visavi

The “STR” tokens - this “cool experiment that’ll breathe life back into NFTs” - have an obvious problem: they exist only so that the people trading them pay enormous fees. Everything built around this, all these “experiments,” is nothing more than a way to incentivize that trading. There’s no economic sense or fundamental value here for the space. It’s a game with a massive rake, played for the sake of playing (and for the creators’ profit). xitter.gq/anonchain/status/21152…

I’ve launched a pixel mini-game for 12 people (4 factions of 3 players each). All you need to join is a twitter account - jump in here: gobblers.xyz/map It’s a strategic and fairly simple game. It’s nothing original, but hopefully it’ll make for a fun way to pass the time. The game runs for seven days, and the members of the winning faction will each receive a commemorative AG Pages NFT capturing the game’s progress and the final map (the NFTs won’t cost anything!).

Contest #3 xitter.gq/artgobs/status/2114402…

The first contest is done: 15 artists, 34 works, 17 hours of drawing, and 13k edits. xitter.gq/artgobs/status/2113336…

A short chapter from my diary of reviving the ArtGobblers graveyard. After recreating and modernizing the broken official drawing tool, my idea for the next steps was based on the fact that 99% of NFT collection websites are complete hollow shells - lifeless storefronts. Often cluttered with flashy js effects that mask total emptiness and a complete lack of ideas. And no one in their right mind visits these official sites more than once every six months, or stays longer than five minutes. There’s simply nothing to do there. So my first idea was to create and maintain a steady stream of contests with small cash prizes, punctuated by heavier art contests with more substantial rewards. With that in mind, the first thing I did was launch two contests - open to anyone with a twitter account and an eth wallet. In the first, you spend a bit of time on a drawing, share it, and cast 10 votes in a mini-game of “pick one image out of two.” For those who can’t or don’t want to draw, I added three extra drawing modes (on top of the classic ArtGobblers one): pixel/genart/AI. The EV of a single drawing right now is a little under $20, and of three (three entries max) - around $40, with the winner picked at random. In the second contest, all you have to do is cast at least 100 votes in the game described above (pick one of two). This is needed to rank all the project’s existing drawings (pages) into a sort of objective leaderboard, which we can then use to pick winners of future art contests without relying on judges. And the EV of those (minimum) 100 votes currently sits in the $40–50 range. And the strict rule for entering both contests was “one account per person.” And even in this situation - a tiny pool of 10–20 participants - there were users abusing both contests with 3–4 accounts. And while I’d thought that a drawing in the first contest was a “proof of work” no matter what, forcing sybils to spend time on drawings, the sybils’ counter-move turned out to be five-minute brush scribbles in the first contest. And the bare minimum number of votes in the second (which naturally ruins the leaderboard’s objectivity and breaks its whole point). Abusing this is rational and correct from a game-theory standpoint, even if it’s unethical. On my side, it’s rational to fight it - which is what I’ll do. But I understand that if the prizes were more substantial (by an order of magnitude), I’d be facing a completely different cohort of sybils playing web3 - the ones who know how to use proxies and multi-accounting software, and fighting those windmills would drain a lot of energy. So I drew the absolutely obvious conclusions: avoid contests of any kind (tweets/drawings) where the winner is picked at random, and lean toward curated contests where winners are chosen by a secret vote of judges. Or don’t accept entries where the proof of work is five minutes of pencil on canvas, or a tweet from an account you can clearly identify as a “hollow shell.” You could go even further, as most NFT projects do - only admit people who hold, say, a gobbler at their address. But that would build an impassable wall around the very thing I want to create, because in that case participants would have to pay to take part, and that goes against the ideas of the “free web3” that you and I share. So it goes. By the way, both contests are here, and the first one ends today: gobblers.xyz/contests

web3 founder picking a business model

The idea that NFTs unite us into “communities” is a huge misconception, and I’ll try to dispel it. If a number of people bought different items (NFT items) belonging to some broader entity (an NFT collection), that in no way makes them “like-minded” or kindred spirits. It makes them people who own something similar. But what they own in this case (pictures of apes) has almost no context and no intrinsic value. That isn’t enough to bring them together or to build a community. You can love Pokemon and, finding yourself at a gathering of fellow fans, you’ll genuinely be among “your own” - because an enormous invented world was built for it, over decades and the intellectual labor of tens of thousands of people. You can talk about the show, the games, show off your decks, your pokedex in pokemon go, your keychains - in short, share the things that occupy your mind in everyday life. You can show up at a BMW owners’ meetup, as an owner of the car yourself, and land among people of roughly the same social standing as you - sharing your impressions of owning the car, listening to others’ troubles, talking about the vehicle you drive yourself around in every day. You can gather at a board-game club and play till you drop, or meet at a book club and discuss literature. Then you’ll go home and, even outside the community of like-minded people, you’ll spend five hours straight fine-tuning your MTG deck, or maybe open a new book and pull an all-nighter. And we really do need like-minded people - they motivate us, they give us new experiences, they expand the boundaries of a field that’s part of our lives. But if you buy a premium (or not-so-premium) red T-shirt from a special series of red T-shirts, and then meet up with other owners of these T-shirts at a waffle house, you won’t be among “like-minded people.” Sure, you can discuss the floor price of the red T-shirt, discuss the promises (which, once again, won’t be kept) of the company that made the collection, sing some rap - which will come off as freakish - and then go your separate ways, because the only thing connecting you is the item you bought, and there’s basically nothing more to talk about. You’ll go home, hang it in the closet, glance at its floor price on opensea, and go do the thing you actually love (or don’t). xitter.gq/DGMD22/status/21115108…

And don't forget - five days left until the first contest wraps: gobblers.xyz/contests/share-…

On gobblers․xyz you can connect your own ai chatbot to an mcp server and ask it to draw something using the standard artgobblers toolset (and at the end - replay the whole process and turn the drawing into an nft item). After a string of experiments - asking Claude to draw in one style or another - I noticed that whenever I let it pick the artist closest to its own taste, it always leans toward Van Gogh. I used to think the reason was the huge amount of text Vincent left behind (the letters to his brother), which ai models were trained on. But the real reason is simpler: Vincent is the most talked-about artist on the internet. gobblers.xyz/d/7QC2XN7?v=1

The first lesson to learn if you're trying to make markets on Poly by hand or with bots: never trust Poly/Gamma's shitty match start-time data - find another source of truth.

But I didn't come back for nothing, kek. I can't not shill my hobby! That hobby is reviving a dead NFT project. Its name isn't spoken out loud in polite company - it's become a synonym for "failure"/"cluelessness"/ "disgrace." Its name is Art Gobblers. When I believed in it at launch, I think I forgot to take off the rose-tinted glasses, and there's nothing to be done about that now. Here I'll keep notes on what it's like to work on something that, with near-100% probability, is headed for failure - but I'll try anyway. Right now we have the site gobblers.xyz. We have no line to Paradigm, to Royland, or to each other. Samurai-style, we have no goal - only the path. Though, to be honest, there is a goal: to build a community of artists and help them make art regularly. (I'll modestly keep quiet about the goal of building a community of collectors - the NFT art market is dead.) Art contests are coming, and the drawing tool has been upgraded so that even people who can't draw can make something - while those who can write scratch-code or use LLMs day to day have room to play too. There's also another idea I'm planning to build, but we'll come back to that later. I'm absolutely not shilling this collection - right now it's dead, and that's unlikely to change.