Remembering Ntopaz as a Dumpster Fire Community
This was a community that started from the old blockchain and slowly faded out of relevance when the bear market started. Ntopaz taught me what not to do if you wanted to build a tribe token, starting a community, have a grand vision, no clue how to navigate the social blockchain, and only your fat stake to push things forward. Ntopaz was a lost cause when it started being lax with it’s antiabuse efforts.
You wont be able to see @ntopaz site anymore. They shutdown. You would notice some old posts of mine would have missing thumbnails because the server hosting these wiped it all out.
I took some time reading my old posts from years back in the hopes of picking up some lessons for hindsight. Ntopaz was probably one of the cringey parts of my history from the old blockchain in terms of antiabuse.
Ntopaz had a vision to be something like what OnChainArt, Sketchbook, and Alien Art Hive have and much more. But it was more focused on supporting art that showcased rainbows and unicorns so patrons of the dark art, ero, weird, and nsfw arts weren’t welcomed. Ok cool, their tribe token their rules. It was part of the long term plan to take the token and open it to Korean cryptoexchanges.
But value had to be made first and that was to fill the platform up with artists and hopefully have those artists mint NFTs (note this was before the NFT craze happened).
The first blunder was having the community account upvote any post that contained #artiststeem or #ntopaz. So any random stranger can get enticed from using the tag without understanding why the tag exists. This is how I found the community in the first place. I tracked the shits that tried to post plagiarized photo content and discovered the program right when they were about to setup up on the platform. Further talks led me to understand these people were venture capitalists trying to start something novel on the old blockchain.
They had no idea how their tags are being used and bot votes being taken advantage of. So a few conversations back and forth helped the community get started formally on discord. Fast forward to slowly building up their community on discord like
I think I started calling it quits when the Chief just fell deaf ears on actually needing to be more strict with the antiabuse part of the program. He wanted more users to patronize their frontend but the downvotes handed out by their coordinators to those that violated the rules were considered bad public relations. It wasn’t a hard rejection but there was no acknowledge that he was advocating the harsh rules as more influx of users started posting low quality effort on the frontpage.
Taking a photo online to convert into a black and white while removing the watermark isn’t art, taking a picture of a sandwich one ate for lunch isn’t art, taking a snapshot about a painting you passed by isn’t the art the platform needs, and I could just go on and on about the daily struggles of minding this while at the same time finding myself putting more effort for volunteer work like it’s my job.
I read my old antiabuse report on the community done and it only made me facepalm and feel cringe at my own write ups.
Here’s the lesson I was happy to learn from the trouble: People are lame, downvotes are ok, and be tactful about choosing where to put your energy to build something meaningful.
It had to come to a point where I just had to ask for vote removal frequently because some curators accepted on the roster were just people who had thought of the role as a hobby without minding the real curator work. Now not everyone in the team was like that of course, but it had its moments when it opted to sign up people who wanted to the milk the program’s graces. This is why we can’t have nice things.
There’s no saving a community that won’t own up to the mess their members make. It was really difficult to drive a point across that some people can be irredeemable. Ban a user and they come back with multiple accounts fully conscious about what they did wrong and still getting the benefit of having multiple strikes.
Ntopaz supported a lot of scam artists, no clear competence on how to level some realistic expectations about how the social side of the blockchain works, and it needed more curators that had some backbone to enforce some rules. I became inactive and burned out from the old blockchain because there were better stuff to do in real life.
I returned on the blockchain which was now Hive (yeah I skipped a lot of milestones in between and just popped up on the new blockchain). Ntopaz didn’t leave any lasting impression because it had no clear directions on what it wanted to build on the blockchain. It failed to understand that while the platform had promising artists to highlight, majority aren’t that good and may just be alts from one person cashing in on their graces.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.
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NTopaz was like a lot of the so-called “businesses” on the old chain.
They had no business model and relied on the reward pool as funding. They were about as bright as STINC since they were without a source of revenue.
They figured they could just sell tokens and be sustainable.
They were posers taking shortcuts instead of actual entrepreneurs/venture capitalists.
And relied on community members that had no experience doing what they were supposed to do. We got paid in tokens that equated to nothing. Had other members on the team that didn't know what they were supposed to do.
An owner that was out of touch with reality that the demographic user base he supports aren't really talented enough to drive in views with the content they create but opts to support them anyway. It had all the red flags but I stuck with it to lessen the votes earned by obvious alts and axeman getting upvotes for commenting like nice post daily.
Phuck it, it wasn't worth minding anymore and just watched real artists on the team lose interest while people with alternative agendas just profited further.
I think I remember that one, but don't think I ever used it. I'll take what tokens I can get for little extra effort. People will exploit anything they can and tags/communities will be abused if not well moderated. They can set their own rules, but if they don't control things their token will have little value.
Most things with value involved a lot of work.
It does make me laugh that I found people using #proofofbrian, but they kept on even after my bot told them of the mistake.
!PIZZA
Proorofbrian will probably be a meme of legends if we keep building that lore up, tell me more about this tag haha
Brian is definitely real!
I ought to took for other variations.
Update: this prompted me to make it look for other typos. Pretty simple change.
POB? :) Next?
The trouble is the curation driven economy. Layer after layer of the same damn thing! People forget the basic, only some are content creators not all. Most have nothing to contribute yet they are obliged to post everyday for what? Money :)
Haven't really invested into POB beyond using the general tag. But I see the tribe as a missed potential that rebuilds slowly.
This, the fear of missing out from the gains for not posting and then almost no consequence but only gains from curating. If their virtual wallets decrease each time they upvoted, maybe they would have been stingy about handing out votes often. These are just as toxic as downvotes.
I think of the whole voting system as one fancy to tip someone for doing a good job, feel good, and support financially without costing the tipper. Not everyone is a content creator, that takes commitment but people have been spoiled with free printed money. A decade and a half ago, you would see me be happy if I earned cents from my blogs only after I spent 3 years building it. Here, it's different, it's like a fast lane but hundred times better for ROI just for putting out junk no one even is interested in.
I never got into that one, but I think I remember the name. It's funny how we age and evolve over time and look back at what we did previously and cringe lol. I think that's a good sign of someone that's developing as a person!
Personally, I don't know what proof of brain is as a community but use the tag. I'll admit that I am sometimes a tag whore, but will definitely adjust my behavior if it's not appropriate.
It's a general tag on the second layer, something like none automated and only human conceived posts being favored but idk. I'm not even sure what direction the tribe is going for but I use the tag because it's a general topic community like many 2nd layer tribes starting out.