Another day, another @BitsTODAY article to get you over the 🐪. Let us open the kimono and give you all a glimpse of how team Bitstoday’s Wednesday went down. @dripcult curated this issue while packing and getting ready for his wedding — TOMORROW (congrats brochacho). @nvo wrote this issue while coasting a cool 42k feet above sea level on a flight across the country. @ASG edited this issue after throwing an absolute RAGER of a Spider-man themed birthday party for his toddler. And if you are reading this, we still managed to get the issue shipped. Don’t say we never did anything for ya’ll.
Guest cover design by @joshua_cottrell
Bits on the menu tonight:
- BuzzClout: Exclusive look at today’s movers and shakers presented by @bitcloutsignal
- Ubiquitous UX Drops: Musician onboarding remix
- Clout Controversy: @HPaulson appreciation thread 👨💻
- The Cloutifieds: @Clubrooms brings engagement back to the blockchain
- General Absurdity: The New Yorker sets it’s sights on Bitclout
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout
First things first. In partnership with @bitcloutsignal, here’s an exclusive look at today’s movers and shakers:
#2 Ubiquitous UX Drops: Musician onboarding remix
Since 💦 a deluge of (highly contentious) changes at the beginning of the week, Neil Diamondhands and team have been quiet. Perhaps they’re contemplating how best to proceed considering there’s been more fallout and criticism from the dev community in the past two days than we’ve seen in the first ~two months we’ve been on Bitclout, more on that later. It could also just be their preferred cadence — @diamondhands and co. are in a pretty consistent rhythm of pushing most updates on Sunday and Monday.
One notable non-core drop we spotted today (though it might be pretty-damn central to Bitclout soon)? IYCMI, there was an Easter (or @happyduck?) egg at the end of @HughJiang article on the Deflation Bomb 💣 with a preview of what the @BitSwap interface will look like once their platform relaunches. Peep this 👀
Maybe we were the only ones who actually missed this teaser, because investors have been piling into @BitSwap heavily over the past few days in anticipation of their potential first-mover advantage in being the first decentralized exchange to list $clout. All eyes on you, @BitSwap!
In other news, a new node made a high-volume debut today. @Audionode aims to support musicians and artists as they launch their creator coins, a value proposition that proved strong enough to land it in the Top Daily Gainers (above) too. In a recent post (here), one of the masterminds behind this node, @Thortorrens, had this to say about market challenges that will @Audionode will address:
“Musicians and bands onboarding onto Bitclout are faced with some challenges. For one, how do you add stability to their coin price for musicians coming on day 1? How do you allow fans to find their favorite artists!?”
Beyond helping artists supercharge their creator coin launches, the @audionode webpage (live at https://audiono.de/) touts functionality to discover and analyze accounts and verification (always preferable that the creator you’re about to 🦍 into is the artist you think it is).
Might @HippieSabotage — an EDM band with 7M+ listeners on Spotify and new arrivals to Bitclout — be one of @audionode’s next clients? A match made in Bitclout heaven? (*queues that @ToveLo remix that took over Summer 2014*). We were going to make a “stay high” joke here too, but @HippieSabotage beat us to it 😂:
#3 Clout Controversy: @HPaulson appreciation thread 👨💻
As we discussed in Edition 041, people were… not super jazzed about updates that announced earlier this week by @diamondhands, especially those re: moving the Bitclout blockchain from proof of work (“PoW”) to proof of stake (“PoS”). While this move has significant impacts on miners, above all, community-members took exception with the way changes were communicated and deployed without community consultation or particularly detailed rationale.
The grassroots reaction here was something to behold, and largely constructive we might add. Over 150 people convened yesterday in the @NachoAverage room to listen to @HPaulson’s lay out his qualms about these protocol-level changes and the way they were rolled out. This came on the heels of a bevy of dev driven outreach back to the core team on Monday night, focused largely on the below:
Unfortunately, as @HPaulson elaborated on in yesterday’s @NachoAverage session, the response from @diamondhands AFTER the dev community took time to organize their concerns left even more to be desired.
@diamondhands pointed out that a Clout Improvement Proposals (“CIP”) repo for the community to make suggestions and pose queries will go live soon and will help future updates roll out more smoothly. As mentioned in @HPaulson’s post however, this is still conspicuously not live. @Maebeam has missed multiple self-set deadlines to spin this up, even though as we understand it, it isn’t all that complicated (not that we could make one). Most recently, @Maebeam noted this would be a priority for them on Monday… so far, nada!
So what’s next here? As @dgsus discussed with @HPaulson, the extent to which Bitclout is still dependent on a ‘core’ development team is a typical growing pain when a blockchain, even one that aims to be decentralized, is still developing. It takes time before the training wheels can come off and we can ride the decentralized wave all on our own 🏄.
Once Bitclout is more decentralized and there is more opportunity for community influence, we’ll also need structures like DAOs to organize the community and make decisions. Luckily, smarter folks than we (e.g. @HPaulson and @Dgsus) are actively planning for that future 👇👇👇
While these are nuanced conversations that we’re wading into, one main takeaway for us is that we’re even more bullish on the community than we are on the Bitclout core team. And ideally, that’s what they would want! If things go well on Bitclout, a day will come where this baby is 100% ours to nurture. There may be some terrible twos to contend with yet 👶.
#4 The Cloutifieds: @Clubrooms brings engagement back to the blockchain 👍
It’s no secret that a lot of the engagement surrounding Bitclout currently happens off-chain. Heck, @nvo was on two different podcasts today, for which there’s currently no on-platform recording solution. Similarly, much of the chatter about clout happens in telegrams, on zooms, or in discords. And there’s nothing wrong with that. 💪
That said, there’s a big opportunity to bring more engagement back to the blockchain and to make it more seamless in the process. In project news, yesterday saw the launch of @Clubrooms, a solution designed to do just that for audio and visual content.
With a stellar dev roster, including the likes of @paulburke, @mubashariqbal, and @danielkepme, as well as backing from @Bithunt, this isn’t the first project that we’ve seen develop around the idea of making gated content for investors easier to launch for creators. So what’s the differentiation here? For one, the proof is in the execution. Further, @Clubrooms is focusing on integrating all the components of Bitclout that we’ve grown to love and making sure they’re still present in their video and audio rooms. For a consistent experience, wouldn’t it be great to engage hosts and other creators in these breakout rooms via chat and to splash them with diamonds with the same ease that you can on Bitclout? While you can’t make it rain diamonds on your barista at the local coffee-shop yet, @Clubrooms is getting us one step closer to bringing this Bitclout functionality to the fore in more of our interactions. ☕💎
For now, early access to the platform will be limited to owners of the @Clubrooms coin. We’re eager to get early reviews from anyone who has access / who has taken @Clubrooms for a test drive. Who knows, we might even migrate our weekly podcast over there eventually 👀👀.
#5 General Absurdity: The New Yorker sets it’s sights on Bitclout
As the deflation bomb approaches, OTC prices climb, and things just generally *intensify*, we’re already seeing lots of absurd signs that Bitclout is ready for blastoff. The least of which were @ASG’s fashion choices in Miami 💀💀💀.
For one, The New Yorker is out with the most thoughtful and in-depth piece we’ve seen from legacy media on Bitclout, yet. Focused on both the platform as well as @Sigil’s story as an entrepreneur building @BitSwap and a general early adopter (way to be, @Sigil 🤠❤️), the long-form article is a far cry from more simplistic past summaries that either dismissed Bitclout as a scam with irredeemable flaws or more mindlessly embraced it as the indisputable future of social media. We don’t make too many media recommendations in these pages yet, but we HIGHLY recommend y’all check this article out (read here). Here’s our favorite quote:
In the twenty-tens, social-media companies became some of the most valuable businesses in the world. But much of that value was built off unpaid labor, as users spent billions of hours crafting posts, shooting photos, and making videos. One might look at BitClout’s creator economy as a way of democratizing social-media platforms and sharing profits more equitably with artists, comedians, and provocateurs — the people who make social media an interesting place to be. After all, where would Twitter, Reddit, or TikTok be without the people who supply them with content? A site like BitClout is simultaneously empowering and dark. It collapses everything — art, humor, personhood — into money, laying bare just who, and what, we are willing to pay for.
Meanwhile, new faces that have joined Bitclout in recent weeks aren’t just dropping in for quick pump either. Rather, high-profile creators like @lorengray who bring substantial clout from off-platform with them are forming longer term relationships with Bitclout, and ideally also paving the path to a less male-dominated top 100 (and platform as a whole). We reached out to get her take on her first weeks; so here’s the mic, @lorengray 🗣🗣🗣:
“A few months ago I had a meeting with my team and @JakeUdell about BitClout and the potential it had to completely disrupt the way we interact with and ‘follow’ creators. What excited me most was the fact that creators are always put first on BitClout which, of course, has always been an overarching issue in the social media space. I also realized that there were very few top female creators on the platform so I wanted to not only join myself, but hopefully inspire other females to do the same. So far I’ve been welcomed into the community with open arms and find myself scrolling through BitClout even more than some other platforms! I’m so excited to see where this thing goes and am definitely proud to be a part of something so innovative and game-changing!”
Thanks for tuning in legends. We’ll see you back right here in these very pages on Friday for our Friday Night Happy Hour. BYOB!
Until we meet again,
@BitsTODAY
