. (h/t eirrann.eth and Phil Mohun).
I suspect it will eventually become clear to the Farcaster network that our attention is overextended and the “more interesting content” approach will not solve for sustainability.
But I’m all-in FC for principled reasons. This protocol is the only place I’m willing to even try to build a business long-term.
I’ve really found my groove on FC in the last month or so, thanks to this group chat. I’ve been thinking there’s an opportunity to bootstrap the group chat into a human-curated and moderated slowcore discussion forum with both onstage (public) and offstage (private) branches. Ideally it would be user-owned and governed. I’d like to build a restorative forum that optimizes for depth, not breadth — a forum that richly rewards deep attention, instead of draining it.
The thinking behind this is that it's important to design online space with deep respect for the value of creators' time, labor, and attention (rather than focusing on the value of their "engagement"). It's really hard to find spaces like that, and no one else seems to be working on it, and I’m currently at something I’ll generously call a “career crossroads” (lol), so… why not?
Since deep-dive reading, writing, and slow-paced discussion all require a lot of time, labor, and attention, membership in the offstage (private) chat would continue to be free but invite-only — not to create scarcity, but to reduce the risk of overextending ourselves. We could then selectively publish some of our chats for the public, and monetize through that branch.
Note that I’m a minimalist entrepreneur (h/t Sahil Lavingia) and I don’t do hustle culture. So anything I build will never compete with attention-extraction merchants on standard “grow your audience and build engagement” terms.
As a senior editor I’ve been running a profitable solo business for close to 15 years, and I’ve been a forum admin/mod since the 1990s. I’ve been thinking about systemic problems at the intersection of creativity, labor, time, attention, money, and “earning a living” since the 1990s also. I probably have enough material in my files to single-handedly seed the forum with discussion fodder for several years.
What I don’t have, though, is funding. Capital.
Venture capital isn’t an option. Even if it were offered (which I highly doubt it would be), I don’t want to risk being forced to make decisions that might lead to enshittification for the sake of profit. VCs fund what’s most likely to be profitable, not what rewards deep attention and creates sustainable long-term value for a user-owned network.
I doubt ROA would qualify for sponsorship. Who’s gonna sponsor a bunch of writers and artists affirming the value of their work, angling for sustainable alternatives to the FC status quo, and talking frankly about the hidden reliance on “free” labor and other shortcomings of web3?
Grants? Well, I don’t know… even if this proposed venture qualified, grant apps require significant admin overhead with an uncertain outcome. The last one I went through was a nightmare. Probably not the best use of my time.
I don’t think bounties, subscriptions, and crowdfunding (in their current form, anyway) are the best options either — for reasons I briefly discussed in this thread and would be happy to explore in further detail on the would-be forum. The discussions themselves could not be productized and would likely be “free” (i.e., subsidized elsewhere).
But after a long stretch of running on trickles of income and fumes, partly because “AI took my job” (sort of) and media industries have been decimated, my invisible subsidies are dwindling. I’ve written a great deal during this time. But financially? I would’ve been better off working for minimum wage. Ouch.
I’ll be honest: I’m a terrible trader. I’ve never held any illusions that crypto will be a path to generational wealth for me, or even a windfall. But even with its many flaws, crypto has still provided a better “safety net” for the past four years than anything else I’m aware of that’s open to me.
I’m not a tokenomics nerd or mechanism designer either, although I enjoy reading and thinking on these subjects.
As much as possible, I’ve set up my life to keep living expenses modest in order to maximize time for slow-paced + intrinsically motivated work. What I’m running into here is not a personal issue, but a structural problem that affects anyone who takes the “high road” (open source contributors, public goods, etc.) — it’s much easier to make money by extracting and taking profits from gift value than it is by doing honest labor to build sustainable value. Unfortunately, integrity does not pay the bills, and I need to make a living.