I’m writing about internet-native communities & Web3 more broadly, exploring the possibilities this new revolution unlocks. If this sounds appealing to you, make sure to subscribe to this newsletter. Enjoy!🔥

If you’re not a subscriber yet, here’s what you missed in the past months:

1. Web3 Marketing 101: Shaping A Symbol System

2. Writing NFTs As The New Primitive For Content Discovery

3. Letting A Chance For Brands To Monetize Their Intangible Assets

I haven't posted a new article here in a long time.

My last article was published 3 months ago, and to be honest, I've been lost in my creative process since then.

When, in early December, I quit the company I was working for to go full-time as a copywriter, I underestimated what it meant to write for a living.

More specifically, I had underestimated two elements of the life of a creator.

First, for the past 3 months, writing has become my main revenue source, which has greatly altered my vision of writing and my relationship with it.

I stopped seeing writing as something that I enjoyed doing during my free time and started seeing it as an obligation.

I've become obliged to write all day for others to make a living, and those Copywriting freelance gigs quickly left me empty of creativity each time I came to put my ideas on paper.

Worst, I found myself disguising the few contents I was posting on Twitter, smoothing my original ideas to make them fit into clickbait threads in the hope of getting the attention of clients who would pay me to do the same for them.

Second, publishing online has become a growing sense of anxiety.

For the past few months, I've felt more than ever the pressure of being a creator, being forced to participate in a game where we're all competing against each other, spending hours writing tweets/ threads for often just a few likes.

And while I could handle the situation when playing this game for fun, it's something else entirely when it becomes your revenue source.

I quickly fell into the trap of wanting to release "better" or "innovative" articles to get a chance to compete with all the other great articles released every day, losing my spontaneity and ending up accumulating drafts after drafts on Substack without ever posting them. Far gone is the Eliot who published a book on a whim.

To this, I found Nick Susi summarizing the whole situation well in a recent tweet:

"The content game feels over-bloated. Friends w/ pods & Substacks seem exhausted, stuck on a treadmill chasing scale + qty, struggling to break through the algorithm & if they do, to be remembered."

Despite the bright future depicted to creators, unfortunately, being a content creator in 2023 is still not a sustainable career path.

And with less time spending creating, and more time consuming, these 3 months made me realize another thing I had missed so far.

The Situation Is Not Better For Readers.

In an age of hyper-individualization, everyone is desperate for human connection.

And despite their promise, social media don’t really deliver on that.

I’m lucky to be in awesome communities such as Radar, Forefront, or Folklore, in which members share out-of-the-box and innovative resources daily, allowing me to connect with like-minded writers and discover new ideas.

But if you’ve been on Twitter recently, the standardization of content is frightening. Most of the content we see pushed by the algorithm is hidden advertisements or low-effort step-by-step tips to write online.

As a reader, I kept looking at content that would resonate with me, which would make me say, “Ah, finally someone like me” or “Hey, he managed to find the exact words to summarize how I feel these days’.

But Twitter left me with not much to connect with.

So How Do We Go From There?

Should other writers and I just give up? Should we all continue playing the same game? Or is there anything we can do to solve this lose-lose situation?

This downtime has given me time to reflect, and I see two ways I and others can escape the content treadmill in the short term.

The first one is to move to more private socials.

Smaller scale, higher impact spaces where creators and readers can have meaningful conversations. Web3 communities such as Friends With Benefits seem to take this route —creating their own app to control the entire consumption experience — and I’m planning to follow my friends and migrate to those new social networks such as Lens, Farcaster, or Backdrop soon.

I’m convinced more intimist socials with pre-curated users will definitely let me connect more directly with readers and writers alike, letting me get more meaningful conversations resulting in (I hope) ever more interesting articles down the line.

The other way is to continue using Twitter & Substack and doubling down on authenticity.

I became a huge fan of Dickie Bush recently and realized the competition is extremely low for people who share authentic ideas. Competition doesn’t exist anymore when you’ve created an emotional connection with a reader. 

There’s a reason why Dickie is part of the top 1% of writers.

He succeeded because he aroused emotions, used the same words his readers used to describe their struggles, and stroke chords. Not because he understood the algorithm.

In the end, authenticity, mixed with a bit of vulnerability, will win. The goal from there for me is to focus on developing original ideas and arousing emotions, not chasing quantity anymore.

Closing Thoughts.

By wanting to “make it as a writer,” I lost my authenticity.

And by not feeling confident publishing articles that “weren’t me,” I disappeared.

When I quit my job, I really thought I would like to write for others.

It turns out I don’t.

What I like about writing is the process of clarifying my thoughts, creating long-lasting connections with my readers by being my true self, and sharing with others ideas they would never have thoughts of.

I realized I didn’t want to get paid to write. I want to get paid to think.

In the past weeks, I stopped trying to become a copywriter and instead focused on developing a new community-building course with fresh and authentic ideas.

With my experience growing the community at Coinvise and talking with dozens of community builders for the past 2 years, I realized I could bring the most value by sharing my experience and “the insights” of community building rather than writing for others.

I’ve never been as excited and motivated to work in Web3 than in the past weeks, and I’m already working on many projects around building Web3-native communities, the first one being a course.

Indeed, I realized there were very few courses focusing on Web3 community-building the way I see it —meaning not following a top-down approach and teaching how to *manage* members, but rather a bottom-up model to help community builders be in the state of openness and empower members to come up with symbols and ideas — and I believe there’s an opportunity for me there.

In the next days and weeks, I’ll start writing again about building Web3-native communities in different ways that I’ve done so far, and sharing about the ups and downs of building a course.

It feels good to be back.

Speak soon!

- Eliot

As someone who went through the ups & downs of content creation and Web3 community building, I can assist you in two ways:

• The 5 Pillars of Web3 Community Building: If you need help starting & growing your community, I’ve written a free 40-pages guide with all the best practices I've discovered to launch, grow and monetize your Web3 community. Grab a copy here:

• Web3 Marketing 101: Shaping a Symbol System: If you’ve already created a community and are now looking to unlock the next phase of your journey, I’ve created a 2h written course that will show you how to arouse a feeling of belonging and expand your community’s culture.