Reward the Real Ones: Defining Meaningful Community Outcomes | Christian Dumas - Superform

All right, next session is about community building and how to incentivize your community to contribute meaningfully to your project. And we've got Christian, head of ecosystem at Superform. If you guys care about community building, you definitely want to stick around for this one. I'm just going to do my full screen.

Hello. That sounds pretty good. Thank you. How do I get the uh Can you put me on the screen? There we go.

Uh, hey everybody. My name is Christian Dumass and I'm the head of ecosystem at SuperFform. Superform is the userowned Neo Bank. I was approved to do this talk about two months ago and it was always going to be about incentives. Um, but SuperForm launched a token a week ago.

So, I've learned a lot about incentives and outcomes, I think, and I'm going to add some of my reflections to the talk as well. Also, very topical and timely. Just a few days ago, Vitalik made a tweet about incentives. Um, he was responding to someone who was effectively saying, "If you don't incentivize your users, you won't have any users." And he had a he didn't agree.

He had a response to it. It was quite long, but one of the core arguments was this here that good incentives are things that compensate users um for temporary costs or risks that they take for being early to what you're building, whereas bad incentives are things that bring people to your product that would never even use a mature version of your product. So we want to reward people for for being early, for putting their capital at risk, for putting their reputation at risk, for being early and supporting us in early days, but we don't want to reward people who are just going to leave the second we stop paying them to be here. So instead of rewarding these inputs that we often have focused on on our reward systems, capital noise, attention, um instead we want to reward outcomes. So we need to define like what are those outcomes?

What are the things that we actually want to be working towards in the long term? This is a bit of an oversimplification, but for the purpose of this talk, I have this model where we have two ways to contribute to a crypto product. Um, we have financial contributors who put their capital at risk. And the outcomes are pretty easy to define, a sticky TVL, for example, and then we have the labor contributors. and they don't have as much capital to put up, but they contribute with their time and their effort and their creativity and um the incentives shape their behavior quite quickly, but these outcomes are harder to define.

So, I'm going to focus on that mostly today. And um why is it harder to define? This is also an oversimplification. We could argue about it, but for all intents and purposes, one ETH deposited into a D5 protocol by me is the same as one ETH deposited into a D5 protocol by you for the purpose of um, you know, incentivization and how it affects our protocol in the long term. Whereas a community contributor like Alice's contributions are going to be very different from Bob's contributions.

And we have to figure out how to properly uh measure these different contributions and determine not just how they impact our short-term goals, but our long-term goals that we're trying to achieve as a as a company. And just a quick note on like short-term incentives versus long-term users. If your incentives reward short-term behavior, then you're not going to have long-term users. So, um we can measure this in a few ways. There's there's trade-offs.

So, speed versus durability. Speed would be like how quickly can we get people to do things? How quickly can we bootstrap our community versus durability? You know, how um how durable are these users? Will they will they stick around when you stop paying them?

Activity versus trust. Activity is just like number of uh of posts, number of transactions, number of quests completed, things like that. Um versus like trust, which is this this long-term trust that the users have um in in the team. They have this long-term alignment. they'll they'll be your supporters even when things go wrong.

Um, and then we have reach versus retention. Reach is engagement. How many likes do you have on the tweet versus like retention? Uh, you know, do these people do they do they keep coming back? Are they um are they long-term users?

Are they long-term content creators? Um, so these are things we think about and often we we incentivize the the former uh and not so much focused on the latter. Uh you probably all heard of infoi and this was a point that Vitalic made in the tweet as well. Um essentially you know if you if if you pay people to make tweets that's like the perfect example of like a bad incentive, right? So um I think like you still want some kind of incentivization.

You want people to create content for you. That's important. And you want your users to be creating cool stuff that promotes what you're building uh as your number one fans, but you don't want this like short-term extractive behavior where you're you're giving incentives away to people who are just going to leave the second you stop paying them. There's no long-term alignment there. Uh and SuperForm did do an infoy campaign and we we wish we didn't.

Uh and we learned a lot of lessons from doing it. Um, but I think Vitalic spot on that this is like, you know, a pure example of like a wrong thing to do in just let's pay people to tweet, right? So, uh, some reflections on on the the airdrop at Super Forum. Uh, we had this like elaborate incentive structure that we built. Again, we're talking about specifically like community participants, not necessarily like financial participation, but we incentivized everything or so I thought and had this like quantified model of community contribution in content creation, evangelism, community support, events, product usage, all these things.

But ultimately, we were optimizing for those short-term things we didn't want to optimize for, right? For speed, for activity, for reach um and what this did was it attracted mercenary users, people who optimized their behavior around rewards. they were only there for the financial gain and there was no downside for them leaving, right? Like they could just come in, optimize their behaviors to uh get the most rewards out of uh our system and then leave whenever we stopped incentivizing them or it wasn't convenient or efficient for them to do so. Um and then the note on infoy here is that you know we promised tokens to unaligned users who you know they didn't really care about super form they was trying to make money um and you know if we don't pay them they won't be here.

So, what happened after the airdrop? Some reflections, motivation dropped. Uh, all the rewards when we're when we're incentivizing this like short-term behavior, these rewards were optimized for like the pre-airdrop with no transition from this extrinsic motivation financial to intrinsic motivation, getting people long-term aligned and having again incentivizing these outcomes that we're looking for. And we had a lot of people who who left, you know, they and honestly a lot of them were short-term incentive driven people. um they were optimizing for ROI not the broad super form mission uh but you know that again we designed the incentives to enable them to do so uh and then the kind of the saddest thing that happened was even our core contributors the ones who were really aligned with superform they did believe of course everybody's a little bit incentivized by money but these people they were along for the ride down for the mission but at the end of the day their long-term effort like wasn't properly differentiated from these short-term like mercenary users um And then after the airdrop happened, there wasn't this clear like what's next?

What are the next steps? How can I continue to help um push towards this mission that I do believe in? Um so they they had this alignment, but it wasn't properly like recognized or reinforced. Um and you know, that's something that we're going to correct going forward so that these people still feel like they're valued and still help us um drive towards our our our outcomes. And that's the key here is like what are what are these outcomes?

and we have to define them because if we don't define what our long-term goals are for the community, then the incentives will define them for us. Um, and these are, you know, this might be different depending on who what your community is, who your users are, what you're actually trying to optimize for, but some things that are pretty general, I think, is like retention. Do people stick around after you stop paying them to be there? Alignment. Are they not just like short-term extractors?

Are they there for the same thing that you believe in? You know, do they believe in the mission? Trust. Do they do they trust the team? Will they be your defenders when things go wrong?

Either like technically or reputationally, will they put their own reputation on the line to support you because they believe in what you're building? Do they feel like owners? Do they feel like they have a say in in what you're doing, in what you're building? Um, do they feel like part of the team? And all this drives like long-term value creation, right?

Um, just like paying someone to make a tweet, that's not going to be useful in, you know, in the in the long term. um there's there's nothing really to be gained from it. A little bit of attention, but that fades very quickly. So, all this drives to like long-term value creation, and we want to incentivize these things. We don't want to incentivize short-term behaviors.

We want to incentivize these outcomes, these like long-term goals that we have. So, we want to design systems that that do that. And um you know, we we we tried to do that at Superform and I think, you know, we we did some things well and some things not well at all. and we learned a lot of lessons and this is like my thinking on like how can we um do better as we go forward. So, uh some some tools that I think are interesting.

I'll just talk about a couple things that I think are kind of cool that you can use to try to measure and reward outcomes. I like the idea of proxy tokens. So, these are like not your official protocol token. They're like a temporary measure to assess community engagement without giving actual ownership. Um there's not any like guaranteed value or um like financial implications necessarily.

Um and then we can use this to like observe behavior like if I give you a token, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to hold it? You going to stake it? Are you going to sell it? How long are you going to hold it for?

Are you going to buy more? We can look at all these things and we can kind of use that as a proxy for if we reward this person like what will they do with those rewards or are they someone who is actually long-term aligned? Um so we did this with um we had our our piggy community loyalty token which um then was a proxy for up. Uh we were inspired by the purr token from hyperlquid. Um and another example I like stargate and layer zero.

So it's not exactly the same but stargate was like a governance token but at the end of the day you know layer zero was able to use it as a proxy for um what their users would do once they gave them the ZRO tokens. And um you know ultimately STG is now convertible for ZRO and it's been like acquired by layer zero. And then one more thing is um guild roles. So I really like guild as a product for those of you who don't know. It's like helps you to um you can kind of collect these like onchain and off-chain contributions and earn like roles and get rewards.

And this is really helpful to quantify community impact. um you can you can incentivize like a wide range of things and then turn it into this like leaderboard of your community's participation and it turns the behaviors into signals that we can reason about and make decisions on. Um the problem the way we implemented it was still we're incentivizing for this short-term activity for these actions that don't actually lead to long-term meaningful outcomes and we counted what people did but not like why they did it or what it ultimately led to. and um you know so the the roles they shouldn't reward activity they should reward these outcomes that we're trying to work towards. So some ideas of roles and how we can kind of fit that into this model of outcomes.

We can go back to these proxy tokens that can signal alignment and and ownership but these need to be um you know these roles should be earned through sustained contribution over time both offchain and offchain um and persist beyond any single campaign. We want like a long time period uh to measure this person's behavior of what they'll do with incentives and how they're aligned. Are they are they creating um content around this token? Are they helping to support the token economy and ecosystem? Um content roles.

We talked about Infoi. We don't really like that, but still you want people to create content. So what can we do? We want to reward like durable knowledge. Uh content that like persists over time that provides value over time.

Um you know, and emphasize like quality and reusable content. Uh and we want to be able to track impact on like understanding not just raw impressions and maybe incorporate protocol usage as as a multiplier or something like that. Like um instead of just like paying for views like how can we ensure this is an aligned person who is also creating very beneficial content that helps many people over the long term um and then give them rewards for doing so. And then um you want your ambassadors, you want your community champions um and this represents like trust and retention. Uh but this needs to be based on like consistency, reliability, follow-through, focus on relationships and not simply um you know paying somebody to like be your ambassador for a few months and then when you stop paying them they leave.

Like how can we retain this person for the long term and make sure that they feel like a valued part going back to um you know all these things this ownership mentality and all these outcomes we're trying to optimize for. So with all that in mind uh a big question might be like will people still contribute if you stop paying them to do so? where they engage without any incentives. Um, honestly, I think not not really. Maybe in the long term, like if you have a really valuable product, then yes, but where if we're focused on like community members who are creating content for you, who are you being your brand ambassadors, um, I don't think the incentives should disappear entirely.

Rather, they should evolve. And we can look at um, non-financial perks. I think that like credit card points and like airline points are a really good example of like kind of something we could look at. So you can give people non-financial perks like um access exclusive access to the team or like early access to products and new features, give them status within the community, the sense of ownership and like influence over the direction of what you're building and all these things. We want to um again reward these specific outcomes that we're trying to achieve these long-term goals with maybe as over time not financial gain but specifically these non-financial perks.

And um one final note uh ultimately Vitalik's final message is the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually useful app and this is something superforms really committed to um despite all the noise um at the end of the day we just