Jamrd
633 posts
Great post - and genuinely appreciate the thoughts I think we agree, the right mental model for any product (especially one like Base App with broad scope) is iterate quickly with lots of experiments, see what works based on metrics and talking to customers, then improve the product based on their feedback. We're trying lots of experiments in Base App currently - trading tab, app ecosystem, messaging, social feed, payments - so people shouldn't over focus on any one feature in particular. And we're not opposed to making changes where needed - that's the whole idea. Content/creator coins are just one aspect of the social feed - some people like them and some don't and that is fine. As one data point, creators are telling me it's already monetizing better than YouTube for them - with a tiny fraction of the user base - so that is interesting. There are and will be lots of assets people can trade in the social feed over time (stocks, prediction markets, traditional crypto, app coins, and yes creator coins). Each customer will have different preferences, and the feed should adjust to show relevant content to them. We don't want it to be too heavily weighted one way. We'll add more card types over time. So I'd say trade what you want, and avoid the rest. Nobody will be into every asset and that is ok. Also I think you're right, perhaps our messaging early on gave the impression the app was primarily or entirely about content/creator coins. That is not the case at least from my perspective, although I do find myself discovering new content via the feed most frequently. They are just one asset class amongst many you can trade, and people should use Base App however they see fit. I also agree, some/most content coins will have very short term lifecycles (that's a feature or bug depending who you talk to). Some may be longer term (like creator coins - imagine betting on MrBeast based on his early videos - or app coins) or they may not. Traditional markets have lots of day traders/hedge funds and long term traders as well. Think of these all as experiments we're doing to see what emerges. I constantly encourage the team to try more bold bets and they delivered. We're not afraid of of having some of them not work, because that's how we find the ones that will. So we'll keep trying lots of ideas. And please keep sending them if you have ideas on what we should try instead - i appreciate the constructive nature of your post. We can do a better job emphasizing the breadth of features, and making that clear to new users. Base chain is general purpose, and useful for lots of use cases: payments, trading, DeFi, building an app/company, etc. Our goal is to get distribution for every builder on Base. I do think having a social feed is important to get that distribution - whether for novel apps/businesses/builders, investments, prediction markets, social trading features, alpha/insights etc. And crypto is a good signal to use to rank these that is harder to fake since there is real value being exchanged (as opposed to bot farms etc that are a big challenge in traditional social media). So I suspect the feed is important, with a crypto native like button. What type of content ultimately does best in the feed is anyone's guess at this point though. We won't know unless we ship it and get the data. Your actions in the app are important signal we'll use to iterate.
