ARGUING LESS
writing stuff down more
Recently, I’ve found myself getting drawn into lengthy debates in Discord or on Twitter with people about Friend Tech.
Here are some of the topics I’ve wasted my time attempting to disprove.
"It's a dystopian nightmare."
"It only benefits the influencers."
"It’s a giant ponzi scheme destined to steal everyone's money."
"No one actually enjoys it and is just in it for the airdrop."
"No one will want to pay $1,000s to talk to someone."
"Influencers don’t make as much money in this model, so why will they use it?"
"Why self-buy is good for Friend Tech."
While, on one hand, thinking critically about these points and working through rebuttals has sharpened my thinking about why Friend Tech is a hugely beneficial project, it also has taken up way too much of my time.
It’s also probably worsened my investment strategy. Constantly being bombarded with negative, pessimistic takes has likely caused me to internally question my own bullish thesis and sell keys early, or not hold as many as my underlying conviction suggests.
Instead, what I’ll do from now on is when I see a take or a viewpoint I disagree with, I’ll post a rebuttal in my Friend Tech room. If it's a super interesting point that requires a ton of nuance, then maybe I'll write a longer-form post here.
This way, my thinking improves, I’m forced to think through what I’m saying, but importantly, my answer is heard by people who want to hear it. Not by people who are simply just whining and moaning about how life isn’t fair because they don’t get the same airdrop size as Hsaka despite adding 0.0000001% of the value he provides to a platform.
But anyway, enough whining and moaning from me. I’ll briefly cover my rebuttals to the above points and then we resume normal postings next week.
"It's a dystopian nightmare."
It’s kind of not.
A dystopian nightmare is what we currently have with FB and until recently Twitter using your brand + influence to sell adverts while providing $0 in payment for it.
A dystopian nightmare is being a day one user of a new social media platform yet having to wait a decade to be able to invest at a 100+bn valuation.
A dystopian nightmare is platforms optimising for outrage and hatred because they know it gets more clicks.
A dystopian nightmare is recruiting the brightest minds on earth and having them spend their days designing perfect algorithms designed to get teenagers addicted to staring into a rectangular box with flashy images.
Friend Tech isn’t perfect, but at least it's none of the things above.
"It only benefits the influencers."
This one is easily disprovable. I’ve got about 3-5% of Hsaka’s total points. Do I provide 3% of Hsaka's value to Friend Tech? 0 chance I do. If anything, it benefits small users MORE than the true influencers that drive engagement and usage to the platform.
Also, if this were true then why is my friend HeroTruck, who has 1,000 followers, valued 4x higher than an influencer with almost a million followers who regularly talks on spaces with Elon Musk?
I’ve added a few additional data points to show this more clearly.
"It’s a giant ponzi scheme destined to steal everyone's money."
Think people need to spend a bit more time looking at what the true definition of a ponzi scheme is.
"No one actually enjoys it and is just in it for the airdrop."
While, of course, there are maybe some people purely using it for the airdrop, the amount of attention and usage it’s getting leads me to believe this isn’t the case.
It’s been out now for almost two months and has been about the only thing anyone has spoken about on Twitter.
I personally really enjoy the app. I think it’s great fun. Even if you don’t enjoy the social messaging aspect of it, the game theory around the trading, bonding curve, and airdrop elements are SO interesting to me. It probably takes up more of my headspace than anything in Crypto since NFTs came out.
If you want to purely airdrop farm projects that are currently just vapor with 0 risk there are many things you can do. ZK Sync, Linea etc. Yet none of these projects receive 1% of the airtime or ORGANIC usage that Friend Tech does.
Also, these things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. Apps should be able to leverage the immense power of airdrops to make their projects MORE engaging. And MORE fun.
We have the tooling, we have the learnings, and for the first time in history, we have the economic ability to spread wealth throughout users of applications. It is a supercharger for growth, and regulations permitting, I suspect we’ll see almost all apps in the future doing something like this.
"No one will want to pay $1,000s to talk to someone."
Probably the dumbest criticism I’ve seen of this app yet. There are COUNTLESS examples in almost every industry of people being paid fortunes for information, consulting, speeches, short-term work, connections, literally anything.
A company I once worked for had a six-figure annual budget to spend on some random company with two employees that made our powerpoints look slightly nicer. And you think people won’t pay $2k to have access to leaders in niche industries?
Why do you think certain clubs in Paris, New York, London, and Dubai can charge $50k joining fees just to get in?
Because being around other people they perceive to be valuable has economic value. And even if they are bad at EV calculations, being able to brag to your friends about having access to these spaces is often the sole reason for the purchase.
As we move further into a digital world, why won’t digital versions of these clubs exist? Friend Tech enables this with the model of exclusivity.
People asking for stock splits or to make the rooms cheaper I think are missing the point. I did originally too. It’s the exclusivity of the groups that make Friend Tech so special.
"Influencers don’t make as much money in this model, so why will they use it?"
This is probably the strongest argument against Friend Tech that I've seen so far. Anatoly has been shouting about this on Twitter and doing some math to show that Drake would only get 500k if his keys were valued at $10m. Maybe not worth the time when he can command more than that for private shows etc.
I think, however, that this framing misses the point. When YouTube first arrived, I'd assume the same argument was made. NO WAY TOM CRUISE MOVES FROM MISSION IMPOSSIBLE TO YOUTUBE.
And yes, it would have been dumb for Tom Cruise to move solely to Youtube in the early days as he was at the top of his industry.
But what that mental framework didn’t account for was a new niche of creators that would spring up and dominate the Youtube Scene. It wasn’t celebrities of yonder, it was new, younger creators such as Mr. Beast who now has a billion-dollar business built solely off the back of YouTube.
It’s entirely possible that Friend Tech doesn’t need past celebrities to make it a success. New creators can pop up, maybe ones who are crypto-native and really outperform on the platform.
For them, going from earning $0 to earning $500k is a HUGE pull and really worth focusing on.
This argument also assumes that the monetization strategy never changes or adapts. There is so much they can do here to add incremental profit opportunities. From pay per message to public feeds to tipping. Who knows, I’m the dumb one here just pontificating, but Racer is smart and I’m sure will think of other ways to grow the app.
"Why self-buy is good for Friend Tech"
I am so, so, so, so glad they nerfed self-buy. It’s mostly the reason I’m back writing about FT today.
I was very ready to nuke all of my keys and walk away from the app for some time if they kept that meta going.
The reason I think it’s so detrimental is it’s like playing a game of Poker where 10% of the players can see all the cards. It’s just not fun anymore when they hold all of the edge and none of the risk.
Or like when you play Grand Theft Auto and you smash buttons on your controller and suddenly a tank and 17 RPGs drop from the sky and you’re untouchable. Fun for an hour or two but gets boring pretty quickly when there is no risk involved and the difficulty level is too basic.
I think with Friend Tech, self-buy really was a red warning light flashing very bright. If they let it persist, then casual players playing the game the way it was intended would likely become disillusioned and give up.
What's the point in me risking 10 eth on keys that might go down in value if someone can self-buy 10 eths worth but because of the bonding curve scaling earn rewards on a 50 eth portfolio value? 1 Eth max downside for 50 eth of points. AAAAAA.
As more and more people realised that prices for all other keys would likely go down, only causing a death spiral. Prices down = people give up playing and look for the exits.
The self-buyers, despite having all the points, end up with a smaller total airdrop because the app itself is worth less as a product.
So thank you, Mr. Racer, for considering this and for now nuking this cheat code!!
ANYWAY!!!
If anyone else has any bear cases for Friend Tech, feel free to write them in my chat or comment here. I’m happy to always have an intellectually honest discussion about anything and would love to look at things from all sides. But please don’t message me saying it's not fair because Ansem has more points than you; I am no longer engaging in that kind of stupidity.
Have a happy Saturday!