22: The Love Storm

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22:1 POKTSTORM

We ran a community sponsored #POKTSTORM giveaway over the weekend, and asked people why they love Pocket Network. Here are our five favorite answers:

@might_gy:

@diamondhandnwb:

@ByungkuJ:

@ForceOfNatureXY:

And @IanCSU:

I’ll be replying to your tweets with the transaction hash shortly after this post is published. Get out there and get staking!

22:2 Happy Birthday Addison!

This week was Addison from Thunderhead‘s 18th birthday! It’s hard to believe that so much contribution to the ecosystem has come from someone who wasn’t even old enough to vote. Addi had this to say in response to his birthday messages:

Thanks for all the kind words everyone. Never thought in my wildest dreams when starting this 1.5 years ago that I would have this caliber of relationships w so many people. Thank you to all for your support and encouragement – only in blockchain is age not a defining factor. Today I can officially open a bank account, which is silly when you think about it. Cheers to a decentralized future!

If you’re not following Addi on Twitter, use the link above.

Speaking of the Thunderhead crew, they released PoktInfo this week, a beta of an analytics dashboard for the Pocket Network. It parses latency, errors, and rewards in order to allow node runners to optimize their infrastructure and improve the QoS of the network.

Go see the work in progress at beta.pokt.info.

22:3 Community, Ecosystem, and Governance

The Pocket team sunsetted support for the official Telegram channel this week, opting instead to encourage everyone join the official Discord, where both moderation and technical support are broadly provided by the core team. The channel will now be a reference post providing important links and contact information for the team. For those who prefer Telegram to Discord, we still have three main unofficial channels for community discussion:

The Poktopus Den | https://t.me/UnofficialPokt
POKT Korea | https://t.me/poktkoreaunofficial
PoktoPrice | https://t.me/poktoprice

To join the official Pocket Discord, go here: https://bit.ly/POKT_Discord

And for formal DAO discussion, all conversations and comments should be posted in the Pocket DAO Forum.

The weekly relay recap shows Pocket Network back over a billion relays per day, with 7.4BN relays being served up for the week. Ethereum was the biggest gainer, most likely on the back of people decentralizing their metamask, with a 21% net gain in daily relays. Be sure to check out the full weekly relay recap.

22:4 /dev/null

It’s not enough to build platforms for your community. The culture of the community is every bit as important as the communication methods used, and that means putting in the time and effort to shape the conversation in your community in a positive and constructive way. While some folks in the community were disappointed at the official Telegram channel being sunsetted, I think it was smart of Pocket to recognize they didn’t have the resources to manage multiple platforms in a way that enforced the culture of the community, and to coalesce their efforts to a single platform.

A lot of folks in crypto think that community conversations should be unmoderated, but every single time that experiment plays out, it ends in disaster as trolls and bad actors drive the conversation to least common denominator. We wouldn’t let people stand in our living room and scream obscenities at us, so it’s silly to think we should allow that in our communities. We should be focused on keeping them welcoming to newcomers, informative, and productive and positive about the project at large.

Criticism is fine, of course, and part of a healthy discourse. But allowing cancer to foster because you’re afraid to offend someone by cutting it out just leads to death. In the 20+ years I’ve been building communities online, only the healthy well moderated ones survive, thrive, and continue to grow. I’ll continue to do what I think is best to protect mine.

That’s all for this week. See you on Twitter.