Screenshot Essays

optimist • building the front page of onchain culture at /forage • ENS: richiebonilla.eth

Everything I write here is financial advice

reasonable question! there are a few contributing factors that come to mind:

1. until recently, the tech wasn't mature enough to be abstracted away in the user experience

2. a lot of the world class design talent hasn't made it to the space. in part because of #1.

3. many people in this space are ideologically driven, leading to conflicting opinions about what should be abstracted away at all

not so different from the development of the computing industry overall. originally just for geeks, but as technology got better it became easier to deliver a simpler ux, and it takes world class talent to prioritize that simplicity. which is basically what made apple, apple.

I’m 1 years young to the crypto space but 15 years old to the UX design of tech product space, so I’m honestly asking this purely to understand, not not mock, but…

Why are everyone, who builds in this space, consistently 20 years behind schedule of what the consumer tech industry spent a lot of time and money to learn about this?

building generational.xyz, investor, photographer, nomad, exploring onchain & exploring the 🌎 /positivesum

yeah, i think that's a great approach. 

you could even say, "you post on instagram already. if you also post on zora, when people like it, you make money"

🎯 

when explaining nfts to friends, i often use photography as an example

there are photos that you own onchain, and there are photos that you don't own on every other internet platform, the word nft is never used

marketing, product and growth | prev content & comms lead at @nansen-ai

yep, but like you said it's much less effective in the current model.

for example, there is low overlap between my phone contacts and who i follow on twitter and ig. so importing that social graph doesn't get me far in many cases.

they also have to ask for me to pick my interests, when they could have a robust understanding of them instead.

agree it's enough reason to be optimistic!

Love this. 

Existing social apps are already doing what you suggest in the last paragraph just much less effective since they don’t actually have access to your identity on other apps. 

But they are already pointing you towards your friends (heavy emphasis on you importing your contacts so they can surface them), already try to show you things you like (by asking for areas of interest). 

Onchain social has the ability to do it better and that, is enough reason to be optimistic.

Startup artist seeking inspiration.  Champion of /bcard

sorry you had that experience. fortunately, it’s not up to us. the market will choose which experiences it prefers.

There are a lot of tech maxis that will call this sacrilege.  I got verbally beaten up a few times when I suggested people ELI5, with arguments that the whole point of this space was understanding decentralization concepts.

That’s just gatekeeping. Tech always tends towards max simplicity over the long term.

researching onchain | writing tomu.xyz founded overgie.com mintgate.io | nf.td/tomu

there’s a lot of in-group signaling by using the right buzzwords. people had a habit of labeling people/projects ngmi if they weren’t on the latest words. it’s happening less now than last cycle. the space is maturing.

🎯

also funny how projects, brands, companies still use techy words to get users when it was clear last cycle that nfts doesn’t get anyone in (real users that care about social “onchain”) -  but i guess we’ll still say this things next cycle as well

You nailed it. This is what blockchain needs to consider to scale beyond the echo chamber. Smartphone users don’t care about what WiFi protocol standards are used, they just wanna get online and use Instagram and send some emails. While the chain is valuable, it isn’t the value.