Comment by @jamesfinnerty • Hey

Thanks Ryan! It’s good to be reminded of this. It’s way too easy to fall into web2 social habits here. Question for you: what’s a good way, in your opinio

Stats

Comments

**My suggestion for breaking the mold is pretty much the same for all creators:** -Keep doing what you're doing! -Imagine new tools you want to use (be active and thoughtful about this!) -Beg/pay/coordinate/collaborate with devs to get those tools built -Be a leader when exploring new tools -Collaborate and experiment like crazy, as long as it makes sense. All of that probably sounds trite and not exactly ground-breaking and I'm sorry. This isn't a new problem, it's actually as old as time. The same old principles continue to apply. What's different today is that we're in an era where users can write any data they want to the database. This is new to all of us. If it can be imagined it can be created. Creating apps to fill your needs and keeping an eye out for new ones are probably the best ways to "create your luck." Louis CK and Radiohead sold their work directly to fans over the internet at a time when it was very difficult to do so. Deadmau5 built his own app and failed. Building is hard, success is not guaranteed. Looking for emergent trends is another way. Snoop didn't build Instagram but he was the first celeb to jump on it. He understood the power it held. Ashton Kutcher raced CNN to 1 million followers on Twitter in the early days for the same reasons. Then you have people like Casey Neistat (YouTube) or Charli D'Amelio (TikTok) who combined these two skills. Neither were the first on their platforms but they were arguably the first who actually understood how to create in the new format. They recognized the emergent app/format and they also recognized their needs weren't being met. So they built their format themselves, on those platforms. They showed everyone else how it's done. **Now to move to specifics, which you absolutely did not ask for but I've thought about anyway:** The lowest hanging fruit we could all use here on Lens is a feed of just NFTs. It could be inside of Lenster or its own app. A feed where you must own the thing to share it. A profile where you can arrange what you've collected into collections. Having a feed where people can post and organize their collects enables discovery, curation, showing off, etc. A lot can be built and solved with just this idea alone. **Now moving specifically to music:** I praise sound.xyz all the time. They are a really great example of using NFTs as data. They created a tool for publishing music. Seems simple enough, but really take a look at how they use the data. The collectors get their names displayed prominently in lists sortable by both Top and Earliest. Collectors get to pick a timestamp on the track and leave a comment. The platform also facilitates coordinating the rewards systems, the golden egg, etc. Then when you look at the Viral charts they display the Sound + Artist + Top 3 Collectors for each viral sound. That's a huge! Imagine if the top songs on TikTok showed the top 3 collectors?? Billions of eyeballs looking at your name next to Beyonce's or Ed Sheeran, or the next undiscovered act? Then when you switch to the overall charts they break out Sounds/Artists/Collectors. That's a hell of a lot of features for collectors to interact with on Sound. Now compare collecting a track on Sound.xyz to collecting on Lenster: This is not to pick on Lenster! But if I collect a song here I hopefully get a shoutout from the creator 🤷‍♂️ And maybe the creator and can meet me on another platform and figure out some rewards or uses for the data there. And when the song drops out of being in everyone's timeline the artist/song/collectors are all out of sight, out of mind. Aggregators/platforms will continue to win on the internet. In a sea of infinite data the curators win. Sound.xyz is in the beginning stages of becoming a winner. What many in web3 are discovering is that while it's incredibly easy (structurally) to create a platform, it's damn near impossible to keep it going (nearly every PFP from Cool Cats to Doodles, Apes, RTFKT, etc are struggling platforms). **Platforms are rarely created from nothing.** **They almost always start with an app or product which then gets leveraged into becoming a platform.** Facebook was a simple poke/wall/photosharing app before it became a gigantic platform with marketplaces, instagram, whatsapp, vr headsets, etc. Uber started as a simple ride-sharing app before becoming a platform w/delivery services and more. Google was just search, etc. The good news is app creation has never been easier! (I say this as I'm currently struggling to build something) If you can build an app to solve what you as the creator want to accomplish, Lens + other existing platforms can make it really easy for you to jumpstart your own app, which can eventually be leveraged into a platform of its own. **An example using Sound.xyz:** -They have potential to become a successful platform. -They face immense difficulty succeeding against Spotify (users don't care about the database). -They need to enable apps to be built on top, both by themselves and by the community. This can transform them from being a singular app to platform. **So you, a musician, want to incentivize people to listen to and interact with your music:** -You create playlists which feature your songs + other songs they mix well with -You reward others who publish playlists using your songs (shout outs, etc) -You make enough playlists and shout out enough people where having an app to handle all of these behaviors would actually be easier **You build an app called SoundOff** -Users choose 5 songs from Sound.xyz's library -The collectors/comments info from the sound.xyz drop show up in this app as well -Users compete to create the best 5-song mixes, collects of these mixes are counted as votes -Those collected mixes now have up to 5 artists plus the collector's info, and can be tied back to all the original collectors of those 5 songs -Those collected mixes now become their own data format, which anyone else can build off of This app could become its own platform, which launches more apps, and the cycle continues. This process can apply to music reviews, music artwork, music use in video or photos. TikTok hit us over the head with the fact that music and sounds can now have network effects. ----------- I know that was probably a little disappointing in that there's no great secret to unlock. We're all in the same boat here. It really comes down to "imagine cool shit and build it." The Lens protocol is a -phenomenal- leap forward. It finally has us all creating a certain type of structured data. We have formats for profiles and basic media posts. That's a great foundation but we're all moving in different directions from this point. If we build simple, fun apps which use NFTs as data we can do what Lens did again, and again, and again... Protocols all the way up!