Tezos - The Path Forward
Tags: Blockchain, Tezos, Cryptocurrency, Community, Technology

We’re going to start off with that which gets the least amount of criticism — the average, vocal, Tezos community member; there is some strange tendency for the Tezos community to self-sabotage and engage in entirely unproductive actions. I’d reason that those who are most critical of Tezos are those within the Tezos community itself.

This is especially the case on Reddit, which may also hint towards the need to reevaluate the current structure of r/Tezos.

Presumably, people are critical of Tezos because they want Tezos to thrive — but at some point it becomes too much. Why is it that the Tezos subreddit is filled with posts and comments about how marketing needs to take advantage of influencers? Merely two months ago, the Tezos Foundation brought Huge, a highly experienced marketing firm that has worked with massive companies, on board as Agency of Record for the foundation. Only about a week before the Huge announcement, there was the announcement that a new Marketing and Communications organization named Blokhaus was coming to the Tezos ecosystem. Do we really think that neither of these organizations have considered using influencers? In merely a few months, we have already seen Tezos-related marketing appear with huge partnerships and a full video ad campaign. Maybe we can stop spamming the subreddit with “where are the influencers?” posts and comments. Maybe we can shift to actually being productive with our time.

Oh, but this is far from a recent phenomenon. The Tezos community has a history of negativity regarding marketing — and the progress of marketing initiatives does nothing to halt it. All you need to do is search the keyword “marketing” on the Tezos subreddit to see the large amount of posts complaining about marketing.

And it’s not just marketing. The Tezos community will jump at anything remotely imperfect.

Let’s look at the curious case of reddit user u/No-Metal-6762 who joined Reddit in February 2021. Despite claiming to be an “ICO participant,” 80% of the content he’s posted on Reddit is just trashing on the Tezos Foundation and Arthur Breitman. Instead of taking responsibility as a community member and attempting to assist with spreading the word of Tezos, we get posts complaining that Tezos isn’t increasing in price during the bull run, spamming the subreddit with negative comments, and spamming posts asking “who can the community point to and blame?” (post deleted, but the comments are still available) across Tezos-related subreddits.

My favorite post of all-time was definitely this one that practically begged Arthur to respond while also including this golden line addressed to him, “You are a more technical and intellectual personality, marketing is not your primary strength. However great leaders know their strengths as well as weaknesses and address them.”

Imagine being a random, anonymous person on the internet and lecturing someone, who was instrumental in building a revolutionary blockchain, about his “strengths and weaknesses” while, most likely, contributing nothing of value to Tezos yourself. Sure, no person is perfect — but comments like these are insulting and unproductive.

There’s also a somewhat common trend in all these threads — there’s a lot of negativity that is a simply a result of the community’s own ignorance. For example, look at this exchange under a post asking about Tezos marketing efforts:

User 1: “this was a pretty good one”

User 2: “But that was a decision by a 3rd party. Tezos didn’t pay them to do it to get more visibility”

User 1: “it was two parts. the VC firm wants more Tezos action, and the TF is investing in the VC firm.”

User 2: “Thank you for the insight!”

Now, this was one of the more simple and civil exchanges but it captures the overall point —far more goes into marketing behind the scenes than the community cares to realize.

Let’s compare this to the mentality of other communities.

Algorand had the same concerns about marketing but the community handled it completely differently. Many posts have actually called out the community’s criticisms of marketing and they have pointed out that the marketing is fine.

I’ve been critical of the Tezos Foundation’s marketing initiatives in the past. However, things have changed. Is it possible that we can let the professionals work for a bit as we shift our focus to things that are actually productive? There are plenty of better uses for our time.

Look at things this way:

There are currently over 51,000 members of the Tezos subreddit. If every member of the subreddit made a single comment a year on r/cryptocurrency, then, distributed evenly, that would be over 140 Tezos-related comments a day. If only half the subreddit members made 1 comment a year about Tezos on r/cryptocurrency then that would still be 70 comments a day.

In order to have 1 medium article a day for an entire year we merely need 365 Tezos community members to write a single article over the course of 365 days. That’s less than 1% of the Tezos community writing a single article a year. Actually, people don’t even need to write medium articles — just post on r/cryptocurrency itself and hype up Tezos as much as possible. Look at this post written by someone who openly admits, “I’m new to all stuff about crypto” getting over 671 upvotes and over 426 comments.

Is someone going to tell me that all these people concerned about marketing can’t find the time to make a few comments in r/cryptocurrency? Or make a single medium article, or a single r/cryptocurrency post, hyping up Tezos? Is someone going to tell me that a post instructing a professional marketing agency to use influencers (while they’re already, most likely, aware of such things) is more important than getting hundreds, if not thousands, of people aware of Tezos on social media with relatively low effort? Please, do the logical analysis on that and consider re-configuring your priorities here.