Last week was about taking the plunge into the world of NFTs, this past week has been about trying to make more sense of this space, whilst attempting to latch onto some happening communities.
With A Little Help From Your Friends
It is fair to say that as far as NFTs are concerned, community is everything. You might say the same is also the case for crypto coins, and to some extent you'd be right. However unlike standard tokens, an NFT collection without a good community behind it is dead. Whereas a coin can have a terrible community behind it and you'll still find people willing to trade it.
Of course this is just a numbers game, a coin typically releases with billions of tokens available. In contrast to an NFT collection which will release with thousands or even mere hundreds of tokens.
So how to gauge the community?
The first port of call seems to be the Twitter profile for the particular project you're looking at. The main things to look out for are; have they been tweeting? What is their engagement like, retweets, likes, etc. And of course how many followers do they have?
Next there is the discord, ubiquitously linked on the project Twitter page. At first I judged the Discord channels much the same as I did the Twitter profiles, however there is a subtlety which is only just now revealing itself to me and I now realise that not all communities are built the same.
The Early Leavers
It's easy to think that because a Discord community has x thousand members and plenty of posts in each channel. This does not mean that it will stay that way. Essentially the early leavers tend to be in the Discord very soon after it has been created, then once the mint has taken place, off they go. Leaving the whole channel dead as a dodo and you're left to listen to the virtual crickets accompany the digital tumbleweeds blowing across your screen.
It's important to recognise that the 'early leavers' refers both to the members and the channel owners. They too are guilty of being very active before and during the minting phase, holding competitions, activating airdrops and generally promoting well. But then once the mint is done and the NFT is listed, they take a you're-on-your-own type attitude.
The most frustrating thing about this type of community, is it's very difficult to tell until after the fact. I'm finding that the Twitter activity of both the channel owners and crucially the members give some clues, but like I say, that activity can all suddenly die down.
My experience with the Ducklings on Solana has been akin to the one above.
At first in the Duckling Discord and on the Twitter, there was lots of frenetic activity and enthusiasm. This was what greatly attracted me, it felt like this was a community capable of giving hype to their project.
This enthusiasm was backed up by the owners, giving airdrops via Discord and Twitter competitions and generally engaging with the community. However after having won one of these comps, I woke up to the reality of the group I had invested into.
First of all I was announced as a winner on Twitter, to whit I was extremely happy and grateful. The winning message said to contact them via DM, presumably so I could ping them my wallet address.
However they had the DMs turned off and so messaging was out of the question. No worries though, off to the Discord.
After finding out who the mods were I messaged them, I also left a reply on the tweet announcing the winners, stating that there was no way of getting in touch and could they please message me.
Two days went by and nothing. No airdrop, no reply, nothing.
To cut a long story short, myself and Bleep made some noise in the Discord, basically saying that it was out of order to run a comp, announce winners and then just disappear.
Finally they got back in touch saying that they were sorry about the DMs and that they'd sent me my prize. Another day went by and still nothing, so I messaged saying I hadn't received anything.
Again after another twelve or so hours, they gave me a my bad text, claiming there had been some kind of technical error and so they resent it.
Eventually I got it, but the whole episode left a bitter taste in my mouth and made me realise that the community is actually dead. If the Ducklings do ever go viral, I can't see it having anything to do with the devs or the current community.
Oh well. At least I like them.
The Disgruntled Discord
If you are using Twitter to search NFTs, then there's a high chance that a lot of the ones you come across are either just about to mint or be listed, or have recently become available.
However there are others that you get later down the line. Perhaps you've noticed a bit of a buzz about them going round, or you've seen them trending on Twitter or Instagram, for whatever reason you're late to the party.
In these situations the Discord is invaluable, because you get to find out what has been said in the time you weren't aware of the project.
For example I came across a project called Yama Yeti, @bleepcoin turned me onto it saying that it was a free mint (gas fees only), and they looked like fairly decent pixel art. So I thought, why not? Let's pick up some cheap NFTs and see where they go.
After joining the Discord and verifying myself I started to check out the messages in general chat. I noticed a couple of slightly disgruntled messages but I didn't take too much notice because, you know? They're free, what's to think about?
The mint was meant to happen at midnight on the 14th of December.
However with a few hours to go, the Yama Yeti team put out a simultaneous message on Discord and Twitter saying that the public mint was due to happen at 18:00 UTC on the 15th of December.
The use of the word public confused me a bit, so I checked and rechecked the Twitter and Discord wondering if I'd missed something and perhaps there was some kind of pre-mint going on at midnight.
Whilst scanning back in the messages I'd seen that the date of the mint had changed a few times and at first it was meant to happen when they got to 300 Twitter followers, then that changed to 800.
This morning they put out a message stating that they were worried that bots would take over the mint, so the price was now going to be 0.05 Sol, roughly $8 at the time of the Tweet.
So even though I kind of liked the NFT, it just felt like the vibe of this team was very much one of shifting goalposts. To boot they had already rubbed a lot of their subscribers up the wrong way by breaking a couple of promises.
In the end I stayed away, I think this was my first truly shrewd move in the NFT market. Who knows though? Maybe that one will end up being worth a lot and I'll lament that I didn't just pay the eight bucks. But I don't think so, a good project needs good support and the evidence suggests that the Yama Yeti team are not going to be the ones providing it.
Moving On Up
So that's it for now, I could write about the more positive communities, but to be honest I haven't managed to jump in on any of those at a good time. So I'll keep going and start to find other tools to utilise.
Next time I'll talk about what those tools are and exactly how I use them.
For now my collection has grown by a single Duckling and I'll be on the hunt for some more tonight.
Onwards and upwards!
WHAT ABOUT YOU, WHAT TOOLS DO YOU USE TO FIND GOOD NFTS? OR PERHAPS THE NFT MARKET IS NOT FOR YOU.
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Cryptogee