@Walrus 🦭/acc What’s the non-obvious downside of WALRUS becoming successful?
If in fact WALRUS should prevail, then the principal drawback of such an occurrence will hardly be price volatility – it will be cultural dil
The pattern is this. Reddit started as niches with strong norms. Okay, scaled, norms flattened, moderation commercialized. Now power resides with advertisers and platforms, instead of users. Similar story with Instagram. Creativity came first, then the algorithm. Quietly, growth killed what was best.
If it succeeds, then it’s caught in the same trap: its culture becomes a product, its memes become incentives, and its participation level changes from “I am here because I belong to this culture" to "I am here because I am being compensated.” And they will change very quickly, because they’ll be optimized around incentive, not meaning, loudness, not truth, extremes, not nuance.
This is in comparison to something like Bitcoin, its culture has stayed hard due to resisting quick monetization. What about something like Ethereum in its early days? It was messy and took its sweet time, but it was value-oriented. This is why scaling WALRUS potentially too well may allow rent-seekers, influencers, and stories to remake the norms from the inside.
