Merging Discord and Reddit for web3 communities

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] gmgm what's up web3 doers welcome to web 3 academy it is the weekly doer spotlight i am your co-host jay and as always i have my fellow co-host kyle reed head with me what's up kai what's up friends happy to be here for another round today on the pod we have grant magdance super stoked to have grant on the pod grant worked for common stock

for years which is web 2 social network so he's got a really great background in growth of web 2 social networks and we're going to get into his rabbit hole story but he grew common stock was part of growing them from eight people to 35 people and has taken that experience now to gm uh he joined the gm team as the third founder in february uh after a few months i think of talking in the background to the team at gm uh and as so many of us has just been sucked into the web 3 rabbit hole and once you're there you can't go out welcome to the show

grant great to have you today thank you thank you for having me really really excited for for this chat today awesome us too so why don't we just start as we always do we we'd love to hear uh the web3 rabbit hole story you know what sort of take us back to uh the the first crypto you bought the first nft you bought you know how how who who got you into it uh is there one person who sort of told you um how did how did you kind of fall down rabbit hole first time yeah um i was in my crypto journey uh was kind of a step function uh started off so i studied computer science um in

school and uh at the time like bitcoin was was definitely around um it was talked about um i didn't know much about it took a distributed scissors class when we talked about bitcoin uh i wish i had thought more uh which i had thought a little more in depth about it at the time beyond just purely uh uh kind of like technical um distributed system uh so that was like absolutely like very first exposure kind of like had an idea of what bitcoin was and how it worked um did not know much more than that was not part of the community it's not by any um and then in uh 2017 um when uh that bull market happened where they got kind of like sucked in um to eat really still didn't know anything what i

was doing um bought a lot of all coins that didn't go anywhere did buy some east which i which i was happy about but like like to be totally honest was like pretty in it for the games the technology was like interesting but i i didn't again think about it in depth enough um didn't truly dive down the rabbit hole enough um it also wasn't really surrounded by a couple many people who who um kind of like understood at that level so things quality quieted down kind of into 2017 early 2018 um it still followed with some but not nearly the same and then um when it really started uh kind of like making a comeback in

2019 2020. um started following and that's really what i would say like truly truly like and start internalizing a lot about um web3 a lot about crypto and started reading more start talking to more people about it um and that's kind of like like once i started seeing like d5 that's probably like the first thing i i got into because when i got out of it and whatever was 20 like 2018 like deep i was like just starting i remember like maker kind of coming out like online i can't remember like compound but i did not understand what they were actually doing um and i kind of remember coming back like oh wow these projects are like these are legit and they have like billions of dollars in them like these are these are like like really legitimate products they're solving

really cool problems um so uh i think that's really kind of like what hooked me is that okay like again the use case thing right like here are like very like clear real use cases kind of like of crypto beyond just um like sending money across borders and things like that um so d5 uh and then nfp's first first nfts was uh top shot i kind of like had a piece before but like top shot came around i was like oh this is like like i thought sports song about a crazy sports guy i followed summon um mike and i were actually like uh we were uh we we uh worked together before so mike's mike's working together at common stock um we like worked together for a week we were living in different places worked

together for a week um just to i don't know have someone to work with because we're always working from home um and i remember like there's like the nft craze we're like like like starting and we're like my top shots and start to look into it and again like most things did not did not dive deep enough down the rabbit hole to really like make the most of it but again there's something that's like okay like i can see how how valuable this is and then the last step function had really happened um about about a year ago um i took like the the uh consensus has like a facility boot camp um that's like three months um and that was honestly like really really leveled up kind of my understanding of um

kind of like ethereum in particular but but kind of like smart contracts in general like before i had understood how they worked and i poked around with them some but it was it was really really cool like oh wow like i can see kind of the the especially the developer like like the power of kind of like building these composable systems on on top of on top of smart contracts so that's kind of whole journey into now working at full time um but that's yeah that's the journey i love it i love to hear love to hear the rabbit hole stories uh there's so many fun things that that went on over the years um let's step back for a second though and money just tell us what gm is i mean we hear gm all the time jay says before every episode yeah and i'm sure there are people who don't

know what gm is so why don't we start off with some context uh and uh grant why don't you just give us kind of the high level over you like what is gm what do you guys what are you guys doing yeah absolutely um so our domain is gm.xyz um so that's that's website you can find us there um uh there's kind of a short term and a long term kind of like vision here um the long-term vision is kind of create a user-owned um kind of decentralized social network and we can get into more about kind of like the the issues with with existing like web 2 social networks but that's like a long-term vision um the short-term vision kind of like getting there um social networks have this like classic cold start problem right like

how do you get someone to whatever go to a bar where no one's at how do you get the first five people to show up um uh and uh the short term is to uh create um kind of like tooling for communities and kind of a place for um three communities whether that's dows uh and a few projects um whatever it is uh to uh kind of spin up their communities actually run their communities in a much more like web3 native fashion um so that's kind of how we see is like on board to solve this this cold start problem is there's very real problems these um communities face uh mostly on discord but across the board um it's not it's not discord specific uh and solving those problems

to bring people on board and then um once there are kind of communities on board then we can start working on kind of like the more generic uh social network aspect um and the decentralization yeah we had uh we had brad from lens protocol on the podcast uh maybe a month or so ago so we we got to dive a lot into sort of the website social side of things and i want to pick your brain on that and see where you guys align and and don't align maybe but i think we'll we'll hold off on that let's let's go with kind of what your guys current product is which is kind of solving problems for existing tokenized communities or taos right now we all use discord and i think i see a tweet every single day at least of someone saying discord's the worst

platform ever and everyone's always you know losing their mind about discord i personally don't mind just right now jay also doesn't like discord i think i don't hate it um i always just say like what's the alternative and like what can we do to improve it because i honestly don't really know what do you find um is the sort of ux issues or or just overall issues with discord right now and i guess what is gm doing to try to to solve that or improve on that yeah great question um so i'll say like discord is a product it's a very good product right it's it's like like like discord is being misused is what i would say um or discord is not being designed kind of for for these large website communities so discord works great if you are

like a group of friends and you gain right it works great um for it works at least decently for like distribution style things as well um but where it breaks down is exactly kind of what crypto communities are which are kind of these like like loosely hierarchical kind of like large kind of like organizations right um where it's not just a top-down thing it's not like one person or like five people trying to shoot information it's also not like 20 people just like all chatting together it's kind of it's like it's like sometimes there are five people who need to reach everyone other times there are like 50 000 people that are all trying to like talk to the same 50 000 people or five people and um

we get on discord is there's a few problems the the biggest issue is that like chat doesn't scale to the size of most crypto communities and that's really like the fundamental issue that we see um and there's a lot of ramifications of of this um one is it's it's difficult for community moderators community managers to distribute information um because a lot of stuff gets lost um in in all the noise right like i'm sure you've been in discord channels when like mints are going on right it's like it's just like chaotic and you have to know it's chaos and you have there's a lot of like tribal knowledge around like okay like this is where like this is like the channel that they're gonna post announcements to right it's like fairly

standardized like usually it's called announcements but like not always um and it it's it's difficult um it is uh it's also really hard for community members to stay up to date with the communities they care about right because like okay i'll go the announcements channel like i can do that right but then it's like where like where do i go for anything else right any other quality discussion um anything on discord is kind of like lost in a week right so um unless it's in like one of these announcement channels it's like unidirectional any sort of like actual conversation that's happening and even that could be like whatever something like snapchat people's rights and that's like pretty important to the community most that stuff is lost um almost immediately and going back and

like sifting through all like chat messages um to find the stuff that's important is really hard and if you're a part of whatever if there are even five communities you want to keep up with right you're probably checking like 10 to 20 channels a day per community right and you're talking about like in order to keep up right you're checking like hundreds of channels a day in order to keep up and then you have to read all the messages and discern kind of like okay this is just like like banter this is like whatever something i don't care about or this is actually like really helpful discussion and even if you find the helpful discussion it's difficult because it's chat with large groups of people it's difficult to follow discussions sometimes too okay like which message they reply to like click

up to it and scroll down it's like okay that's a different question it's unrelated so there's there's all these there's all these kind of like issues again it's not it's it's a problem inherent to real-time chat with large groups of people it's it's not really a problem inherent to discord um other than discord is real-time chat and they use it for large large numbers of um participants so that that's kind of like a whole category and probably like the biggest pain point that we've seen i i i don't know but with a lot of the people that we talk to that's typically where the sentiment of like oh i hate discord comes from because it's overwhelming like let's see my like i have 869 unread messages on discord right now right like that's like and most of them like i'm sure 865 i don't care about right like that's the

reality of it um and uh and i think that it's also the only thing i'll say about discord i think um some of them maybe like the more experienced moderators we talked to um talk about is that it it's really because discord can be difficult and really intimidating it's kind of bare to entry for new people who are interested in your project because people have to be like pretty interested initially yeah to get involved and i i've had this experience where like i've been on the fringes of communities i'm like i usually fall off once i get over am i really in it then it's great right you feel the community which is what chad is so great with right you feel the community that real-time interaction like you get questions to answer like it it really is incredible

but that that barrier to entry is oftentimes really high so there's a lot of people who could be interested in your community who may convert like really like engaged community members um who just fall off because it's like okay i don't have enough time to understand how this community is organized right there's 80 channels i have no idea how you organize and then number two i'm not interested enough right now to actually like try to keep up with with the um kind of things that i care about so that's not like one whole problem second problem discord i'll be i'll be a lot faster on this one um the second problem that we see a lot and talk to community managers a lot and this is actually like really much more like emotional emotional problem for community monitors is there's a lot of spam on discord and discord makes it

really hard to get rid of spam and there's there's a number of different reasons for this dms kind of being like like universal in one spot makes it really hard there's no discord being isolated like being this this silo there's no way to like like figure out like real identity or just kind of like have some like not even not even necessarily like real like real world identity but there's not an easy way to verify whether this person is who they say they are or if they have any clout or anything like that like at least on twitter if someone like like dmz right you can go look at their profile right like okay like how many files they have people that i like i follow follow them like what are they tweeting about like like you can get a

sense of that right um but on discord that's really hard right people can just change their username to some mod and dm you and um it's a really really painful experience and um it not only like ruins a lot of people's experiences like in particular communities it can really ruin people's experiences it's kind of like with crypto in general so that's that's another area that we see and support's very closely related to that um because a lot of spam happens a lot of uh kind of like scams happen kind of like through like like what users think are support channels um so those kind of the biggest the biggest pain points that we see with discord and the ones that we're really focused on trying to solve

that's great great explanation jay would you agree with that anything you would add yeah yeah i would i would completely agree i think that the few things to just quickly add that came up for me were one i remember one one discord that i'm quite active in that is just like you said it's like it's like a flowing river that if you aren't staring at that river every minute you you miss like an entire you know you can rate like 100 comments right yeah and then and then you feel like you have no idea what's going on it's so hard to get back into and so this this one discord community somebody started uh offering

virtual assistants within the discord so you could hire a virtual assistant who would basically manage your discord and i was like whoa like that's a ridiculous solution to this problem like you're telling me that if i want to be active in web three i need to go hire a virtual assistant yeah who manages all my discords like that was one funny solution that i did not hire a virtual assistant wow like maybe that's what i need to do the other thing i think that comes up for us a lot is this idea of i think this is more me being upset with some founders is i think a lot of founders are using discord to build an audience not building a community

kyle always uses the metaphor of discord is like your community center or your community hall not your um your your megaphone uh to create your audience to broadcast and so i think that distinction is also really important because i think that that distinction is what is causing a lot of these issues where you have 50 000 people in a discord you know i don't know can you and this might be a separate conversation but like can you create a 50 000 person community like is that really the right steps to building community that you know i'm i'm kind of talking more about community versus audience now but that's the other thing that uh that sort of pops into my head

yeah it was there's our oh good cow no no take it away um we we talk about this in in uh i think this is similar but uh kind of like a different frame we talk about it's like internal versus external communication a little bit right there's this like extra like pop of funnel the communities are really interesting and it's really important right it's really important for communities to have like top of fun at least for a lot of communities they're like understand like interesting people like knowing about the project and asking questions and things like that and then there's kind of just like internal like actual like community right like people who are like really involved in it who aren't just like kind of interested in keeping up but who are actually doing like the the day-to-day things i think you're exactly right like discord is oftentimes being

used for both those things and it's it's not really a megaphone yeah that's actually why we started a newsletter because we and sort of the podcast too is like originally we want to start a community and we're like wait a minute you can't start a community on its own in discord we need to have another way to speak to people to broadcast like your radio station or your television and then when they need to get done or have questions you go into the discord and that's where you can communicate that's the way i see it i'm curious though um maybe there is and really what i see then is like it's like discord is not a scalable way to build community you need to have the podcast the newsletter to scale the like announcements and the news and whatever and you have the discord to like

communicate is what gm is doing then like are you guys trying to find a way that you can scale the social aspect um like how are you guys trying to solve some of these discord issues or do you just see it the same way as we do and it's like we don't need you can't have it all in one you got to have your like broadcasting over here and then your social aspect over here like how do you guys think through that yeah um so where the product started this is actually kind of this has been kind of like a a journey for us we've learned a lot kind of in the process of this kind of where the product started is very much like okay like the issue is chat and like let's create a platform that is like a like a crypto native

reddit right form and post right form and post great for long form content great for large discussion great for separating signal and noise because people can upload and down bow you can come back like if you go to whatever you finance on reddit you don't need to read every single post and every single comment to find generally what the community thinks is valuable right like you can sort it and you can look at the top 15 things from the last week or last month you can kind of catch up quickly on what you missed so there's a lot of advantages for um for forum kind of style communication especially in large communities and you see this in web 3 right um you see communities like bank list and others like spin up discourse

right which is like open source forum style it's where they do oftentimes governance proposals budgeting kind of things like that right things where you need large-scale discussions and it's like long-term content so that's kind of our idea of solving this at first it's like okay like we like form style um and that will kind of like address the issues and uh we learned that was pretty naive um because chat has a lot of benefits to it there's a lot of great things with chat um again it's great for small communities right like if you have 10 people it's like fantastic or if you want to have it like a quick group of whatever of the moderators or whatever like devs like it

chat's fantastic for that chat's really good for building community like form style like it's something we've learned like forum style communication like i don't know like you can build community like reddit like there's communities and subreddits and things like that for sure but not in the same way it is on discord there's like there's a difference and there's a level of like like connection that you can have with someone or a group of people in real time chat that you can't yeah it's real time that's why right it's real time exactly yeah it's like people it's it's it's it's like a it's it's only like a slight shift away from like an actual conversation right it's like the medium is different but the feeling is the same um

and we see this with communities and this is probably like our biggest we talk communities and we see communities need both right um again bankless has discourse they also have discord efinance has a pretty active discord right so they have like they have a subreddit that's one of the more active subreddits on reddit and they also have like a very active discord um we also see this both with reddit and discord um reddit is rolling out or at least with specific communities has um chat style posts now you can post something instead of comments it can be a chat room and we see communities communities use this um i don't know if you're familiar with project step in but they have a uh

in in their in their subreddit they have a post that's pinned to the top it's just like hey like this just like the chat room whatever like people drop in like chat about things like um and discord is rolling out forum style channels as well so discord is in beta right now um but they are essentially taking um primitive is implemented is it's their threading feature just that like a message that the like root message is now like a post and then threads threads or comments so across the board we see this as something that that's that's needed um so uh we're starting we are just about to roll out chat um on on gm so we see it kind of as a place um

to kind of get both of those uh where for announcements for governance proposals for whatever it is if you want feedback from your community there are um like actual posts you can post um you can have comments you can have upvotes we just rolled out um roles so uh we have like a full role system where you can say for these we call them topics for like these certain topics um these people and can be based on tokens these like certain token holders have access to only view this or these certain people can uh post but they can't um but this like uh like you you pretty much have it so like it's it's view comment and post and you

can kind of slice and dice that across your community in any way possible um so how we see where we're we're starting to be more in the middle than we used to be um in terms of like is like a forum style or is chat like the way to go um we've kind of converged like hey like communities really need both for very different reasons um and that the the hope is that um come by by having an outlet for uh for long form content that it will be easier to stay up to date on like the most important things that that you care about because if you're again if you're a moderator if you're like having discussions like that stuff should happen in kind of like a post um whereas kind of the more real-time stuff will happen in chat so it sounds like the the merge of like

the reddit style and the discord style is like is like where this is all going and reddit's already doing it discord's already doing it and the gm is now trying to do it i'm curious like what does gm do like discord is pretty big reddit is huge like you guys are trying to take on some behemoths here uh is it though is it the fact that you guys are going the kind of the web 3 native side like cool thing i noticed when i get to gm is like you immediately have to sign in with your wallet um i could join i'm part of bankless dow so i could immediately join into uh the bankless academy community and it just looked into my wallet saw that i had enough tokens and boom i was in discord you can't do that reddit doesn't even have this functionality though they

are talking about building these kind of things but is that your sort of like um bread and butter that you think is the thing that's going to elevate you guys or is there something else that you guys have that you're that you're building in as well no you're you're uh absolutely right like having a wallet connected um gives us uh like an advantage um in a way that like red and discord will like never be able to compete with um like fundamentally they can try but at the end of the day um that primitive is opens up all these doors um so kind of with the stage we are in now we kind of like shift back and forth and the stage we are in now is that there's kind of a lot of just like basic

functionality that communities need um to run their community that's not has that doesn't really have anything to do with web3 um again they kind of need chat we think they need forums they need some sort of roles right they need ways to put up rules and faqs right there's kind of like all these basic things that a community kind of community needs and there's a lot of things that user needs right they want to be able to have push notifications they want to have a mobile app right they want to be able to mute certain people they want to be able to follow certain people they want to be able to like set their notification preferences right there's kind of a lot of things that um in this day and age that that users just kind of expect out of the box um kind of

with with any application whether that's web 3 web 2 um whatever it is um so a lot of what we're focused on right now is is building out kind of like the the basic um like tooling uh that communities and users need for it to be useful at all um there is some like web3 stuff and like again like you said like you can you can token gate um communities you can create specific roles um we pull in like nfts compo apps onto like users profiles like you can see all that sort of stuff um so that's there uh but the really cool stuff is is yet to come kind of around um around web3 like like here here's one of the ones i'm really excited about and i don't know if you will build this

full disclosure i don't know a little bit i think there's a lot of potential um so before i joined uh the gm we had a there was a user there's i honestly think this happened like thanksgiving day um there's a user who uh created a uh a username that had like a slur in it um so uh they were banned um they came back immediately with a different account their band came back immediately with different account because part of the issue is that now it's really easy to create accounts because it's just a wallet um and uh mike and i have this really good idea which like okay let's just sign ups by having some amount minimal amount of heat your wallet um

and they did that and the person stopped didn't come back and um we've seen that happen before so there was a uh early on the project or a lot of people would come just like like just like when all day like airdrops were happening or like come try like like and just like post a bunch like content and some like genuine spam um and uh we bumped up we kind of like looked at how much heat people had their wallets and like bumped up like a little bit over the average it was like it wasn't much i mean like at the time i think it was like ten dollars beneath now it's like two dollars it's pretty much just like non-zero it's about the threshold um and we have had almost no spam and part

of that is that we are small for sure right like there has to be some value um but one thing that you could do that we could do which is really exciting is that i think the takeaway here for our takeaway at least is that like having like it doesn't take much um friction to kind of like render spam like cost and effective right like if it's free why not spam right if it's slightly expensive like spam doesn't work all that often if it has some cost to it um it starts being pretty ineffective um and the idea here was like okay if you have to like pay a couple bucks on gas every time you want like load up a new wallet to spam like it's probably not

going to be worth it um so we've talked about some with communities is is potentially allowing communities to set up roles where users would be required to like essentially stake something right and if they're deemed kind of like a bad actor in some way like similar to proof of stake like they could be slashed like it's just we need to feel like we don't have a lot of clarity on what this actually looks like right there's a ton of questions around like well they actually stay like what does that smart contract look like what does it mean i mean this question doesn't mean to be deemed a bad actor who gets to decide that right like that's not probably like you can't like mathematically prove something as spam like you can in certain cases um of uh proof of stakes so there's a

lot of details throughout them but like that's something that we can do that reddit and discord just won't be able to do and there's there's kind of there's a lot of things that we could kind of explore in that area but that's only available because we have user's wallets connected right i'm fired up about that that is that is huge huge online because you said before one of the biggest problems it with discord is the spam issue and not only is it a big problem because people are losing money and you know it affects it is it is a huge turn off for onboarding to web 3. and that is a problem for all of us right like everybody in the space

any time somebody gets has negative experience and gets scammed they might leave and never come back i don't think we can downplay that right so yeah i'm that is yeah it's it's that would be incredible if you guys could solve that and i think you nailed it it's not it's not a it's not it doesn't have to be i mean it doesn't have to be some you know huge amount of money that people have we've talked about the same thing with with email previously on the podcast we talked about how there was a a product that was looking to just basically do the same thing with email in order to send an email to somebody you would have to pay like a penny but because it was costing pennies then

spammers wouldn't do it anymore and you might solve the email spam issue too so yeah respect yeah someone's got no it's either no someone someone does and it's like it it's yeah it's something that that crypto enables right um in a way that would be like you might be able to do something like that in like a web 2 world would be hard right you know credit card information like like issue refunds i mean it's kind of like it'd be kind of a pain right so i want to get into sort of the the um the future of web3 social in a second but i'm curious a lot of our audience has communities or is building communities whether it's like nfts or dows or whatever is gm getting into trying to be like

all the dow tools like when you're a dao for example you want to do something with voting and you might use like snapshot or you want to you know do coordinate where you want to send out tokens to people who have been helping and whatever so like right now in the dow space everything is everywhere there's just a million different tools um you said one of discourse i think you said bankless uses is like are you guys trying to build in all those tools as well or will you like open up apis and integrate a bunch of tools in or what's what are you guys thinking there yeah really great question it's the latter um like we see ourselves at like our butter is like the communication um like like we don't plan to build something like coordinate or snapshot or um any of those it's like i would say

that this this isn't again don't don't hold me to this but i think uh a loose mental model is that like if it's kind of like in discord or done by like a discord bot that's kind of something that we're like we're looking at and talking to commute members about um right if it's it was really like its own separate application um like coordinate snapshot i mean they work right and people use them because like they solve very real problems and um yeah i don't really see us like getting kind of like into that space i think absolutely there's like we will integrate with those at some point i think there's like a ton of i like really cool things that we could do to integrate with um with snapshot in in community just like again other

discord bots do where you could easily see right you could have whatever like a forum post and you could integrate with with snapchat you could actually pull in like live counts to that or something right or you could actually pull in you could actually look you could see um again i don't know if like this we could actually see in someone's community because we have public addresses you could actually see what they voted on in different proposals right you could see like oh this person had voted on this proposal this post person like voted this way on this proposal right um and there's kind of like a lot of things that we could do um around integrating which is really exciting but not not in terms of replacing okay so do you see yourselves then as the one thing i'm constantly trying to figure out from the

ux part of communication with the community is where's the home page there doesn't seem to be a home page so when we talk about this you know dow tech stack for example you know you've got coordinate you've got snapshots managed governance so is is gm the home page or is there i'm just curious what your thought where is the home yeah where do you think the home where does it fit in that's right so home page for the community you're saying right like what what's yeah yeah yeah not their marketing homepage but community homepage yeah i mean i i think it's it's an excellent question what i would say is that um it probably depends depending on like

the the uh uh stage of the kind of like of the community um i think early stages um it probably will like like if like we hope at least some things think there probably will be something like like gm right like mostly all they have is like this lock means that they don't even have tokens yet right like they're like like communities they'll like call themselves dads they're like we're just like kind of group of people like really interested in like in in crypto that's awesome right i'm not spared to do that at all um i think for coming like that it really is solely based around around communication like the communication um kind of like platform would be uh uh kinda like would be the home page um one of the things that we would like to do that's on our roadmap um this goes into like again

progressive centralization things like that is to open up our apis um because one one of the i like for larger communities on the other because we'll talk to we've talked to a few communities um or like few like communities are trying to start that have existing brands and things like that we'll have like a couple hundred thousand people and they're interested in like owning their brand right like they don't want to be c whatever on gm understandably right they want you to go to community.whatever x.com and you're there and i think um for larger communities i think that's probably where we'll go is that they will own the experience and they will integrate um into corn ape into snapshot but also

into gm to pull kind of like the community and social and we were even talking with other people about that about who have like communities themselves and they're interested in gm being like the the comment section effectively right can they integrate gm into like they want to post their own like like proprietary research but they don't want to build a comment system they don't like to deal with that so they're like hey like can we integrate with gm and like use gm to like back this this um comment system um but really for the most part own the user experience for for our members um so that's that's the route that that we're planning on going um is opening up these apis and gm.xyz is like one place that you could go to

interact with the community but other people could spin up other clients um communities could spin up their own clients that are specific to their communities um all kind of built on on top of gm so that's kind of like the the future that we envision at least so when we talk about ownership of communities um right now i look in the web3 space and there's like there's gm which is kind of like the reddit uh and then there's like lens protocol which i mean it's the underlying social graph but what's on it right now is like the lenster which is kind of like your facebook or your instagram sort of thing so fairly different things here one sort of social building audience is once focused on communities um the difference that i see right now and this is something that you guys say is that you're going to progressively

decentralize right like lens protocol is like everything you do on there you basically own it's minted as an nft right now anyway gm is not that way other than connecting in and integrating with web3 it itself as a platform i guess is not web 3 technically um talk about like why you started that way if you can um and like what this whole progressively decentralized progressively decentralized means and like what that looks like in the end what's the plan there yeah absolutely um so yeah we're really up front about this um this whole post on on our website in the about section kind of about it um we are not like decentralized like our tech stack is like aws like we are a very traditional web to tech stack um i think that the simplest way to put this is that like we

read from the blockchain we don't write to the blockchain um so we're not like we don't have like in-house smart contracts we're not issuing nfts or tokens um but we are like like you said um integrating with the blockchain like reading data and validating data what twitter's doing with pfps and same with instagram yeah exactly exactly um so that that's where we are right now um and the the fundamental um the fundamental reason is that uh decentralization has a lot of benefits it has a lot of drawbacks too um the biggest drawback is uh the speed at which you can iterate and develop um and this is true like this isn't even just in technology right

like like democracy is a fairly decentralized form of um compared to others and is also part of what makes it really slow um and infuriating slow right but it's decentralized and there's a lot of benefits and it's like yeah like we'll take because the government like we'll take we'll take those trade-offs right um same is true for for for building technology the the speed at which we can ship um is 10x if not 100x faster than on decentralized architecture and uh part of that is just because it's decentralized in nature and part of it is because like the infrastructure the tooling just like isn't there um and

uh the next step of this because like there's no like moving fast isn't necessarily good in and of itself but we really believe that in order like the best way to build a product that's valuable um and to get to a practice valuable is to just like iterate fast and ship quickly um and that that is one of the biggest advantages that we have over incumbents and other people in the space is that we just feel like we can out execute um and that our goal is like first and foremost to build a valuable product because that is when decentralization matters right like to us decentralization doesn't matter if no one is using it and oftentimes um i mean maybe this is controversial but oftentimes i think decentralization um

is kind of like a hammer looking for nail a little bit um and there are very valid uses and real like genuine uses of decentralization but it seems like something that just like everything is decentralized it has to be decentralized if you're not decentralized right like it's not like good enough um and i think that uh yeah like there's there's very real trade-offs in that until we get something that's that's actually providing genuine value to users um we think it's much better for us to be able to move fast and do things like ship roles in a month right ship real-time chat like run ship real time chat in about a month and i i i just like couldn't do that um kind of on on decentralized architecture

i also i agree with that completely i also feel like you don't need to be decentralized until the thing that you want to be decentralized is like makes a huge impact when you make a decision or it's holding a lot of value but like until which i mean gm hopes to be that in the future but like until it has billions of users like it doesn't need to be like something with a thousand users why does that need to be maximally decentralized yeah but just i don't understand why people think that it makes zero sense yeah i i we we like totally agree with you and that um i think what's the other thing i just said just in my mind um i forget if i remember i'll come back to it okay but yeah we like we totally agree um that uh it like it doesn't it doesn't

have to always be decentralized well i think the the challenge that that exists is and i agree that doesn't have to be always be decentralized i'm definitely a i totally support the speed in the beginning and ignored up speed you need centralization but the challenge is when you come down to funding and if you fund in a investor vc model then i wonder how do you decentralize like that i think is where some sometimes there can be challenges because i'm not sure how i'm not a finance guy so i don't know like if you got funding could you decentralize after

that like you know and this might be a different conversation to have in terms of the financial and investment setup of equity versus tokens and decentralization but um but yeah i think that's that's the one area where i'm not sure how to navigate it but one example that i've that we've talked about before on the podcast is is maker you mentioned make her before you know maker maker went back and forth several times i don't know the full story but if i'm correct they started decentralized then they centralized then they decentralized again so they went back because exactly what you

said they realized that pace was important so you needed centralization and then once they had enough scale they were able to decentralize so i guess my question to you is do you guys like and do you guys have a like a road map do you in terms of like how do you decentralize like do you guys think about that like is there a framework of what any project could basically take from to go from centralized to decentralized yeah uh so i we don't have like a step-by-step like like a path here but we do think about this a lot because and the main reason we don't have a set by step pad is a lot of different ways that

we can go and and as the time comes we'll we'll figure out kind of like what makes most sense for us um i think one of the things with decentralization is uh it's it's oftentimes a binary uh descriptor like is this decentralized or is this not um yeah and we think about decentralization kind of in two two large swaths which is still probably too too high level one is like decentralizing governance and the other is decentralizing data um and most likely we'll see most likely we'll go the decentralized governance first right we're like we may still be running like a like web 2 stack um but the ownership the decision making things like that are done in a decentralized way um so that would likely be be the

first step and uh we kind of have to figure out like what that path looks like for us um yeah maker has has a pretty good model um you know swap has like similar models um so we're like looking at those i'm sure we won't follow anything exactly but we're looking at what other people have done in this space successfully because one of the one of the other big issues in the space it's almost like uh like all the tokens are created create all this speculation and it's this massive problem for so many projects because it completely obscures whether you're actually doing anything that's valuable or not because like if people think they can make money especially during a bull market um it really obscures like any notion like do you have product

market fit which like is fundamentally kind of like all that matters at the end of the day at least for for a long term kind of like sustainable business um so uh yeah we're really wary about talking about tokens or about kind of like like like coming to that path um because there's a lot there's a lot of issues with it as well but we think a lot about what um what decentralized governance um would look like um then there's a decentralized data piece which is like typically kind of what people think more of this decentralization right is this thing actually like like running on chain um again we don't know exactly what this will look like um one of the other reasons that we like progressive decentralization is that the infrastructure we at least believe the infrastructure

right now is not in the place to support a like global scale social network that people expect right people expect real-time feedback they expect people to like click like and have it be liked they expect real time notifications even real time like chat and dms and there's just like not there's like like the the technology like you could maybe try to do something um but it probably wouldn't be fully decentralized and it wouldn't be scalable and kind of like the way that we needed it um and we think that those uh standards are gonna change because they're they're changing really fast right like there's a lot of cool projects are kind of like out there they're doing things kind of like in decentralized storage um and uh we are

wary of hitching our cart to the wrong horse um and really committing and building something kind of like on like like whatever whatever the technology is today um and then two years down the road something else comes out it's like man like we just architected our entire application pre-product market fit but kind of like around this like one technology um that now like clearly there's there's a use case that's or there's like a there's a um technology that fits our use case better so that that's another one of our hesitations with with jumping into decentralization kind of before product market fit if i had to put it out there well i would roughly say is like find proc market fit figure out how we're going to decentralize government or governance

and then figure out how we decentralize data um again don't hold this to that um and all those can look very different ways right decentralized governance doesn't strictly mean a token or anything like that but that's roughly the path we think about when you say decentralized data are you talking about like the content that we're creating and posting on top of gm or are you talking like there's also user data which i guess you guys probably don't really collect because we're just connecting with a wall anyway so you already have kind of erased that side of it but there's definitely like the interactions and things we're doing on the site is that what you mean by decentralized data yeah so so think like i ideally and like in the end state like like go like way down the road like that stuff would be decentralized yeah right um and that

would be like yeah user data um it would be like like user generated content um communities things like that like like would be kind of like would be decentralized i think the the even more important piece to us is that it's user owned um right and that comes a lot with decentralization but one of the issues i think i think you mentioned this in like your uh the the podcasts are just released like going down the rabbit hole podcast um but like one of the there's two huge issues we see with web 2 uh social networks one is that they have data monopolies right like facebook does not share data with youtube because not your data tick talk right let alone just not share data with like whatever the startup that's trying

to do something new um and we think that really like stifles a ton of innovation kind of like in this space and a good case study is is twitter with this and the early days twitter had open apis all these things were built on top of it right the bird came out of other people like like the like twitter bird wasn't twitter the twitter mobile app was like acquired um there's like a lot of things that came out of of having um like open apis and data that that's not kind of like siloed um and then like most web two social networks they realize they can make a ton of money on ads and if they allowed other clients to build on top of them they could just filter out ads um so they shut down

their apis and that's like the end of that um i think that's a massive issue and is really holding back kind of like the social space um the second big issue is that uh current social networks outside made the exception like youtube a little bit have 100 take rate um which means that all the value that's generated like all the like eyeballs that are on facebook on tick tock on instagram that are seeing ads um and that are they are seeing ads because of content that other people create um the people who are creating that content don't see any of that right um reddit for example right the person who created each finance who created wall street

bets right like they don't see like any of that value massive value you're like right like wall street by 10 what that's there's like tens of millions of people right um and the people who put like blood sweat and tears into like monitoring that community starting that community creating content that community um see see none of that and for us that's kind of a huge kind of like a huge issue and a huge like in a perfect use case kind of four for web three um is actually kind of like giving one giving communities ways to like monetize um and actually like see some of that value and then two giving individuals themselves um kind of ways to uh kind of get value from from their

their content their work i love that and you know it's interesting i like the way you guys are are kind of doing this of like let's see where the tech goes because you're right the tech is not ready in web 3 the tech is not ready for social not even close uh i mean the the ux of web 3 is absolutely terrible yeah i say this with every podcast i think but what's interesting you have like lens who's like kind of on the other spectrum right where they're like let's just do it full on let's experiment and see what happens um but like you you can't really i mean it's only been launched for like a few weeks or whatever a few months now so i don't want to like harp on them at all because i love what lens is doing but like you couldn't go and put a hundred

thousand person community on there right now like you gotta switch over your network every time you wanna get in and then you gotta sign every transaction just to like comment it's crazy um so i like kind of slowplaying it see how it goes but like integrating in and doing everything you can to be as web 3 as possible i'm curious though whether you do go fully decentralized you decentralize the data or not we just talked about like what the business model is of big tech which is basically let's take all your data and then let's sell ads i asked brad the same thing here on lens what's the business model of gm if not ads how do you guys how do you guys make money or what yeah yeah absolutely uh again a lot of different pads we can go i think a few a

few that are um uh most top of mind um one is is aussie may be boring for lack of a better word um and is that uh we're kind of this weird like not quite like we're not we're not really kind of like b2c we're also they're like gals aren't like fully businesses but um but there's kind of there's kind of like hybrid i think there's potentially a lot of functionality that we could offer um communities particularly like larger communities that they'd be willing to pay for so i think a very simple very web two sort of business model um we need to have premium features and um one thing we we

like talk about some it goes back to the support thing right like potentially like a very simple support system where like every community there's like a support channel and you go to support channel and it's like you click on like the talk to sales on a website and you're talking with the community moderators and like it's verified through like signing a wallet they're actually talking to community moderators on the moderator side they have some like ticketing system where they can see who's talking they can sign to people they can set priorities something like that right like like just pretty basic way to provide support for your community um so that's that's kind of a simple thing um and there's a there's a lot more that we could come off around so that's kind of like one one round i mean this we may end up at a hybrid i i don't know but

that's one the second is a much more um like web3 crypto approaches that potentially taking cuts of transactions and there's there's a number of different ways that this could look um maybe it may be an obvious one um or or like first one that jumps to mind is that it would be pretty natural once we had communities going to facilitate transactions inside of of gm right like hey like that's cool nft like let me put an offer on it right um that like facebook marketplace has been kinda like quite successful um there could be something like that on um on gm as well and we could take those transactions another one that we're like really excited about direct we think a lot about we're gonna like really start

making moves on um in the next next couple weeks uh it's kind of like this like uh gm name service um similar to ens but uh i think the thing that's particularly exciting about it is we could actually do it we think about in the context of communities um so uh i think the best way to motivate this is again think about like wall street bets creators of wall street's bets see no value and then also think about in this context of that we have uh role based uh or like token based roles right so if you own a particular whatever if you own a punk in the community you could be granted right access to whatever like the the punk's internal topic or something like that um

what we could do what we talk about kind of with this gns is that um uh we actually issue nfts for communities themselves and that whoever owns the nft we give like super admin rights to for a particular community so whichever wallet owns like the c gm nft like we would verify that they own that and that would grant that wallet super admin rights that community um and it actually turns like communities into assets potentially right um where like like there is value in being the owner of a large community and that um that solves a couple probably like

doesn't solve probably like it addresses a few things for us one it again gives community managers people create communities people like putting work in communities like an actual asset that approves value two we can also take a cut of when those assets change hands potentially even take potentially even like charge for minting those like it seems unlikely we'll do that um and we wouldn't do that solely for a like monetization route um it'd be more about kind of like reducing um reducing spam and things like that but that's also a route that we can monetize um so those are like two high-level like like routes we could go down in terms of monetization that role idea i love so quick story four years ago i was i think it was four

years ago or so i was a health coach right and i built like an online course and a membership and all this and uh and i had a podcast in that but i was in a bunch of facebook groups for my ideal customer and i was just posting content in there that's how i get all my clients and the guy that owned this facebook group which had like 60 000 people in it it was huge he dm'd me and he's like do you want to buy my facebook group off me and be the admin i was like at first i laughed i was like what are you talking about and then i was like wait a minute i could own this group of 60 000 people and it was like getting hundreds of people in it every single day it was crazy and i was like uh how much and so he

like made me an offer and i was like okay how do i do this like how do you i have to give him money somehow and then he's got to make me an admin so like i ended up getting some like um what do you call it where you get like an intermediary to like do it and i sent him the money and then he had to make me and i bought it off him it was awesome it was the weirdest experience of my life yeah facebook blocked me uh and shut it all down and then kyle got rubbed by facebook i can see right now this role idea with the nfts is like oh that's an immediate like perfect situation if that would have because it would have been so easy to do it all yeah i love that idea it's super smart so cool yeah so there's there's a lot of

different things there that we're excited about it goes back to your um kind of question about like differentiation right um and like the things that we can do because we have a wallet linked um that other players like won't be able to do and we're not there yet like again we're starting trying to build lives like table stakes features which we're pretty close to we're probably honestly like and they'll always be stuff like that we're probably like a month or two months away from like really having a lot of those like people say features done um and then after that is when i'm really excited because they'll start being a lot of these kind of like more kind of differentiated web three native uh kind of features some of which will just replace spots on discord but some of which would be kind of like like brand

new functionality can i put in a feature request yeah absolutely all yours so one of the things that our community has been trying to figure out we're looking to launch a token as well it's going to be valueless because we don't want any speculation we just want to use it as kind of like a a point system just as we start forming and structuring the the uh the community and the problem we're having with discord is well we want to be able to like tip or send the tokens to people who are contributing in our community and it's like in order to do that we have to dm them like yo what's your ethereum address yeah uh and then we have to keep it on file then like make sure we go and check it it's like why can't i just click on their name and

like send you know um so that's whoever builds that like there is like a bot that does it but only for a few tokens um we need that so gm so excited you brought us up it's something this is generally something to talk a lot about is that this idea of like like we have this like rep system built in into the platform where it's right now just like like a pretty basic calculation kind of like reddit karma um but uh this idea of like rewarding community members is something that a lot of community moderators we talk about ask about like hey like we like like there are people right small number of people who are putting this community on their back like we want to recognize and want to reward them but it's hard um so we absolutely like this this 100 is is in our roadmap um to one make it a

lot easier to see who in your community is is active um there's a lot of cool stuff we could do here where you can see people like people in community who are active you can also see whatever like if you have a token how many tokens they own how long have they held your tokens things like that so you can have this like an intersection of cool data there and then two making it really easy to to do air drops right it's like hey like whatever send a pop or send an nft to the first thousand people who joined right or like like send it to like this specific person who had we're gonna do whatever an ft if like the top post each week right the most interesting post right so like here's here's a person like cinnamon ft um a lot another one of the things that

we we see is providing a lot of value is potentially helping communities go from like tokenless to tokened right um and they start on gm not having a token and then when they make the decision like hey we wanna have token like like at first it'll probably be a very manual process that will hold like handhold them and like do it but potentially like productionize this where it's like hey like okay you want like issue a token click issue token like what do you want you want erc20 do you want your c71 boom like how many do you want here are the users how do you want like divide it down like upload whatever like uh csv of addresses or do you want it to be on gm sorted by interaction or like how do you want to do this and you click issue and like we

just like spin all up right in the background like send it out so there's there's a ton a ton a ton of stuff that we could do there because i think what you just said is something that we hear pretty greatly from people who run kind of like active communities right web 3 is going to be so much cooler when all that is actually possible yeah so as we as we wrap up here i just have one kind of final question i think jay's got a bunch of like speed round questions for you um but if we were to just zoom out um and i don't know if you have anything to add in here but just taking a look at where web3 and social and communication communities where that and how that looks five years 10 years i don't know whatever time frame you want to give

like how do you think that this all changes like right now we're predominantly on web 2 and there's like people playing around on some web 3 stuff but where do you think this goes what do you think the big changes are um i think two fundamental changes are going to happen and they're both like like similar and it's kind of like a splintering um one of which is i think this idea of of having multiple clients i think um is going to become a reality in one way or another i mean like elon talks about this some even even with twitter um is that it's not just going to be like there is five social networks and it's it's fundamental it's like all siloed i think um someone will will show how valuable it is to have like

competition when it comes to clients and things like that um i think that will be kind of like the the long-term winning architecture um i think the second thing we didn't touch on this but i think the second thing that that we see is i think there's gonna be like a splintering of identities um kind of in in social i think right now it's kind of like like hybrid like some people do this right where they'll have like different like synonymous accounts for for different interests um in their life um but we're not really there like a lot of us myself including kind of just have like a single real identity account um i think we'll increasingly see particularly as like generations grow up um who are like born like truly into like a very like like uh social um like digital social world um people have like

multiple identities online right might have a work identity they might have their sports fan identity they might have their professional or i guess that work they might have like some identity on like whatever for your community a particular project they're working on um i think we're gonna see that like become increasingly more more common super interesting to think about that i don't know how that we should have a whole podcast about how that plays out and we've had had multiple conversations on the podcast uh our podcast that is coming out this week is with disco xyz and they're doing a lot of work around identity uh we've yeah we've we've talked to unstoppable domains and their thoughts on identity and it's really interesting very very interesting yeah

all right any final questions kai before i jump into the speed round let's head to speed around okay let's do it um what's one nft you'll never sell oh that's a good question um i have a squiggle that i bought at the peak peak prices [Laughter] i think i hit the peak within two weeks it's the most it's the most down bad i've really been um but i i love our blocks um i think what they do is like so unbelievably be like cool

especially when you dive into like how they're different from other um nft projects another kind like algorithmically like generated project is like incredible and squirrel's like like being first i think it's it's really really cool but down bad i love it i love it that's great yeah big fan of art blocks as well uh what's another web 3 other than gm another web 3 project you're excited about could be crypto could be nft could be a dow could be anything good question um a few different answers for this um one uh default d5 protocol i learned about kind of one of the ones that

honestly got me really excited about d5 originally it's called alchemics um yeah it's like a self-repaying loan it's like it it's it just seems like like such a good use kind of of d5 and i follow it some um and it's it's exciting so uh that's one um another one i like i really like wine um and there's this there's this uh dow that just issued uh an nft called avico i think a bit of binto um okay and they have some like winery in napa and like i don't know it's i'll see where it goes definitely this is not this is not uh financial advice but obviously you're down bad don't listen [Laughter] but i i think i

there's a lot in this space i'm like obviously constitution down like the first one like like really kicked a lot of this off there's um uh what's the golf course one that there's something yeah yeah links out right there's a lot of they're kind of like interesting in this space that like to be totally honest i don't really understand how the financials work like it doesn't like it doesn't compute to me um which is part of where i'm like i go in um kind of expecting i don't know 100 lost but i'm really interested in like what that like i'm really interested in like what it could turn into because it's like that that intersection is something i think that has yet to really be like figured out and nailed down so projects like that even though i like don't quite get how the like financials

work i'm really interested to see how they play out because i think there's a lot of potential um but i just don't quite know what it's going to look like in the end cool one thing you've bought recently for under 100 that has brought you joy and it does not have to be a digital product it can be a physical product oh probably a bottle of wine like wine um drinking a lot of like like lambrusco it's like a like a sparkling red that i really enjoy and they're they're like it's it's nice because like like even like goodlam bruce goes are still like 15 or 20 so they're not they're not that expensive and in high summer days it's

very enjoyable to have like like a chilled sparkling bread central park new york hotel exactly yeah sounds pretty nice very nice uh you you mentioned this is my my final question uh you mentioned early on in the uh in the podcast that that you guys what you initially started doing has changed along the way and i think that's just such a valuable lesson for founders and operators right now is uh and probably one of the biggest takeaways i had from nftnyc was the only way to learn is to jump in to do and you don't need to know the the end result you just gotta sort

of take the next step and learn along the way um so if you had a billboard to any web3 founder or any any person that's getting involved in web3 and this billboard your advice what would you put on that billboard um it's a tough one two things two things that have that i think about have thought about recently that i've like internalized a wish that i had like thought of like like understood sooner um one is that this is it'll sound kind of funny when i say but like the the bar for people caring about things is much lower than i

thought it was like i like it's it's and it's it's easy it was easy for me to think that like you needed to have something radical something totally different something really exceptional for people to care um and the reality is like it's hard to get people to care for sure but um i'm consistently surprised with gm that like how much people seem to like care and be interested and ask questions um and i think i was kind of like oh it's like it's like the fear of failure the fear of people like not hearing putting yourself out there putting like energy into something and then people like why are you doing this like

like who cares um and webbing in particular i think is incredible for that right people are so supportive um it's it's honestly incredible so that's the biggest big thing that's the first big thing is that like the bar for people like caring about something is much lower than it seems like it is um the second thing is exactly what you said like like creativity innovation is in is in the process um it's not like an epiphany moment um that gm the way it is right now is not like like we two months ago we had like okay we know our path like that's what we're doing we did it for a month and we're like wait like we got and this is on me like like mike i was oh i was like joke with mike that mike's

like six weeks ahead on of me on product because i'll like push back on mike's ideas and then like six weeks later i come back like no you're right like we should we need to focus more on like getting communities built like getting them like on board and things like that and we like we tried and we learned a ton and we're like hey no like the reality is like the product isn't where it needs to be like we don't have those table stakes features and that has like shifted our focus like okay like now we just need to build um so like that's by far the biggest thing is that um starting somewhere um like wherever it is like start and it's absolutely going to change like the innovation happens in that process like innovation doesn't happen up front like

the innovation is like comes with the process and the doing um and that's also something that i wish i i had kind of internalized or known sooner that's awesome there's a couple a couple really good quotes there that we'll for sure want to pull out and share i want to give you a chance to tell people where they can find you online give your shill anything uh you want to ask the audience how they can get involved with gm yeah absolutely um so uh websites jam.xyz go there check it out like i said you have to like silent with eath but check it out um there's a c gm community uh that's kind of like the community for

like us for like the gm product tons of people share feedback um we build in the open like we're strong believers in in the open we share designs before we even start on them we share road maps we share features we share demos and we ask for community feedback and all the time community feedback um impacts our roadmap impacts what we build and packs what it looks like um so if you're interested like yeah sign in and like give us um give us all as much feedback as you want is genuinely like the most the most helpful thing um twitter gm.xyz on twitter it's like gmdot xyz um because where we do the same thing ask for feedback share a bunch of demos things like that um you can find me at

grant magdans m-a-g-d-a-n-c um on twitter as well that's us awesome we will put all those links in the show notes grant this has been awesome really really appreciate you coming on the show this is uh i feel like we're gonna need a part two and i was gonna say six months but it might be in one month at the pace that is removing yeah no this is awesome thank you thanks grant thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are

missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one