Of course, the tip-hunters came running. If you hand out $degen tips for poetry prompt responses, that's no surprise. They brought their AI-generated poetry, which is quite recognisable. And they did so every single day for a month.

Was this why I started OnPoWriMo AKA Onchain Poetry Writing Month, a month of writing a poem every day, inspired by the National Poetry Writing Month that started some time in the early 2000s on, as these things did then, a blog?

The answer, obviously, is as the Germans put it 'jein', which is a mashup of their yes (ja) and their no (nein).

Sharpen your skills

So, what happened? Like last year, I decided (like last year a last-minute decision) to inspire onchain poets to use the month of April to sharpen their writing skills and strengthen their creative confidence by writing a poem every day. I created a list of 30 words, one for each day of that month. Every day, the idea was to write a poem with or inspired by that word. I even started making prompt videos every day, posting my poem and the word of the day on Drakula.

People in the poetry channel on Farcaster, my audience for this project, would respond with their poem and I would tip, generously, these poems with $degen.

Farcaster-explainer-break

Let's take a short break here, for those unfamiliar with Farcaster. Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralised social networking protocol. With clients such as Warpcast, you can do basically what you can do on other social networks such as Twitter. But: Farcaster is blockchain-friendly and -based, and permissionless for developers to build upon. This can be with apps or clients, or by introducing creator reward mechanisms fueled by a crypto memecoin. That is where $degen comes in. Qualifying users can distribute a daily allowance of $degen (currently 1 $degen is about USD 0.018) to creators they like who are active on Farcaster by replying to their casts (the messages you create on Farcaster, like tweets on Twitter).

More enthusiasm for poetry

Back from the break: I was rewarding participants of OnPoWriMo for two reasons: my goal for the poetry channel on Farcaster is to get more people enthusiastic about poetry and about writing poetry. Rewarding them with tips of about 5 USD for a poem seemed like a good motivation to expose yourself to poetry every day for 30 days.

The other goal was to help people to either write more, or become more confident about their writing and creativity.

Then the tip-hunters came. With their AI-generated poems. And I struggled with that a bit. For a little while. But not too long.

First of all, the idea was to pull people in by letting them create something every day. Every writer has to begin somewhere, and using ChatGPT to generate a poem, at least has people writing prompts to ask the AI for output. So, they were actually writing something every day, and by doing so, they would strengthen their creative confidence.

Secondly, and more importantly, walking with the tip-hunters, were people who actually used the month to get back into writing, to start writing, to improve their writing, and others actually told me they had a bit more creative confidence towards the end of the month. That was just the result I was looking for.

Was it worth it?

Would I do it again this way? Back to Germany again: jein. The sheer number of responses I got every day meant that I had to reply a lot. Which was a commitment I silently made during the project, and wanted to keep. I replied really to most of the posts. Not only with a tip, but with some friendly and mostly positive feedback. It took up too much of my time to do it precisely like this again.

On the other hand: it helped grow my following on Farcaster, which is always nice. Most importantly, though: the people who reached out to me to thank me for this project, because... it made their day lighter, it brought them back to writing, it strengthened their creative confidence, it helped them to improve their creative skills. The responses I got from these people are what will make me come back to this next year.

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