Happy New Year Popula Bees! This week, we recommend some excellent articles to kick off your New Year's reading. As we step into the New Year, let's embrace it with positivity and determination to achieve our goals. May this year bring happiness, success, and fresh opportunities for growth in your life. Here's to a year full of joy and prosperity.

Yours sincerely,

Popula Team

Ecosystem and Industry Insights

Multiplayer Creation: Unlocking Participatory Media
- An exhaustive analysis of multiplayer creation and the new possibilities brought about by web3 and crypto networks. Especially interesting to us was the part about registries for attribution data because we think that the Drip Protocol is effectively such a registry.
  https://mirror.xyz
  Multiplayer Creation: Unlocking Participatory Media
  Web3 blurs the lines between creators and communities. From art to governance, creativity is becoming increasingly multiplayer.
Designing reward systems for web3 governance
- This article is a great theoretical overview of something Popula has been implementing in practice for some time. "Reputation tokens could hypothetically take the form of a non-transferable fungible token (for instance, if the transfer function in an ERC-20 contract were disabled). One might use non-transferable fungible tokens to rate community members’ contributions in a more fine-grained way – for example, the number of reputation tokens can be easily fractionalized and used to assign rating to community members on a continuous scale rather than a discrete scale created by a few reputation badges represented by NFTs. These reputation-based governance systems can more equitably distribute influence and potentially offer better Sybil resistance."
  https://a16zcrypto.com
  Designing reward systems for web3 governance
  An analysis of the tradeoffs of reputation-based and token-based reward systems for participation in web3 governance
The Future of Social is Onchain
- The article explores the potential of onchain social platforms and creator tools, doing a great job of breaking down the principles of "onchainness," including permissionless and composable nature, ownership, autonomy, provenance, and coordination. The author discusses how these principles can create new, rich experiences in social and creator platforms, emphasizing the value of onchain mechanisms in fostering collaboration, experimentation, and value distribution among builders, creators, and users.
  https://archetype.mirror.xyz
  The Future of Social is Onchain
  The home for web3 publishing.
Love vs. fame: A framework for social applications
- Li Jin has long been one of our favourite writers, and her ideas have been contributing a lot to shaping how Popula looks like today. In this article, Li introduces two ends of the spectrum: "love" products, which focus on deepening connections with existing relationships and typically monetize with subscriptions, and "fame" products, which prioritize discovering new content and creators and are typically driven by advertising business models. The author observes a broader trend in recent social networks moving towards fame-based products and suggests that crypto social networks can support love-based networks, enabling smaller, high-context groups to thrive through new business models. The concept of shared ownership in crypto could facilitate the creation of new communities, forming the basis for what the author calls "socioeconomic networks."
  https://www.lisnewsletter.com
  Love vs. fame: A framework for social applications
  While "social" is often generalized as a single monolithic category, there's actually a ton of variance in today's landscape of social apps. An axis on which I like to analyze social networks is how much they appeal to users' desire for love vs. fame
Mint First
- This is an interesting article from Zora outlining a simple yet powerful idea: creators can use Zora to combine the benefits of onchain (permanence, monetization, etc.) with the distribution width of web2 platforms. In the worst-case scenario, nobody will mint, but at least the creator will have a permanent record of the content; in the best scenario, a community will form who buys that content, and gradually, the relationships will move onchain where the creator has more power.
Structure Without Capture
- This article is about organizing DAOs internally to make them more efficient. The innovative idea is to create time-limited or purpose-limited groups or committees that dissolve when they are no longer needed. Popula's group and accessibility management enable the creation of such limited communities, thus contributing to the expanding community design.
  https://hats.mirror.xyz
  Structure Without Capture
  How we can delegate roles and authorities to get things done without recreating the entrenched power structures of traditional organizations
Making "The Blockchain" the Next Place you Need to Be
- Fascinating article by Jarrod Dicker from TCG. He argues that the main reason preventing blockchain from getting mass adoption is that we keep looking for use cases, while instead, we should focus on one obvious use case that has already proven successful for previous technologies (Internet, the Web, the Cloud): commerce. He argues that the transactional nature of the blockchain is the most prominent and practical application that will attract mass adoption. Over time, other use cases (ownership, governance, etc.) will come automatically. Focusing on this relatively 'simple' function also saves a lot of energy in explaining the benefit of blockchain to newcomers since everyone is used to and likes buying and selling stuff.
  https://darkstar.mirror.xyz
  Making "The Blockchain" the Next Place you Need to Be
  If you were a GenX kid with even a small amount of tech familiarity, you almost certainly had the following experience: Sometime around 1995, an older relative or friend would come to you and ask for help 'getting online.'
Games Over Governance: Recentering DAOs on Coordination
- This article expresses a very original viewpoint: when talking about DAOS and communities, we overplay the role of governance, which is too complex and usually drives focus away from the original mission of the DAO. The author's thesis is that we should minimize governance as much as possible and instead enhance and focus on (automatic) coordination by gamifying the operations of a DAO, and offers some nice examples (with great chart flows!). Popula believes in shared governance while offering plenty of onchain and automatic tools for communities to automatize their operations as much as possible.
  https://operator.mirror.xyz
  Games Over Governance: Recentering DAOs on Coordination
  The DAO conversation almost exclusively revolves around governance. The entire space effectively speaks of them equivocally. One cause for this is that pooling money pre-product (community-first) makes the collective management of those funds an immediate need. Then after people realize the overhead of collective decision-making, they try to implement delegation; this further entrenches the conversation on the topic of governance and nothing else.
Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger
- This is not a written article but a podcast episode where Chris Dixon interviews Bob Iger, CEO of Disney. The part that struck us was about communities: “In Pixar, every movie got assigned a room. Basically, a nice conference room. The movie lived in that room full time. The director and the team put pictures up all around the walls, had music that was referenced to the movie. They did all of their meetings about the film in this room. The movie started taking on a tangible quality of actually existing in a space whereas, at Disney, we had one room that all the movies shared. That's subtle, really subtle, but it gives a sense of place and home and a collegiate feeling. The film that feels like it has a home and the people that first of all become part of the film. This is a sense of place. It starts actually to become tangible. It comes to life.”
  https://simplecast.com
  Creators, Creativity, and Technology with Bob Iger
  with @robertiger @cdixon @smc90 A wide-ranging conversation with Bob Iger on the interplay between technology, content, and distribution; as well as Bob's journey -- and that of various creators! -- especially as the industry evolved from TV and cable to the advent of the internet/ web 1.0 to 2.0 to briefly touching on web3 and other emerging technologies.

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Popula Spotlights and Community Updates

Community of the Week

Creatives DAO: The CreativesDAO is an overarching body for all creative contributors in the NEAR ecosystem. With CreativesDAO, artists have the freedom to express themselves and create impactful projects that promote decentralization and sustainability, spreading the blockchain gospel. If you're a creative with a vision, check it out here!

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Behind the Scenes and Product Updates

Street Interview: What are the barriers our there?

We asked people what are the main barriers to experience Web3 when we were at NEARCON23. Let's take a look of what they said! Click here to watch the video!

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Goodbye 2023. Hello 2024! | Newsletter Issue #4