Some background
Before we get started, I'll quickly introduce myself. Hi, my name is Kelvin! I've been working on Optimism over at OP Labs for almost five years now. Prior to Optimism I was working on trying to make the original plasma stuff work back when plasma was all the rage and before we realized it was way easier to put the data on Ethereum the whole time. So I've been working on Ethereum since ~2016 and L2s specifically since ~2017.
Ethereum has obviously grown quite a bit since then. Some of you who've been around for a while probably also remember the days when you'd know every person at every conference and meetup. Things have changed! Devcon is 10k+ people! It's been a wild ride.
Although it's been amazing to see Ethereum grow, it's also been hard to lose the sense of tight-knit community that Ethereum had back in the day. Of course, most of that sense of community came from the fact that there simply weren't that many people working on the thing. A lot of people have worked very hard to see Ethereum grow to the size it is today and there's no going back. And that's ok!
Twitter is miserable
Still, I don't think that our platforms for communication have quite grown as Ethereum has grown. Ethereum has a number of communication platforms but none are more popular than Twitter. I think this is a massive mistake. Twitter is a closed platform designed to incentivize engagement as much as possible. Ethereum of all ecosystems should understand that incentives rule everything around us. Twitter wants engagement. Ragebait, dunks, drama, and anger are the fuel for the engagement engine. We all know that this is true.
And then we look at the Ethereum community and we wonder why everyone is so angry at one another all the time. Of course everyone's angry when being angry is the only thing that makes your opinion heard by the broader community. I despise this state of affairs and I've been hoping for something better.
Vision
I want to see the creation of a forum that acts as a space where people who about the future of Ethereum can respectfully discuss any subject relevant to that future at length. No more flame wars, no more ragebait, just meaningful discussion about how to drive Ethereum forward on all fronts.
Existing alternatives
Ethereum has a number of existing platforms that serve as an alternative to Twitter:
I've been asked by a number of people why I'm not happy with using those platforms instead. I have a few different answers:
- More important than any other reason is that the broader community must believe that a platform is useful for a specific purpose. I think it is far easier to get the community to believe that this particular forum is the canonical forum to have this type of discussion than to retrofit that meaning onto these existing forums.
- Ethresearch and Eth Magicians are both highly technical forums. It's unlikely that we'd shift Ethresearch at all. Eth Magicians could maybe move towards a more general-purpose discussion format but it would take a lot of community buy-in from existing active members to do so. Again, it's just far easier to create a new forum with a new vision.
- Reddit is perhaps *too* accessible. It's too easy to hop into the conversation without putting in any effort. I don't want to prohibit anyone from engaging in this forum, but I do want people to have to put meaningful effort into that engagement.
- This is an experimental project. It's very unclear what this whole thing should look like or if it even makes sense. I can't experiment if I'm trying to engage with someone else's platform. It's far easier to act as benevolent dictator at the beginning of a project like this so that things can move quickly and evolve.
This is an experiment
It's important to note that this whole forum is an experiment. I do not know what I'm doing. I have an idea but I have no idea if this is the right way to go about things. Maybe one day we'll realize that the correct answer was some onchain social platform, but the immediate goal was to get something out the door as quickly as possible. It's not perfect. It won't be perfect. We're just trying things, and that's ok!
Next steps
Well, next steps here are to start using the forum for stuff and provide feedback where you can. I'm going to need a lot of help to make this vision work. Any and all feedback about how to make the forum better will be heard. Who knows if any of this will work, but I'm excited to give it a shot.