The community is dead, long live the community

Author: jamesrichardfry, Head of Market at Across Protocol

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

I have been hesitating on how to start writing this content. Part of me wants to paint everything in a sunny light. To package it with marketing jargon, make it sound grand, and then turn the page.

But that wouldn’t be entirely honest. If you know me, you know I am someone who wears my emotions on my sleeve and can’t keep things to myself. So, I’ll say it plainly.

The community is dead. Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. It goes without saying, but I still need to say it out loud.

I still miss the good old days in the Clubhouse and Discord chat rooms. Back then, we would spend a lot of time "vibing" with online friends, talking about magical internet currencies, the latest NFT drops, the best staking opportunities, sharing our pitfalls and losses, dreaming about the next great project, and truly "building" together.

To this day, I remain good friends with many online acquaintances. Some have even become close friends in real life. When the community was good, it was truly wonderful. I miss those days.

Looking at it from a broader perspective, what is a community? I rambled on about this for too long at the last all-hands meeting; I could almost hear my colleagues rolling their eyes.

To share a bit of my insights with you, here’s my view on communities:

A community is a group of people gathered around a common interest. In many aspects of daily life, we have communities.

From the school you attend, the sports you participate in, the religion you believe in, the gym you go to, even the grocery store where you shop, there are communities.

Some communities are rather superficial. The group of older gentlemen I see at the gym from Monday to Friday is a community, but it is clearly different from the circle of friends we intentionally spend time with.

Web3 communities or crypto communities are no different.

We gather around common interests. The summer of DeFi. The NFT craze. The NFT downturn. Various cross-chain interoperability, various zero-knowledge proofs.

No matter what you’re into, there’s always a group of people who will go deeper down the rabbit hole with you.

Some are in it for financial speculation. Others are driven by a deep belief and commitment to the early cypherpunk movement. Some crypto communities are more superficial or merely performative.

Others are very profound. I mean extremely profound. Like religious groups, with fervent followers, beliefs deeply rooted in your heart, the kind of depth that gives you the courage to step onto the stage and passionately explain why you believe in the founders, the project, the roadmap, and why you are the project’s most steadfast "diamond hands hodler."

Belief. It was this that drove parabolic growth in the early days. Without the community, there would be no crypto world as we know it today.

By the way, Across is no exception. The early days of the Across community were a golden age. The atmosphere was vibrant. There was a deep belief (yes, I’ve repeated this word multiple times). Filled with excitement and energy, people genuinely cared about the project because of its innovation, not because of the token price.

We recruited many people from the community who are still fighting alongside us today. Some early supporters remain loyal community members, sharing both joy and hardship with us.

When the community was good, it was truly wonderful.

But then, everything changed.

Fast forward to today. I’m about to say some blunt truths. Please understand, I’m not referring to "all" community members, "every" community group, nor am I painting everyone with the same brush. But if I continue to speak frankly, I am indeed referring to the majority. The vast majority.

The term "community" has been tarnished by the "extractors" of the crypto world. In many ways, if you want to know why "greed is the root of all evil," just look at the countless Discord "communities."

There are thousands of unread messages every day, astonishing daily active users, and a constant stream of social support until the token generation event (TGE) arrives. We all know how the script goes.

The atmosphere before the TGE mimics the sentiment of early crypto communities. Deep belief. A fire burning in the belly. The courage to step onto the stage. Profile pictures and project tags in bios. Life and death together, diamond hands, steadfast bullish hodlers.

Then, everyone changed.

One night before bed, you could hardly keep up with Discord notifications.

The next morning, it had become a ghost town.

Even worse.

You find your loyal "community" charging at you with pitchforks and torches.

All because of an airdrop.

You see, "community" is no longer a community.

It has devolved into an endless stream of AI-generated garbage, solely to earn points, to gain the hope of an airdrop, only to dump immediately, then complain about the token price, and label the project a scam or a rug pull (to be fair, this is often the case).

You don’t need me to finish this long-winded statement; you know what I’m trying to express, right?

"Community" is no longer a community. You all know it and can feel it. The timeline has soured. The Discord server has soured. The podcasts have soured. Twitter Spaces have soured.

Everything feels off, just like "Kang Shai Fu" is never "Kang Shi Fu." Everyone reading this article today understands this deep down, even if you’ve never articulated it so clearly before.

Today’s "community" is merely a cheap imitation of the early communities that built the crypto world into what it is now. The common interest of these "community" members can be summed up in one thing. Extraction. Fast. Decisive. Extraction. It is this poison that has stifled what the crypto world could and should have become.

Most of today’s (reiterating, not all) Discord "communities" consist of a mixed bag of remnants.

Some are truly loyal followers and believers. (To those who still support Across today, without you, we wouldn’t be where we are. Thank you. You know where to find us, and we will always have a place for you.)

Then there are others, often the majority, who come to extract benefits from the project. I won’t elaborate further.

Finally, there are those who show up just to complain. Because in every bear market, these specific types of "community" members will kick you when you’re down, as if the bear market has no impact on any team member, as if we caused the bear market to happen.

Unfortunately, the Across Discord has recently fallen into this "majority" category. Our "community" has become unrecognizable.

Those who acknowledge the incredible achievements we’ve made, recognize the progress Across has brought to the entire industry, and still support us have grown tired of being part of this extractive "community" and have left Discord.

The few who remain are eager to follow us to Twitter and other channels. The rest are what I defined earlier as the so-called "community." Yes, I say this with a fire burning in my belly and steadfast belief.

Therefore, today, the Across Discord will switch to read-only mode.

This is the first step in our planned complete shutdown of the server.

To those steadfast believers in the community, let’s continue to build. We have much work to do.

To Discord, thank you for hosting some of the beautiful old times in the crypto world; I will always cherish it.

The community is dead.

Long live the community.