DAOs: Taverns and Town Halls | Charlie Blackstock, Anjali Young, Alex Poon

you get anything all right hello everyone welcome for thank you for joining us at eth Denver 2024 this is the Trident stage thank you so much for being here we have a really exciting panel titled Dows taverns and town halls we moderated by Bill Warren um head of product at summon we've also got Charlie Blackstock co-founder of gamer. XYZ anelie young co-founder and Co CCO of colland Alex punon CEO of charme and um John Allen as well thank you so much thank you everybody uh Welcome to our game show taverns and town halls uh where our contestants will compete compete for the best answers um but thank thank you all for being here it'd be great if each of you did uh just like a two second intro of yourself and kind of your role in the Dow space and we'll start with anelie and just work our way back welcome everybody so happy to see you what a great crowd we've got today um I'm Angela young I am the co-founder like Bill said um of collab land we started off as a dow tool um back in May of 2020 and it have grown since then but are the creators of token gating on Telegram and on Discord and now on web apps and on websites well down for 100 um so Alex co-founder of transverse uh we are a web three Community management software uh that also get used by uh nft communities uh refi communities and also foundations grants organization uh so really is about uh the Town Hall side of uh getting uh people engaged in uh voting getting together and making decisions uh yeah my name is John one of the co-founders of game seven uh the largest gaming Dow um we're extremely excited to basically be the hub for gaming to support gamers in different areas and also help with push standards best practices um I'm also one of the co-founders of summon which is a Community Management tool it really seeks to kind of be the glue to bring a lot of these fantastic Community tools together that we'll probably be speaking about today my name's Charlie I was the co-founder of gamer XYZ now I run a product called farworld on farcaster so you'll be hearing a lot of farcaster takes from me today uh but excited to see have you all here and share a lot of stuff we've learned over the last couple years all right thank you so I think we're going to start out with the question of um what's the best mix of taverns and town halls and just to give the audience a little bit of uh context and back background here for the language we're using we're thinking of taverns as those digital spaces where people are boisterous the conversation is pretty free flowing think like a Discord or um telegram channel uh versus Town Halls are often the places where governance decisions and conversations are happening mostly discourse or Charm verse um so I think uh John will start with you and ask what's the best mix of Tavern and town halls for a community yeah I mean it's a great question I wish I could be like here's the exact structure but I think what's like so cool about this is that we're seeing a bunch of different iterations and experiments on what the bright balance is um for me I think there's like a couple prongs that I kind of analyze it on it's like one kind of like what is the general sentiment of your community um like for me personally I prefer the town hall because I like I like asynchronous I like things more organized I'm not constantly there whereas I think a lot of people like that Tavern they like it be boisterous with memes really loud they're constantly there it's like more synchronous kind of like realtime communication so I think it's like kind of like you know you have to consider what your community is kind of what their personal preferences is and then you also have to figure out what is the Mandate of your entity are you trying to just be more of like a social Gathering sentiment really retail focused are you really trying to get things done to like really tangible decisions have to be made to like for you to be successful right so you I know that's really a non-answer but it's really a case by case and what's fantastic is there's a lot of great implementations um of each of these kind of Tavern and town Halles tools and just pairing that together in thoughtful ways is something that each Community manager really has to do themselves that's great but we will dock a 100 points for the non-answer um Anie so collab land for several years now has really served almost like the bouncer for the taverns the the discords the telegram channels you know how do you all advise the communities using collab land to to maintain kind of a a lively atmosphere but also keep the trolls at Bay yeah that's actually I come from digital communities before crypto um as an admin and as a mod for many digital communities um mostly around international adoption and homeschooling that was my previous iteration of my life I was a full-time caregiver to my children um and TR the amount of troll management that we do now and communities have to do now is so much less because of token gating really like people need to have some they have to buy in right like they've got to have skin in the game and once they do then it makes it easier as far as like how to keep it fun how to keep it interesting like we're also a distributed team and so much of what we do obviously is work however without that time social time built in like mandated social time where we're getting to know each other it's we notice the difference if we don't take that time if we don't take that Friday time to play a game together and get to know each other a little bit better kind of keep tabs on each other how people are doing socially it makes a tremendous difference on how much work we get done the next week so taverns and town halls have to work hand in hand I mean we're completely we're all separate right we're here at e Denver I mean it's so important for us to all be at IRL events like I love being able to hug you and give you a kiss on the cheek like it matters because the next time we talk we have that now so of course IRL um relationships are super important however when you don't have that you still have to have the tavern without it like you get less work done you need to be able to know where people are coming from so one thing we tell our admins and mods is like commit to a calendar commit to a Content calendar if you show commitment to your community then they're going to show a commitment back to you so I could go on and on but I'll I'll stop there yeah that that's great we'll give you 50 points for that answer um you know moving on to Alex in in some ways CH verse is really meant to be the town hall or if not you know fight back on that but um you know how do you make sure that conversations are getting to the town hall how are you all advising communities to use charm versus proposal system and forums to really come to good consensus decisions yeah so I came on WE web 2 and I remember like 10 years ago I wrote a blog post about complaining uh how many messages my team is sending over in slack I think this must be like I think slack sent me an email saying like congratulations like you got your team had wrote 100,000 messages or something like that I was like that's 100,000 messages are almost too much um so I think to me like yeah it's deeply important to me they finding a place where yes people building relationship with your cooworker what Your Community is important but also having a place to help you focus and gets the important things done um so yeah as we enter web 3 um just seeing a lot all these messages in in in in Discord um and it's we find it challenging and I think what's important is having a dedicated place that people can be oriented themselves to like if I am here to submit a proposal to discuss discuss a proposal or I'm here to apply for a grant to want to just communicate only thing about the grants um that's a place to go to and not being dropped in into a forum and trying to figure out like your way and trying to search and and and and spend you know an hour reading everything just to find the one place that you wanted to figure out what's happening that's great and I'll drop the uh game show stick at this point but um Charlie as the farcaster Maxi on the panel where does farcaster fall in all of this is it going to be a Tavern a town hall like what's the future of this kind of like crypto darling of the moment on uh so that's question so um like the difference for me for town halls and taverns is like Town Halls is a great place to like get things done and be organized but they really go hand inand with taverns which I think is a great place to build community build identity build memes and I think those are all so important in Dows I think having like a culture of uh identity is really important and I think it's something that extends you I you just see flavors of it across chains across apps across currencies and so I think town halls and Tav really go hand in hand together and I think you really need both uh and farcaster is doing a really interesting job with their one of their primitive features of forecasters things called channels which are very similar to like Reddit channels and they have a lot of nft and gated features built into it so I think those really for like fill the need of a Tavern this is where all of your everyone's hanging out they're talking about your product they're sharing links they're sharing frames frames are like little mini apps that get built into foraster so those Ser of has a great Community Building like feature and then we're actually using token gated groups so you can actually create groups of people with nfts and those end up serving very much as like a town hall um where you just limit the you limit the people who are participating and try to have a lot more organization so that's kind of like the use cases right now but I think forecaster is working on a lot more Primitives outside channels I think will continue to be add flavors and ways to you know bring a lot more governance and organization to groups of people that's great yeah and I think for for taverns the important part is kind of having a bouncer to keep the trolls out but for the town halls how do you make sure that you're balancing getting the most educated high contacts people participating in those with also not excluding the the genp so to speak um this question goes to John yeah so I think I think it's a great question because it's like trolls is a big deal right on the one hand they're some of the most engaged people you're ever going to have in your community but a lot of times they can be extremely disruptive so I think there's there's a couple considerations I think is interesting like you know was already mentioned right about like just token getting something uh that's really easy to make sure somebody has skin in the game um you know often times when you're like hey if you hold at least one token or one nft that'll exclude a lot of people because at least they have some skin in the game like it's very easy for people to be extremely negative when they don't really know about something or they just have a cursory understanding but they've actually bought in a little bit that screen some that being said very motivated trolls it's not that hard to buy onef often times unless it's prohibitively expensive um so you'll still get them um I think kind of the other consideration is like how do you kind of one use reputation to inform a better understanding of should I be listening to this troll as much like obviously if they're a massive whale in the community they you know they have a huge amount of skin in the game you should probably be listen you know they're probably not trolling themselves right you know there's probably something there that you might want to unpack maybe you don't agree with it but you should definitely consider it um I think the other piece of it as well is there's some people who maybe don't have that much skin in the game right they're just constantly being negative one of the things that I found very interesting is that um there was one community that I was a part of and we had one or two people who were like just constantly negative about things and what we ended up doing was we ended up pulling them in and being like hey we would like you to start an ambassador program to improve the community you know we're going to give you a tag on Discord we're going to have like little meetings with you right we're going to kind of like involve you and the craziest thing happened was all of a sudden they were the biggest advocates for the community other trolls came in and they were like hey no like let's have a one-on-one let's talk you know and like and they actually like trolls converted to the best ambassadors that I've ever seen and actually can like well they're passionate right they're already passionate and that is what we're all needing like apathy is the killer right and so if they're passionate you can turn them around yeah yeah yeah no that that's fantastic and I wanted to follow up with anelia and how does collab Land one Empower communities to deal with trolls and two kind of what do you all do to help those communities manage trolls like can can you boot people with collab land can you take away nfts or is it really up to the community to kind of use your tool as they see fit yeah we cannot take away nfts we I we people ask all the time about that no we cannot take away nfts but you can ban people and the beauty of it is with token gating you're yes you can ban them from access to your group if you're not behaving in a way that is conducive and constructive for the group but we're not taking away their nfts right you just because you're losing access to the community does not mean you're losing access to the value that's being created from the community and I think that's what makes this world right crypto blockchain whatever nfts assets um so different and unique it's like you do have to behave within the rules of the community but that doesn't mean you lose your financial stake in it yeah no that's great and I guess Charlie back to you where do you see foraster I guess going in terms of adoption and what communities are are joining you know especially in the gaming space is there a future for farcaster or is it uh a little bit uh kind of like flavor of the month in crypto which we do a lot of that yeah uh I was talking to someone else about this um if you're not immediately skeptical by like something that's getting a lot of hype in crypto and it like kind of bursts onto the scenes uh you haven't been in crypto long enough I feel like we see these things all the time like something blows up and there's so much fomo and so much hype and like if you don't come into that with like an immediate lens of skepticism you will if you're in the space for long enough you'll get burned enough times it'll back a project that was a rug like there's just a lot of stuff that gets built in this space that ends up not fulfilling its an initial promise but I do think forecaster stands above that I think forecaster is one of those things that uh I tell a lot of people it's the most excited I've been about a set of Technology since I went to my first ethereum Meetup in 2015 I think some of the stuff that they're building as like the Primitive layers for social engagement it Rivals the technology of like smart contracts and I I really do think it's going to come completely change how a lot of apps work on the internet and so I'm on the farcast Maxi is bullish big surprise um but I do think that has a lot of core Primitives of things that take a lot of effort to do with the current Tech Stacks like a lot of what we do on the Internet is just navigating the social feed and then constantly getting redirected to other apps and apps that make that process more seamless and more interesting tend to do better but on foraster you get to do a lot of stuff within the feed and within your Within in the Forum and in the context is most interesting so no I don't think it's a fat I think it's definitely here to stay and I feel like we're going to start seeing a lot more Builders and a lot of people looking for really great Integrations to Leverage The distribution that you'll get through something like forecaster yeah and I guess maybe just attack on to that because it's like for us we've done a lot of work with like the Twitter integration and we start looking and we're like at scale for a community to do something thoughtful and engaging on Twitter we're talking like 20 to 30k a month API access for Twitter with look at forecaster it's run a node and if you start saying thinking okay what if we redirected that maybe even half you know 10 to 15K a month into actually developing things for forecaster that's why I'm really excited about it right like by having that kind of like open protocol and allowing like this kind of like flexible like kind of client or even build your own client on top of it it's really leaning to the reason why I got into web 3 was cuz like we don't want to be limiting the creativity of people that we're working with or the community that's around us I mean just adding all to that I'm I'm also bullish forcaster I I'll add on on fast too all talkter so we took a totally different uh route we actually made frame available in transverse so you can actually embed the frames so in a way like yeah instead of going putting the the information into the feed you can now actually take the frame into transver so that like uh if you buil faster frame that is you know disappearing in the in the feed you now have a place to actually have a place to store your frames and discuss the frame and share people the frames that uh that you build in faster so kind of go both ways that's really cool and just a little more context if you're not aware forecaster frames are just like a a base uh set of code that allows you to build essentially like mini applications within foraster so imagine scrolling through a feed and then an an item shows up that's basically like a little mini app that has some constraints so yeah and and I'd love kind of I always think of collab as the ogs of mixing crypto blockchain with social spaces and gating them probably just cuz that was like I think I was part of one of the first experiments in meta cartel of uh token gating a channel in telegram um H how are you guys thinking about forecaster or the future of social in the space like where's collab land's mind at around all this yeah it's a good question we're still so early I'm excited about farcaster however we've also seen other web 3 native platforms come and go so I'm excited about forecaster it's got so much great stuff like I was at two different foraster events in Paris last week I love the people there I it's of course they're wonderful and I'm I'm excited for farcaster I hope it makes it however it's still early I think there's still a need to be in places that are more web to focused um to on board more so it's like filling two separate niches we've got collab land like we're on Telegram and Discord now we're looking at other plat platforms as well Web Two platforms for a larger group of people to enter right it's like top of the funnel but for everyone to eventually go to foraster once you're more sophisticated enough and you're more involved in web 3 to move to forecaster I think that's great so I think there's room for more and so um our approach is still more at the more at the mass onboarding stage great no I love that and to go back to to Chris a little bit and and shift towards the town hall since I think we've talked a little bit more about the taverns so far you know how do you get attention to the town halls traditionally maybe other than John people resist residing there because it's it's not as exciting it's it's not as fun it and it's it's meant to be serious and you know thoughtful conversations not just kind of like meme posting but how do you make the experience engaging so that it gets the attention it deserves yeah so put on my my product head a little bit right so instead of counting daily active users we are Northstar is more weekly active or monthly active users partially for that reason that like we don't expect people to come and socialize on a daily basis or multiple times a day compared to your Facebook your faster your other social platform right so I think the key is having those you you came to chers for reason right like you're not really here to hang out um you're here to either have a serious discussion about certain topic you're here to apply for a grant you're here to check on the proposal that you submitted uh or having this like structur uh discussion going back and forth so I think like it is much more purposeful and I think with that is I think a big part of it is um is earning your reputation building your reputations so that because again like this is something that you are building toward something uh and H and having more that higher influence and decision making along the process of the community I think that that's what get people coming back to contribute to the community in a in a little bit less exciting uh man or less fun manner perhaps so does that mean that the future of dowo governance especially in the town hall looks closer to the the IRL Town Halls where it's mostly filled with elected officials and um occasionally some older retired folks that come yell at them I mean I think I think partially is that but I think it's more about people who write proposals people who submit uh for for for Grants or or rfps or so on they care deeply right like they actually they care so deeply they spend the time to write this onepage five-page thing that they that they show up to uh maybe this is yeah people that are retired but also that I think it fundamentally people who care deeply about the community that they're showing up for and I I don't think we should demand that every single person you just happen to hold an nft or part of the social conversation to also have to read your three-page proposal and vote on it like I don't I don't think that's reasonable yeah so so John direct democracy or something more like a republic yeah well it's like to kind of like go go back to like your first question right it's like you know does it look more like these elected officials right you know or does it look more like this more direct democracy I think like one blockchain and Dows and a lot of these stru make it a lot more efficient and easier to do direct democracy um the problem is always like people who spend time like who's actually going to read and understand kind of that problem and so what you're already seeing is even in these more like direct democracy approaches for a lot of these decentralized communities that it's kind of like uh how do you describe it it's more kind of like signaling from the people who are very well known in the community right and even for elections oftentimes it's more of a popularity contest um so one of the things that I'm like a huge advocate of is just like having to be much more meritocratic where it's not like a popity contest it's not like the person who has the most kind of followers on Twitter or X you know at this point um you know it's really you can granular understand what have been their contributions to the community and based on that standing I think that they should have more autonomy more agency to like help represent or be elected ideally um but I do think that we start to Trend toward some people are either elected into a position to make decisions or people are just seen as kind of like signals for the community that they're like hey here's the reasons I'm voting this way and people often times trust them because like we can try to make things more ient and more democratic but at the end of the day I mean like not 100% of your community is going to read the 10 page proposal they're not going to follow the entire discussion they're not going to have the context right and so I think for me it's like that battle between how do we basically make things more meritocratic so that ideally we have more of those High signal people and more of those people who are may be elected um actually deserving to be that status and then how do we make things more efficient more digestible more easily kind of like um available to the general community so we can have more direct democracy um but yeah for me it's meritocracy kind of reputation that's that's like I I I absolutely love that I'm a huge proponent of it um so yeah I got a plug for AI there I mean really that's how it's all going to come together right like how else are you going to get all that information distilled for everybody like that's a natural fit M so you stole my next question oh sorry which is great no no I'd love to keep exploring is like obviously AI is another topic dour and more of the kind of broader Zeitgeist outside of crypto how does it change Dow communities how does it change what you know Sor to do more of a Down thee line question how does it change what each of you do um both to kind of like help people digest more but also is there a downside of like we're playing into people's laziness even more I will tell you last year at e Denver we had uh Bounty and the winner of the mini app was an AI mini app and it was is at that point you know you weren't able to just put um documents up into whatever chat GPT and have it respond so it's a mini app where you can put in your documents and that way it helps with onboarding because mods and admins are completely drained from answering the same question over and over and over again and so even with that like wanting more people to participate you need to have that information available and being able to say like what is the sentiment of this group right now I'm joining this new group I want to know what are the popular topics that are happening what are the conversations and what has been the mood over the last week or two I mean like you're going to be able to get so much more information that way which is going to encourage more involvement so it's kind of a exciting thing I mean as far as downside I don't know there's a lot of downside but but for what we're talking about here I think it's there's a lot of upside nice so when the when the Terminators take over Alex um how are how are they interacting with charm verse what's the kind of future of AI there um so there's a lot of excitement around text generation and summarization but actually think in terms of community what's more exciting about AI is like really gleaning the contribution and interactions of people and how they're really contributing to the community being able to P out those uh minor interactions and not only using like the most basic signals like someone saying GM or whatever I think like that's where it gets interesting of like helping find those people who should be more involved of be had more influence in the community and then I guess the AI ofal can can find those people and uh you talk to them yeah Charlie we'll we'll go to you and then finish up with John does does AI ruin foraster I mean in many chain in many respects blockchain is somewhat the opposite and it's all about self- custody the human layer interacting as yourself or suly owning your identity owning your own money like what does AI do to something like farcaster well I think the UN the underlying like niceties of forecaster is like guaranteed cryptographic proofs that message came from someone because it is like a decentralized blockchain and decentralized data so I don't know if like the world's quite ready for just how much content is going to be made over the next couple years this collection cycle is going to be absolutely nuts like the amount of propaganda and just insane stuff that's going to come out over the next 6 months I just don't think we're ready for and being able to tell where that information came from and being able to quickly verify that it's authentic is going to be Paramount and so I think it AI lends itself really well to a social graph or a social media Network that has more cryptographic proofs that you're seeing a video from someone that isn't a deep fake and is real because these things are going to be impossible to distinguish in a very like near timeline and so I think social networks being built on blockchains are going to be critical because there's going to be way way way too much content it's going to be way too hard to verify all the sources and so you'll need signatures and you'll need more cryptographic proofs of that data or content that you're seeing is from the person you think it is uh and that's going to be a real Challenge on like Twitter and X over the next 6 months is this going to be a crazy election year for a lot of reasons unfortunately uh but content going be one of those things yeah and I guess John what does AI do to that meritocracy where you're trying to find the best people for the town hall but all of a sudden now you can have chat GPT write your proposals and make you seem kind of smart yeah yeah because I think it's like there's there's two things when I think about AI right like obviously there's a lot of stuff moving very fast right so like I think they maybe start off on the stuff that I'm excited about it's like one um you know being able to synthesize a community is kind of like content most people have documents like here's our shared ethos our values like our documentation like getting people spun up very quickly and then having a bot be able to engage those people and spin them up it helps because like there's only so many bassadors at scale right and so I think like as far as kind of like making people feel more welcome and getting spun up more quickly to like self- select into maybe like a like a larger role kind of within the community that's something I'm really excited about um you know I also think that like from a community manager standpoint being able to kind of like like measure sentiment you know like as mentioned right where it's like if I could see the snapshot of all 9,000 messages and be like hey people are generally kind of pissed in my community and it's about this keyword that keeps coming up I think that's compelling but directly to your point the thing that I am concerned about is that you know if you look it's like Bots is always a problem right you know when we're trying to figure out how to make some Cil resistant system it's just this constant game of cat and mouse and so I think really identity and reputation and kind of like effort is a really important piece of that and so I think right now we're thinking of it in kind of like one way but I think as AI becomes more ubiquitous it's like you know when you can train an autonomous agent to fill out a tight form to be very engaging to write write a proposal to write a really thoughtful kind of like um you know rebuttal against somebody else's proposal right it's like it's going to get very odd you know when it's like how do you kind of distill down from the average very motivated Community member and the average very motivated autonomous agent right so I think it starts to get a little bit weird it's something that we're we're watching but uh I think we're all kind of seeing it unfold together so yeah I think it's it's particularly this is a unique thing in crypto that there's such an incentive to pretend to be an engaging member because you're farming tokens and you're hoping or you're hoping that you get token like it it and of course that that Bots and and trolls in in in web too but like just the magnitude and the sophistication It Like It's So Different in crypto yeah yeah and I think that's for us it's like it's been really been predicated on like engagement right because it's like I think a lot of people are like hey if you have kind of like this token or you do this kyc process or you do but it's like it's really just a game cat and mouse because like as soon as people start using that and they're like hey this is a very good simple resistance method there's a market for that immediately people are like oh I'm willing to sell my token I have this I don't care you know so it's like it's this game of cat and mouse and so I think the way that we're thinking about it is like if you can granularly kind of like measure and reward incentivize engagement you kind of continually moving like that line of like where people need to be right if you're continually allowing them to engage and kind of like you're you're seeing kind of what their engagement has been in a granular way then sure with enough time and effort this is why we're calling it simple resistant instead of simple proof right you know unless I'm like standing right next to you you know and seeing you kind of engage it's like really hard so anything digital makes it challenging but I think like continually moving that goalpost and like having engagement um you know at a certain level of Engagement it doesn't really make sense for somebody to kind of like try to take advantage of that system um because I agree it's like everyone's trying to farm these aird drops everyone's trying to pretend to be something real um and I think just being thoughtful about the Hoops that you're making people jump through um is is really a problem in the space that a lot of people are trying to solve I love the reputation building identity building like it's so important but we're still in crypto we're still so financially motivated that there's has to we have to find some way to like turn identity and reputation into some financial gain because until that happens I don't think like what Alex was saying like most people are still airdrop Farmers that's just the ugly truth and so we have to find some way to reward that reputation and identity and maybe then we'll get closer to what we want yeah I totally agree because I think like a lot of like Dows are predicated on kind of economic contribution and I think that's like super misaligned right because it's like $1 one token one vote one maybe somebody invested super early and they have a huge stake and after 6 months maybe they're not involved anymore but there's still like this like whale right and then two it's people who either invested early or people who have a lot of capital those are the people who have say where we what like I think if you predicate it kind of like engagement and reputation and you start saying like they're the people who have more access maybe more sa more voting control not saying it should be 100% either way but I'm saying we should have a spectrum between those two econom economic contribution and an engagement and direct physical contribution right and then somewhere on that line that 6040 50/50 I think if we open that up um and like like that's that's a much better model than than I agree just like I hold this token right or I want this token right because at the end of the day if you put in a thousand hours into my community and you want some tokens I think that's very align most projects need that engagement you know they need some reasonable amount of money but it's really engagement that I think is distinctly lacking for a lot of these projects that's great and since we're short on time final question an and Charlie your answers are the most important here uh favorite Tavern and you can do favorite Town Hall if you really have wait what but I can't say my own because shout out to all the collab land down members out there and members of our Discord community so boom I I meant literal Tavern in Denver oh literal t in Denver I don't know I have a startup in Denver so I don't get out much fair enough uh probably I like um Denver Central Market's a good spot I feel like there's a lot of lot of stuff happening there that's great yeah so thanks again to all our panelists this was a fantastic talk really appreciate you all being here and um if you haven't checked out any of these projects on the stage all of them are fantastic do doing great things in the Dow space so please do visit collab land visit charme check out game seven and then uh watch watch for some interesting experiments on farcaster from Charlie farworld Dogg that's the next one love it thanks everyone thanks you thank you thanks Bill