Finding High Fryers & Making Smoke Signal Sticky (2 for 1 offer)

Strategy
#1

STICKY SIGNAL

I spoke a bit about this on telegram, but at the moment SmokeSignal, in my humble opinion, is way undervalued.

We live in a society more and more bereft of freedom every day, the thought police are here, and they are here to stay. Censorship is everywhere, spoken about on the evening news in the western world, discussed in whispers in places where censorship is already the norm, but we have a public forum which is uncensorable, and nobody knows about it…
Logan was worried we would not capitalise on new users if the site wasn’t sticky, but it is my belief that it’s the people that make a site sticky, not the platform.

SmokeSignal might be helped by a more sexy looking UI granted, but the bones are there, to get some meat on the bones we need traffic and there is lots of traffic to be had if we look in the right places.

HIGH FRYERS & FREE THINKERS

What is it that we are looking for? People, and in my view loads of different types of people. To be able to build an organisation that’s both well structured & educated (I use that term loosely) we need both well written governance code for the DAO to operate & lots of different people with a multitude of skills and attributes (hopefully with the ability to both persuade and collaborate, based on their knowledge of a particular problem or subject)

THE 2 FOR 1

Driving traffic to SmokeSignal will drive people to foundry, I think it’s that simple. Hopefully the people finding SmokeSignal will be free thinkers as well. My only fear is that we could attract a bunch of hard left or right wing individuals to the project as that is where censorship is the most prevalent, quite how many of those will bother to learn how to setup a wallet, load some ETH & DAI, and then actively want to get involved in a Governance level in Foundry?? I suggest it is likely to be extremely low. I suspect it will, on the whole, be those who are either libertarian or are just pissed off with the fact they can’t read both sides of the story.
I’ve said it already, but actively promoting SmokeSignal via a twitter bot or something of the like which trawls looking for anything that has been censored or flagged by a platform, offering a different option to voice opinions that cannot be censored would drive traffic to SmokeSignal then onward to Foundry.

I think not doing anything now will be a missed opportunity, I think the Jo Rogan interview with Alex Jones and not advertising SmokeSignal then was a missed opportunity, Donald Trump might only be around for a few months and there are a lot of people with an axe to grind, we have a place where people can say what they like and it can’t be censored, let’s let them at least know about it.
I should say have no clue how to write / program a twitter bot, I don’t know if there is something that could be used to do the same thing on reddit & other platforms???
I’d be interested to hear what others Fryers have to say.

Thanks

2 Likes
#2

I quite agree with your position, my suggestion would be to get a new channel featuring smokesignal, both traditional and crypto news channel.

1 Like
#3

The captain is right. We have an opportunity right now, with the rampant ramping up of censorship on popular platforms. We need to start trying to capture some of these frustrated users, rather than waiting for SmokeSignal itself to be more sticky at the UX level.

I’ve seen other platforms popping up trying to capture this frustration, too. Yesterday I even saw this, a warning about the emerging “decentralized world of hate”. So we’re witnessing, in real time, society “waking up” to this uncensorable potential, from multiple different angles.

I’m really grateful to @Captain_Stake for bringing this up in such stark terms. I’m pretty sold now, personally, on the urgency and importance of marketing SmokeSignal.

I love the idea of getting a bot to automatically respond to censored posts on other platforms. It will take a bit of investment–no one on our team has the relevant skills, so we’ll have to hire that out–but it will be an asset that continually pays off in a steady stream of new users frustrated by the limitations of traditionally owned companies.

Speaking personally, I see two next actions I can jump on immediately.

First, find a contractor who can write one of these bots. I’m thinking we should limit it to one platform to start–and my gut says Twitter. Twitter is relatively bot-friendly and is also one of the biggest offenders of subjective censorship. Any input on this decision?

Second, I think we should reorganize the Elm developer’s priorities to focus on just one or two particular SmokeSignal changes. I’ll share more about that as we go, but the short version is that a new user landing on SmokeSignal should get more of a sense of an “alive” community/discussion.

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#4

There is still the major hurdle of requiring crypto, while marketing to “regular people”. Most won’t have Metamask or Ether or DAI, let alone all three at once!

As a quick hack, here’s what I’m thinking:

On the front page of SmokeSignal, have an attention-grabbing block that says something like

This tool is impossible to censor, because all data gets permanently etched into the blockchain. Unfortunately, this means you’ll need some cryptocurrency to get started. We’re happy to help you out here with a little crypto so you can join the conversation!

Then in that same block, we’d have a form that checks for Metamask. When it’s detected, the user can submit a simple form, which can be submitted. And we’ll be watching that in the background, ready to grant starting DAI and ETH to new users - at least until the number of such requests turns into a spammy avalanche.

#5

Another thing worth discussing is the gas price. At current gas prices, the minimum cost of posting any message no matter how small is around $1.30. Fortunately it doesn’t go too crazy with larger messages: Captain Stake’s original post here would cost $2.77.

This isn’t great, but it’s not fatal. We can mitigate the pain of this by marketing SmokeSignal’s use case as that of an “unkillable blog/Medium”. The user can be assured that by paying this fee, they pay for data immortality.

Additionally, when we see any post that gives a lot of life to SmokeSignal, we can spend some DAI to tip the guy. Thus, a new user might find out that they’ve actually made more money than they lost. We can directly reward content that improves SmokeSignal’s stickiness.

#6

An additional benefit of tipping in this way is that other users will see this action; we (and anyone with DAI to tip) can directly signal what’s desireable to have on the platform.

#7

I think all of the above Logan, this would be a massive step forward. The fee for “data immortality” is a really key selling point IMO. You get what you pay for, as they say.

I think some key words in the SmokeSignal banner would help a user understand that platform quickly.

Uncensorable - Immutable - Unkillable
Real Free Speech - Built on the Blockhchain

#8

Uncensorable - Immutable - Unkillable
Real Free Speech - Immortally Encoded on the Blockchain

1 Like
#9

Uncensorable - Immutable - Unkillable
Real Free Speech - Cemented on the Blockchain

This is less awkward phrasing, but maybe it loses some clarity as to how the blockchain directly guarantees immortality…

#11

I completely agree that if SmokeSignal were to have an active user base, it sale would take care of itself.

I must admit that I feel out of my depth around how to market it exactly. I suppose it’s novel property is that it is truly uncensorable and that is the hook with which we can fish in the market.

#12

We can greatly reduce the cost of posting to SmokeSignal by removing the state stored hash in favour of a UI calculated hash and by not emitting all the byte data in the event but rather simply emitting a single event indicating that something was posted.

We could also reduce the cost by running the smart contracts on xDAI as well as Mainnet. This does go into the territory of “mostly immutable” as opposed to “unassailably immutable” though.

#13

Well, to take the data out of the event is to actually remove the data from SmokeSignal. That’s where the messages are right now. We’d need to find somewhere else to put it.

#14

We can get the message from the calldata of transactions to the SmokeSignal smart contract. The entire message is actually already in the call data and being duplicated in the event.