Arjan | That Poetry Guy on Farcaster

Danica Swanson pfp

I've been thinking about this stubborn how-to-get-writers-sustainably-funded problem for a long time, since it pre-dates crypto. It's actually become one of my main intellectual interests over the years. Without getting too far into the weeds, here are a few thoughts: What if Paragraph were to zoom out and focus more on the social layer from a systems perspective -- i.e., think of context, curation, and conversation as the primary paths to value creation, rather than individual writers? Could Paragraph help writers collectively build thriving creative scenes with network effects accruing to the contributors -- writers, editors, curators, preservers, and readers? One of the things that drew me to Paragraph in the first place was the quote-highlight feature, for example. Could Paragraph give contributors places to preserve quotes and respond to them in ways that might help draw others into an ongoing conversation around the work? Maybe in a mini-app?

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Danica Swanson pfp

For reference, I wrote about what I mean by "from a systems perspective" in this piece. (Look at that beautiful preview pane! Great design work, @paragraph!) https://paragraph.com/@danicaswanson/quality-writing-is-systemic

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Danica Swanson pfp

I also want to highlight this concept of "club goods" from @trigs, and a comment in the same thread by @wanderloots.eth that brings to mind the possibilities for the quote-highlight feature: "We also need a way for referential rewards. Eg, someone quotes someone else, value should flow back to the original creator." https://warpcast.com/trigs/0xb79f4393 https://warpcast.com/wanderloots.eth/0xb83d8f34

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Arjan | That Poetry Guy pfp

Arjan | That Poetry Guy

That was indeed an interesting conversation, and I like the club goods idea. This is more or less why I have started my @trpplffct poetry grant fund. It's still a bit low profile, and I am exploring ways to make it work, but the idea is that funds are raised through (Degen) tips and donations, and distributed through small grants and onchain collecting. It is small, but it works. I have raised enough to run it for a bit over a year now, doing a one-poet grant and a collection budget per month. Now it's a one-person project, but if something like that can be done by a collective... What I have been trying to solve for, is the challenge I found in 'crypto art' circles that artists are very supportive of eachother, and often pump back their earnings back into the community, but mostly these earnings come from other artists doing the same. It's a limited amount of value that is pumped around, in stead of a steady stream that comes from outside to fund writing.

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Danica Swanson pfp

I keep returning to the club goods idea too. Kudos to you for being "in the arena, trying things" in earnest, and for approaching the grant funding thoughtfully. Sounds like you've taken on a fair bit of coordination work. Too often it falls to already-overextended writers to take on additional labor on top of their creative work: crowdfunding campaigns, design, marketing, audience-building, coordination for grants, etc. I suspect most individual writers will not find that to be sustainable long-term. Collectives can share workloads, but of course they require significant coordination efforts too. I also wonder about the long-term sustainability of degen. Great point about the limits inherent in the way artists tend to use their earnings to support arts communities. Gift economics can work well in circles with built-in reciprocity. But as long as our default systems continue to extract the lion's share of value and return very little back to the value-creators themselves, it will be an uphill battle.

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