Thank you to everyone that reviewed and shared feedback on Prop 624. The team has done our best to incorporate or address it all and remains committed to developing and growing nounspace into the top Farcaster client for web3 communities (not just nounish communities, but also communities that are nounish but don't know wtf that means yet).
While we believe we can get there, we also recognize that we have a long way to go. In light of this, we’ve refocused this prop around the first critical step in this journey: converting at least a handful of communities into power users/evangelists. We’re confident in our ability to deliver this and hope you’ll agree after trying nounspace and reviewing this prop.
Before we dive in, here’s a high level list of key changes:
Decreased request from $250k to $200k.
Full-time headcount is now 4: 1 product manager and 3 engineers (wearing lots of hats ofc)
Updated goal: show early validation of product market fit via 10+ communities using nounspace as their primary hub.
Added usage metrics, which have continued to grow since our last prop 🚀
Added more info on $SPACE and nounspace DAO, which successfully launched on September 12th
Made the proposal shorter and more focused on the road ahead. See the appendix for more information on nounspace's achievements thus far, or even better, see the app for yourself on nounspace.wtf.
We hope this revised version is a hell yes from each of you! If not, please let us know what you'd need to see.
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In April, Nouns voted nounspace in as 1 of 3 winners in the Nouns x Farcaster prop.house competition (prop 498 + 509), granting us 100k USDC to build our concept of a nounish Farcaster client over the next 3 months.
We’re requesting 200k USDC from Nouns to fund ongoing development, maintenance, and proliferation for a minimum of 5 months, with the goal of onboarding at least 10 web3 communities that use nounspace as their primary hub.
By further investing in and developing an open source Farcaster client that’s useful to not only the Nouns community, but all communities and users, Nouns can proliferate ⌐◨-◨ in a fun, valuable, and scalable way while also developing the best tools for our own ecosystem’s use. We believe this is what Nouns does best, and that there is no better use of 200k USDC from the treasury than to double down on nounspace and the Nouns x Farcaster alignment.
Our mission is to build the future of social.
Our vision for the future of social is one that's customizable, open-source, decentralized, and community-owned.
Problem
The problem is that social networks are rigid and monolithic. Your toolset for self expression is limited to liking, posting, and commenting. That's it.
The digital world is much more than usernames posting though. So much of the content and functionality that gets created and consumed online happens outside of social. The best that creators or communities can do to bring their external content into social is to post about it, perhaps with a link. Then, they're lucky if they can persuade a % of their audience that hopefully sees it in their feed to leave the social app.
At the same time, AI bots are spreading rapidly throughout social networks, and it's more important than ever for humans to be able to express themselves uniquely and creatively.
Solution
nounspace makes it easy to share the vibes, content, and functionality you wish with your audience. While other social platforms focus on creating walled gardens that restrict and constrain, nounspace offers an open and extensible rainforest that gives power back to users, builders, creators, and communities.
The average human spends 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media each day, over 1/3 of the time we spend online.
Our thesis at nounspace is that a lot of the interesting content and functionality already exists online, but outside of social. Rather than create some new, separate app, social is where it makes the most sense to bring it all together. Users, builders, and communities are already using social every day. Why don't we meet where we already are? Thanks to decentralized social networks like Farcaster, this is finally possible.
The same tools that empower you to express yourself on your public Space--Themes, Fidgets, and Tabs--are just as useful on your personal/private Homebase. Rather than bouncing between dozens of apps, you can access the communities, content, and functionality that are important to you as a web3 user/community member from nounspace.
Our solution isn't to build the ultimate social app ourselves, but rather to give users, developers, and the community the platform to build their own ecosystem together.
At least 10 communities (5 nounish & 5 not-yet-nounish) using nounspace as their primary hub.
The $200k we're requesting will cover development and operating expenses for nounspace for a bare minimum of 5 months. During these 5 months, the team will laser focus on crushing this goal as well as extending stablecoin runway as much as we can. Once we've achieved the goal, we'll use our learnings to identify the next goal and continue building strategically towards the mission.
Web3 communities are optimal users for nounspace because they have information and functionality spread across a large number of outlets, such as their website, app, social presence(s), forum, governance platform, blogs, videos, or other apps such as Donation apps, NFT platforms, DEXs, DeFi protocols, or market data. Currently, the only options for communities to unify their content exist outside of social, such as building custom webpages (ie. ShapeShift, Giveth, or Nouns) or link trees.
By enabling communities to aggregate their silos while focusing on the unmet needs they have with existing social apps, nounspace will onboard the world one community at a time.
nounspace is uniquely positioned to serve these needs thanks to our team's experience cultivating, contributing to, and working with web3 communities for a combined 30 years. Combined with the experience, network, and support of Nounish communities and their members, the advantage is frankly unfair.
Already you can the explore the unique, customized spaces of a diverse list of top web3 communities such as Based Nouns, Edunouns, Gnars, NounsBR, Public Nouns, KeepKey, ShapeShift, Giveth, and Skatehive. These communities and more are excited about nounspace and already providing us with clear feedback on what to build next, such as Profile Tabs (launching during this prop), Channels (up next), Mobile (sneak peak below), and ongoing UX improvements.
1. Get web3 communities
Leverage social media and our existing networks to identify pilot communities in web3 that are the perfect fit for nounspace.
nounspace has already developed the core foundation and building blocks that enable communities to consolidate their fragmented stack with no code: customizable Spaces, Tabs, and Fidgets. We look forward to working closely with our pilot communities to address their feedback and needs until nounspace is their primary hub for sharing content, functionality, and vibes their audience.
2. Get web3 users
One way to onboard web3 users is for me or nounspace to say "Yo you gotta check nounspace out." A much more effective and scalable strategy is to make it compelling for communities and their members to invite eachother. Smart Links (view spec) will enable both users and communities to share any Theme, Fidget, or Tab while earning $SPACE rewards for their creations that get used and for the new users they invite. Smart Links also streamline onboarding for new users and help immediately demonstrate value. We can also use this system to create public leaderboards of not hust referrers, but top Themes, Tabs, Fidgets, which users will be able to add to their Space or Homebase in 2-3 clicks.
3. Get web3 developers
Once we have the users, the next step in unlocking nounspace's potential is empowering the concentrated network of builders on Farcaster to develop, launch, and monetize Fidgets.
This where nounspace can really shine, but we'll never realize this vision unless we can first establish a sufficient userbase to entice developers. Fortunately, the barriers for launching a Fidget are much lower than launching a product or company, and advancements in AI will continue lowering this barrier until it disappears. Last but not least, nounspace can leverage the 20% of $SPACE supply allocated to builders to subsidize and accelerate the development of Fidgets long before reaching critical mass. Believe it or not, the third prong in our strategy is not as far as it seems.
While nounspace is still in its early stages and has a lot to improve before we could even hope to start seeing signs of PMF, it's undeniable that we're seeing some very encouraging momentum. In addition to glowing testimonials from happy, paying users and web3 communities (see appendix), nounspace continues to see increasing usage and activity.
Here are 3 charts that tell the story:
1. Daily Unique Visitors
Visits peaked on the day nounspace launched, in large part due to the pent up hype we'd been building over the prior 3 months. Unfortunately, our young private alpha was not quite ready to go viral, and our usage declined over the following month. Since the beginning of August, we've seen visitors steadily increase as we continue building and addressing feedback.
2. Daily Space and Homebase Edits
After a rapid fall from an exciting peak at launch, activity from users customizing their space literally hit rock bottom at the end of July. Since then, we've seen users customizing their Space and Homebase daily.
3. Total Activity
The most exciting metric is the total events. This chart gives an overview on how much users are using nounspace collectively across all tracked events, including signing up, editing their space or homebase, liking or casting, or viewing a page. nounspace has seen double digit week-over-week growth for 5/6 weeks (wowowowow), with over 500% increase over the past 6 weeks.
Most startups never ship a product let alone get happy, paying customers. To say the growth that nounspace is experiencing this early is encouraging would be an understatement. Opportunities and validation like this are rare. We have a long way to go, but we believe we're on the right path and well equipped for the mission.
Extensible Tooling - Continued improvement and maintenance of a Nounish Farcaster client that all nounish projects and community members can use, contribute to, and even extend themselves through reusable and remixable mini apps called Fidgets
Proliferation - Beyond Nounish communities and members, a Nounish Farcaster client that all projects and users can use
Profit Potential - While we believe that the best way nounspace can support Nouns' treasury growth and sustainability is by increasing awareness and demand for both Nouns and nounish communities, all Nounish communities and community members will also have the ability to earn $SPACE for the users they refer as well as the themes, tabs, and fidgets they create and share.
Nouns has already invested $300k in developing 3 nounish farcaster clients. While this was the right amount for developing a proof of concept, it's clear that developing a truly competitive client requires more time & resources. If nounspace succeeds in our mission, the benefits to Nouns will be ongoing and unbeatable.
Beyond providing nounspace with the necessary funding to continue building, the Nouns community has the power to increase the likelihood of nounspace's success by supporting nounspace and/or sharing feedback on what we can build to ensure that your community(s) love nounspace and use it as their primary hub. This is Nouns' greatest superpower, and it doesn't cost anything. Let's leverage this to amplify the ROI of props and demonstrate the strength of our community and networks to the world.
The primary expense at this stage is to pay humans to design, build, and grow the app. In addition to covering operating expenses, the 200k USDC will enable nounspace to pay living wages to the Based Space Foundation Team for a minimum of 5 more months of focused efforts. By compensating contributors with a blend of USDC and $SPACE, we're able to maximize the impact of the funding provided by Nouns while also providing contributors with additional incentive to add as much value as they can.
Our team has experience building, operating, and exiting multiple consumer startups (JustLegal (acquired by DigitalTown), Bitfract (acquired by ShapeShift), and Press Cleaners (9+ years in operation)), building, launching, and contributing to top DAOs (ShapeShift, Giveth, and ATX DAO), building decentralized social (LBRY, Odysee, and SkateHive), and being nounish and gnarly.
Funds will be held and administered in a 3/6 Safe multisig composed of team members.
nounspace is already generating significant revenues and has additional streams going live soon. While our ability to achieve sustainabiity ultimately depends on finding product-market fit, we've validated our ability to generate meaningful revenues and will continue creating and capturing value appropriately to extend runway while being cogniscent of the need to also minimize friction and maximize growth.
nOG Sales(5.3835 ETH+ in sales so far, up .5535 ETH since the last prop a couple weeks ago)
MOR Emissions (currently 1.5503 MOR/day, or $15.4k annualized)
Tabs Sales (Users that don’t hold nOGs will get their first tab for free and then can pay $3/year nounspace to host additional tabs on spaces or homebases)
Fidget Commissions
Theme Commissions
Additional grants for roadmap-aligned features to help offset development costs
$SPACE Emissions (there is currently ~17.5 ETH in the SPACE/ETH liquidity pools on Base, and an additional ~1 ETH per week accruing to $SPACE and the liquidity pools each week from Capital Providers that contribute yield from their stETH on mainnet)
YOU! nounspace would be nothing without you, our users and community. Check out some of the spaces that have already been customized below:
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View these spaces and more on nounspace.com/explore
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One of the best available opportunities for the Nouns ecosystem is to double down on the vision for a nounish farcaster client, specifically doubling down on one of the promising clients nouns has already invested in: nounspace. We’re lucky to have a world-class, aligned, and proven team led by nounspaceTom ready and eager to accept this challenge and make the most of this compelling opportunity.
P.S.
We want to give a big shoutout to the nouners that have gone above and beyond to support nounspace over the past 3 months:
latsko.eth, ccarrella, toadyhawk, bigshotklim, RobotFishGirl, nounishprof, vlad/skateboard, carlosmelgar, brennen.eth, dotnouns, Benbodhi, bob burnquist, jesse pollak, gami, yes2crypto, and many more.
Building something as ambitious as the future of social takes a village, and Nouns greatest superpower isn’t its treasury, but rather its diverse and aligned community of builders, creators, and connectors. We’re prepared to do everything we can with the resources available to build and grow nounspace to the best of our ability. Similarly, we ask that you all do everything you can to support and grow nounspace so we can maximize the ROI and wholeheartedly double down on this timely opportunity of epic proportions.
ICYMI, nounspace v0 opened the token gates to private alpha for nOGs holders on July 2 🚀
After 2 months of testing and iterating, we opened nounspace up to all Farcaster users. nOGs will continue receiving early and premium access to new features.
While we know there's a lot we still need to improve before we could even hope to see signs of product-market fit, public reception to the first nounish Farcaster client has been positive and encouraging.
nounspace has been quite busy over the past 6 months, and while we've strived to condense it all into a digestible prop, we understand that not everyone has time to read it all. So, we created a 3-minute video that highlights nounspace's entire journey so far and goes more in-depth on key concepts such as nounspace's mission, the $SPACE token and its fair launch.
Eleven powerful fidgets are live now, with more being added weekly, and we’re working on a full suite of developer tooling to empower anyone to build and deploy their own Fidgets for any nounspace user to use.
The Nounish Governance Fidget demonstrates how Fidgets leverage composability to enable compatible contracts or subgraphs to share the same UI/UX.
The Frame and iFrame Fidgets are particularly magical, and have already opened pandora's box, demonstrating infinite creative possibilities within the platform.
Fidgets live now ߷
Frame
Pinned Cast
Feed (supports both Farcaster & the other app)
Image
Video
Text
Iframe
⌐◨-◨ Governance
SnapShot
Links
RSS
We've only scratched the surface of what's possible with Fidgets. Which Fidget(s) do you think should we build next?
✅ Spaces - customizable personal pages where users can layout fidgets and frames
✅ Homebase - a private customizable feed and dashboard
✅ Themes - change colors, fonts, drop shadows, and more (even completely freeform css)
✅ Music - use any youtube video or playlist to give each space its own theme song
✅ Tabs (just launched!) - multiply the power of Themes, Fidgets, and Music by adding additional pages to a space or homebase as tabs.
Beyond the features pledged in our original proposal, we've also launched initial versions of the following core features:
✅ Theme Templates - select from 10 pre-configured theme templates, complete with Fonts, Fidget Styles, and Backgrounds, and (optionally) add your own modifications.
✅ Search - search for any Farcaster user by username, FID, or verified wallet addresses.
✅ Explore - a curated selection of customized spaces across a variety of topics, with Nounish projects featured on top.
✅ Notifications - get notified for relevant Farcaster activity, such as likes, recasts, quote casts, replies, and follows.
Beyond shipping a loveable, feature-rich v0, we also launched…
nOGs NFT collection
Granting our earliest supporters access to premium features for life.
Nounish community members got to mint their nOGs for free!
Nouns, Public Nouns, Gnars, Yellow Collective, Purple, and VRBS. However, when we announced on September 12th that 2M $SPACE was allocated to existing nOGs holders, and another 1M $SPACE would be dropped to nOGs holders in October, we ended all free sales except the one for Nouns holders.
There will only ever be 11,111, so mint yours before they run out!
nounspaceTom (aka me)
a handsome, nounish KOL with over 8k followers and growing
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/nounspace channel
A flourishing community of over 2k followers (up from 1.5k a couple weeks ago)
To cap off our 3 month sprint to the proposal finish line, we hosted the Onchain Summer Extravaganza in Austin, TX where we brought together over 200 attendees (both longtime crypto lovers and curious novices) to celebrate life onchain, nounishness (or as the locals call it, weirdness), nounspaceTom, and the launch of nounspace. As a result, we were rewarded with a 2 ETH grant from the Onchain Summer Hackathon.
If you haven’t had the chance to check nounspace out, please give it a try and let us know what you think!
How you can help
Vote yes to provide the nounspace team with the necessary funding to continue development in pursuit of early signs of validation and product market fit
Give nounspace a try, and customize your homebase and space. If you love it, keep using it and tell your friends and any web3 communities you know. If you don't, let us know so we can improve.
Be my farcaster friend and recast me, @nounspaceTom, please!
Participate in the community or nounspace DAO in any capacity (more on this below)
nounspace DAO
nounspace DAO launched on September 12, 2024. While the team that's developed nounspace thus far will continue developing and growing nounspace as an independent entity, the Based Space Foundation, the community of $SPACE holders will be empowered with their own treasury, governance process, and control of the SPACE MOR20 contracts which control the emission allocation. Drawing from our past experience and learnings launching DAOs, The Based Space Foundation equipped the community with the full suite of DAO tooling necessary to discuss, propose, and execute proposals autonomously. While the Based Space Foundation is incentivized to support the community in successful coordination, the community has minimal dependencies and is empowered to carry nounspace forward in whichever direction they collectively choose, with or without the Based Space Foundation.
This synergy results in the best of both worlds: the ability to move nimbly and competitively relative to centralized organizations as well as unlock the infinite potential of an aligned, incentivized, and empowered community.
Further, it ensures that nounspace will be owned and operated by the community, which we believe is critical to our mission to create the future of social.
Tentative Roadmap
When building nounspace v0, we chose to concentrate on our key differentiators - the unique features and capabilities of nounspace that set it apart from other clients. Since launching alpha, we've been catching up on the core features that users of Farcaster or any social network come to expect, such as Search, Notifications, and improvements to the Feed and Casting UX. We also addressed user feedback, squashed bugs, and added some key Fidgets: Video, Links, Swap, SnapShot, and RSS.
We look forward to continuing to build upon this solid foundation one step at a time until we achieve our mission.
Ultimately the nounspace team's roadmap will be agile, flexible, and guided by user feedback and the results of ongoing experiments. Here are some of the ideas we're tentatively planning or considering based on the feedback we've received thus far:
Bug fixes + Polish + Improvements
First and foremost, we look forward to improving the app based on feedback from nounspace’s growing userbase and community. We’ve already received some great feedback and bug reports from community members and shipped dozens of fixes and improvements, and look forward to continuing this trend.
Native iOS and Mobile apps
We’ve already invested a lot of thought into nounspace’s mobile UX, and have clears plans to enable the full suite of nounspace functionality on mobile, including theme customization, fidget configuration, fidget usage, and core farcaster functionality in a cohesive experience that’s easy, accessible, and fun. We have the backend, mockups, and team ready to make this a reality, as well as users that are already attempting to use and requesting nounspace on mobile.
Check out these sneak peaks which demonstrate the smooth UX & awesome power of navigating Feeds and Fidgets from the palm of your hand.
Feed/Infinite Scroll Fidget
Fidget Carousel
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View Fidget
Opening Multiple Fidgets
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Channels
Enable channel owners to customize the space for their channel with music, themes, fidgets, and tabs. We have some exciting ideas for how to make nounspace the best place to manage, apply to (see upcoming changes to channels), or participate in channels, but the first milestone is to ship the core MLP feature and bring the power of Fidgets & customization to Farcaster channels.
Proactive Space & Homebase Customization
With each new user that customizes their space, the nounspace network grows in value. Thanks to the rich data available from Farcaster's Social Graph and the corresponding onchain history for each user, nounspace can kickstart these network effects by programatically adding and configuring Fidgets on user's spaces and homebases before they ever log in. This flattens the learning curve and creates a magical onboarding experience for new users by providing immediate value.
Direct Messages
We look forward to implementing Farcaster DMs as soon as they're supported on the protocol.
Smart URLs
By enabling sharing themes, fidgets, and/or tabs via URLs, we can empower both users and their communities to quickly and easily share the magic of nounspace with one another.
Smart URLs serve multiple purposes that are core to nounspace’s strategy to provide the best platform for users and communities to both explore the online universe as well as share the look, sound, content, and functionality they wish with their audiences. Further, we can maximize the virality of this strategy by displaying results publicly and rewarding successful creators, referrers, and communities with $SPACE.
Smart Contract Fidget
Read from or write to any function on any contract. With a simple, no-code UX for creating, customizing, and sharing smart contract data and interactions via Fidgets, nounspace is not only a website builder, but a dapp builder. Not only do we need this ourselves for contract interactions related to $SPACE (ie. approving and staking stETH or $SPACE, claiming $SPACE rewards), but it's yet another infinitely powerful Fidget that can benefit any user or project that utilizes smart contracts.
Fidget SDK, smart contracts, developer experience, review process, and marketplace
Enable developers to quickly and easily build and deploy fidgets in a way that’s both flexible and secure. Because nounspace is basically composed entirely of fidgets, getting this part right is essential. We’ve drafted the architecture as well as the factory contract for deploying, using, and updating Fidgets. We did this in collaboration with Morpheus, who had already started working on a spec for “Non Fungible Agents” when we realized we had the technically-identical goal give users to access to an infinite library of flexible, permissionless, and secure third-party apps. This is a huge win-win, not only enabling interoperability between Fidgets and Agents (ability to use agents deployed in the Morpheus ecosystem alongside fidgets on nounspace), but also saving development costs for both projects and resulting in recurring revenues for nounspace in the form of MOR emissions to code contributors. If you’re a developer excited to build fidgets, stay tuned for the Fidget SDK and join the #fidget-devs channel in our discord server in the meantime.
Auction fidgets, Agora/delegation fidgets, fidget where you can easily add ⌐◨-◨ to any image? Yes, yes, and 1000% yes. The Nounish Governance Fidget is live now and features 25 nounish communities (if yours is missing, make a PR or ask Tom!). Let us know which nounish fidgets you’d like to see next! If you're a developer interested in building nounish fidgets, join our discord!
Curious to learn more?
Check out some of the longer-form content we’ve produced over the past 3 months while building in public:
Not codified anywhere that I'm aware of, and while I know some people share the ethos, can't say that I'm speaking for anyone but myself in my VWRs
appreciate the interest though and happy to discuss more offchain
@0xc6a3...96E4
Hi there!
This part you wrote about the three things that you think Nouns should fund is quite helpful to see:
"regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel"
Is this defined or expanded on somewhere? And is this Nouns DAO view or your personal view?
Appreciate the help.
Agora stands out for me as one of Nouns tech success stories.
a small team funded 20eth (with eth priced at ~$1,500) to solve a very specific problem for Nouns - delegation. They identified a pain point in Nouns’ tooling and solved it, making it easier to disseminate information and coordinate with aligned individuals in the ecosystem, and saw significant traction among Nouners. (RIP Prop.House)
they came back, ultimately passing a prop for $221k. a hefty price tag, yet there were was a clear roadmap and deliverables providing direct value to Nouns DAO. the product was so good that Optimism, ENS, & Uniswap adopted the product and the company received venture backing
(why Nouns then gave a non-dilutive $500k grant to & created client incentives for a Y-Combinator portfolio company that was on the verge of closing it’s doors to build a governance client when there is seemingly no roadmap to venture scalability or break even revenue generation is beyond me, but “alignment”)
i think what’s missing for nounspace is that it doesn’t solve any problems for Nouns. the mandate for the round was, “to build a dedicated Nouns client to help surface information across the Nouns ecosystem.” a myspace style profile doesn’t serve that purpose; it doesn’t make discussion and coordination any easier, it doesn’t help proposers connect with voters. i have used the product several times. my profile isn’t customized because i didn’t feel the need or desire to save the changes made
regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel
unfortunately, putting noggles on a website in the name of “proliferation” isn’t hitting any of those marks. it’s a cool idea, and i do wish the team success.
Thanks. Appreciate the clarification. I am observing that different people having very specific criteria that can differ from others very specific criteria can often lead to a jam.
From my experience, in DAOs, its ideal when there is a very clear shared mission that many/most people really care about. When that is the case, things seem to flow and become easier.
Also, happy to chat more "offchain". (even though nouns camp is a really fun (yet expensive) place to do it!)
38
0x38D8...1bc0reposted for (2) · Oct 4, 2024
0x5D80...1F16
(for signal):
I don’t think it’s ridiculous to state my opinion onchain and I didn’t ask you to feel any sort of way about it. I think that we have a pattern of funding sprints and then being afraid or unwilling to double down and give promising builders a chance to expand scope and find pmf. This is far from the only time it’s happened, and I think it hurts our ability to find and keep good builders in the medium to long term. I believe in giving passionate builders room and latitude to cook, especially when they are working on a problem we previously signaled was important to solve.
0xc6a3...96E4 replied · Oct 4, 2024
0xE048...8846
(comment):
@0xc6a3...96E4
Hi there!
This part you wrote about the three things that you think Nouns should fund is quite helpful to see:
"regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel"
Is this defined or expanded on somewhere? And is this Nouns DAO view or your personal view?
Appreciate the help.
Agora stands out for me as one of Nouns tech success stories.
a small team funded 20eth (with eth priced at ~$1,500) to solve a very specific problem for Nouns - delegation. They identified a pain point in Nouns’ tooling and solved it, making it easier to disseminate information and coordinate with aligned individuals in the ecosystem, and saw significant traction among Nouners. (RIP Prop.House)
they came back, ultimately passing a prop for $221k. a hefty price tag, yet there were was a clear roadmap and deliverables providing direct value to Nouns DAO. the product was so good that Optimism, ENS, & Uniswap adopted the product and the company received venture backing
(why Nouns then gave a non-dilutive $500k grant to & created client incentives for a Y-Combinator portfolio company that was on the verge of closing it’s doors to build a governance client when there is seemingly no roadmap to venture scalability or break even revenue generation is beyond me, but “alignment”)
i think what’s missing for nounspace is that it doesn’t solve any problems for Nouns. the mandate for the round was, “to build a dedicated Nouns client to help surface information across the Nouns ecosystem.” a myspace style profile doesn’t serve that purpose; it doesn’t make discussion and coordination any easier, it doesn’t help proposers connect with voters. i have used the product several times. my profile isn’t customized because i didn’t feel the need or desire to save the changes made
regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel
unfortunately, putting noggles on a website in the name of “proliferation” isn’t hitting any of those marks. it’s a cool idea, and i do wish the team success.
Not codified anywhere that I'm aware of, and while I know some people share the ethos, can't say that I'm speaking for anyone but myself in my VWRs
appreciate the interest though and happy to discuss more offchain
0xE048...8846 replied · Oct 3, 2024
0xc6a3...96E4
(against):
Agora stands out for me as one of Nouns tech success stories.
a small team funded 20eth (with eth priced at ~$1,500) to solve a very specific problem for Nouns - delegation. They identified a pain point in Nouns’ tooling and solved it, making it easier to disseminate information and coordinate with aligned individuals in the ecosystem, and saw significant traction among Nouners. (RIP Prop.House)
they came back, ultimately passing a prop for $221k. a hefty price tag, yet there were was a clear roadmap and deliverables providing direct value to Nouns DAO. the product was so good that Optimism, ENS, & Uniswap adopted the product and the company received venture backing
(why Nouns then gave a non-dilutive $500k grant to & created client incentives for a Y-Combinator portfolio company that was on the verge of closing it’s doors to build a governance client when there is seemingly no roadmap to venture scalability or break even revenue generation is beyond me, but “alignment”)
i think what’s missing for nounspace is that it doesn’t solve any problems for Nouns. the mandate for the round was, “to build a dedicated Nouns client to help surface information across the Nouns ecosystem.” a myspace style profile doesn’t serve that purpose; it doesn’t make discussion and coordination any easier, it doesn’t help proposers connect with voters. i have used the product several times. my profile isn’t customized because i didn’t feel the need or desire to save the changes made
regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel
unfortunately, putting noggles on a website in the name of “proliferation” isn’t hitting any of those marks. it’s a cool idea, and i do wish the team success.
Hi there!
This part you wrote about the three things that you think Nouns should fund is quite helpful to see:
"regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel"
Is this defined or expanded on somewhere? And is this Nouns DAO view or your personal view?
Appreciate the help.
0x5D80...1F16signaled for (3) · Oct 3, 2024
0xae47...5Fed
(against):
Pretty ridiculous vwr imo, We shouldn't feel guilty about voting no on six figure proposals for products that have essentially 0 users / traction - and that have already been funded six figures ~6 months ago.
This is a large amount of money, I don't doubt the team are cool Nounish people but it is about the product eod, not just paying people $300,000 because they bought some Nouns. This could be done on a smaller budget, perhaps with different focus? As you say, Nouncil is against, which imo is because Nouncil has been pitched the same thing for months rather than allowing the product to speak for itself and letting the users guide development.
Gl to the team, I personally like aspects of this as we've spoken about previously, like serving as a front end for SubDAOs that don't have functioning auction houses (e.g. foodnouns), becoming your own client ID at Nouns, help proposal flows, candidates, voting, auction, exploring props - also web development should be mobile first imo - big scope and I wish you success.
I don’t think it’s ridiculous to state my opinion onchain and I didn’t ask you to feel any sort of way about it. I think that we have a pattern of funding sprints and then being afraid or unwilling to double down and give promising builders a chance to expand scope and find pmf. This is far from the only time it’s happened, and I think it hurts our ability to find and keep good builders in the medium to long term. I believe in giving passionate builders room and latitude to cook, especially when they are working on a problem we previously signaled was important to solve.
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willywonka.ethsignaled for (1) · Oct 3, 2024
Thank you all for your consideration, and once again for the initial inspiration and funding that brought the v0 of nounspace to life.
While we were of course hoping our v2 prop would pass after incorporating or addressing feedback, decreasing the ask, and showing progress from the close v1, we can only respect the community's decision while asking that you keep an open mind and give us another chance to prove ourselves and our vision for nounspace.
We know we have work to do, but we're too encouraged by the validation we're seeing to give up on this mission, which if successful, we know will provide substantial & ongoing benefits to the entire Nouns ecosystem.
We want the community to be as excited about nounspace and its ability to benefit Nouns as we are. We're encouraged that some of you already are, not to mention many outside of Nouns that are already being pulled down the rabbit hole as a result, and we remain committed to getting all of you onboard eventually.
In the meantime, please continue following our progress, trying/using nounspace, and sharing your feedback.
Looking forward to seeing everyone that's able to make it IRL and celebrating Nouns together next week!
Nounspace has the potential to create impact beyond nouns. I'm supportive of props that check off the fun and weirdness off nouns + create a product, service, movement, impact with potential to outlive the treasury. This is a fair ask for a meaningful build.
We should also create more rails for dogfooding our own products. This could have benefitted from it.
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Proposal was defeated · Oct 3, 2024
0x4977...E333voted against (1) · Oct 3, 2024
I think there's default merit to the team for actually delivering something out of all Farcaster grantees 🙏. Unfortunately, looking at the numbers, I don't think the product has hit any kind of product-market fit (yet!). imao, total no of events is not a great metric.
It'd be cool if before asking for more funds, the team managed to get a couple of sub-communities really excited and using the product daily (together with their members), and maybe a few paying users. Then, I'd feel more confident in supporting them fwd!
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ae
0xae47...5Fedvoted against (0) · Oct 3, 2024
0x5D80...1F16
(for):
To be honest, I’m a little confused by the community’s reaction to Nounspace and the general lack of support for WillyWonka, Realitycrafter and the Nounspace team.
As a DAO, sometimes I feel las though we behave like a hundred-headed Idea Guy on an ADHD-fueled bender. We wake up one morning like a collective Cat meme and peer over our newspaper to say something like “I should fund a Farcaster client!”
And, because ADHD is a helluva drug, one week later there’s a passed proposal and a prize pool for builders of a Nouns-first Farcaster app, something we decided we needed dearly. Nice. We give 3 top teams a chunk of change and we generally feel pretty good about ourselves. This is what it means to build!
But then, the meds wear off and we get distracted — on to the next shiny coordination problem.
Meanwhile, one of those teams (and only one, so far) actually executes passionately and thoughtfully and delivers a working Nounish MVP with actual users and some early traction (and even some inherent mechanisms that may help with eventual sustainability.) The team love nouns, engages with the community, and says they want to keep building this infra that we said we wanted. They even buy Nouns of their own to show their alignment and commitment. They make a proposal for funding to turn their sprint into a half marathon and see if they can find PMF.
We turn them down.
They take away what little criticism they do receive, revise and come back with a leaner proposal.
This time, we just don’t even vote or give feedback on it at all. (Except for Nouncil, which voted in favor of the previous, more expensive iteration, but is somehow now against the current version.)
We say we want to attract and retain passionate, talented builders to solve problems for Nouns and beyond… but why would builders want to build for us in this kind of environment?
Food for thought (and we should never take our Ritalin on an empty stomach.)
Pretty ridiculous vwr imo, We shouldn't feel guilty about voting no on six figure proposals for products that have essentially 0 users / traction - and that have already been funded six figures ~6 months ago.
This is a large amount of money, I don't doubt the team are cool Nounish people but it is about the product eod, not just paying people $300,000 because they bought some Nouns. This could be done on a smaller budget, perhaps with different focus? As you say, Nouncil is against, which imo is because Nouncil has been pitched the same thing for months rather than allowing the product to speak for itself and letting the users guide development.
Gl to the team, I personally like aspects of this as we've spoken about previously, like serving as a front end for SubDAOs that don't have functioning auction houses (e.g. foodnouns), becoming your own client ID at Nouns, help proposal flows, candidates, voting, auction, exploring props - also web development should be mobile first imo - big scope and I wish you success.
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0xdcf3...7a19revoted for (2) · Oct 3, 2024
0x5D80...1F16
(for):
To be honest, I’m a little confused by the community’s reaction to Nounspace and the general lack of support for WillyWonka, Realitycrafter and the Nounspace team.
As a DAO, sometimes I feel las though we behave like a hundred-headed Idea Guy on an ADHD-fueled bender. We wake up one morning like a collective Cat meme and peer over our newspaper to say something like “I should fund a Farcaster client!”
And, because ADHD is a helluva drug, one week later there’s a passed proposal and a prize pool for builders of a Nouns-first Farcaster app, something we decided we needed dearly. Nice. We give 3 top teams a chunk of change and we generally feel pretty good about ourselves. This is what it means to build!
But then, the meds wear off and we get distracted — on to the next shiny coordination problem.
Meanwhile, one of those teams (and only one, so far) actually executes passionately and thoughtfully and delivers a working Nounish MVP with actual users and some early traction (and even some inherent mechanisms that may help with eventual sustainability.) The team love nouns, engages with the community, and says they want to keep building this infra that we said we wanted. They even buy Nouns of their own to show their alignment and commitment. They make a proposal for funding to turn their sprint into a half marathon and see if they can find PMF.
We turn them down.
They take away what little criticism they do receive, revise and come back with a leaner proposal.
This time, we just don’t even vote or give feedback on it at all. (Except for Nouncil, which voted in favor of the previous, more expensive iteration, but is somehow now against the current version.)
We say we want to attract and retain passionate, talented builders to solve problems for Nouns and beyond… but why would builders want to build for us in this kind of environment?
Food for thought (and we should never take our Ritalin on an empty stomach.)
Toady hit the nail on the head ⌐◨-◨
0x5D80...1F16voted for (3) · Oct 3, 2024
To be honest, I’m a little confused by the community’s reaction to Nounspace and the general lack of support for WillyWonka, Realitycrafter and the Nounspace team.
As a DAO, sometimes I feel las though we behave like a hundred-headed Idea Guy on an ADHD-fueled bender. We wake up one morning like a collective Cat meme and peer over our newspaper to say something like “I should fund a Farcaster client!”
And, because ADHD is a helluva drug, one week later there’s a passed proposal and a prize pool for builders of a Nouns-first Farcaster app, something we decided we needed dearly. Nice. We give 3 top teams a chunk of change and we generally feel pretty good about ourselves. This is what it means to build!
But then, the meds wear off and we get distracted — on to the next shiny coordination problem.
Meanwhile, one of those teams (and only one, so far) actually executes passionately and thoughtfully and delivers a working Nounish MVP with actual users and some early traction (and even some inherent mechanisms that may help with eventual sustainability.) The team love nouns, engages with the community, and says they want to keep building this infra that we said we wanted. They even buy Nouns of their own to show their alignment and commitment. They make a proposal for funding to turn their sprint into a half marathon and see if they can find PMF.
We turn them down.
They take away what little criticism they do receive, revise and come back with a leaner proposal.
This time, we just don’t even vote or give feedback on it at all. (Except for Nouncil, which voted in favor of the previous, more expensive iteration, but is somehow now against the current version.)
We say we want to attract and retain passionate, talented builders to solve problems for Nouns and beyond… but why would builders want to build for us in this kind of environment?
Food for thought (and we should never take our Ritalin on an empty stomach.)
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0a
0x0a04...e79Bvoted for (2) · Oct 3, 2024
For: 6 | Against: 0 | Abstain: 3
+for - @moctezuma3ro
+for - @willdias
+for - @zimardrp
🎥🎥🎥 - @r4topunk
@givepraise to @zeroweight for any unique voting system to allow my gratitude +for NounSpace, mainly the community and team pushing the unique platform. Since I understood the reason and purpose it provides I started showing more friends. This bridges what browsers should have done to create your own space.. +/w web3! - @koh
Backing this proposal makes sense given Nounspace’s potential to be a real decentralized social hub, not just for Nouns but for the broader web3 space. The team has adjusted their budget and sharpened their focus based on feedback, staying true to Ethereum values: open source, decentralized, and community driven. Considering development costs, man hours, and the need for continuous iterations, the $200k request for five months is not unreasonable to keep things moving forward.
Sustainability concerns are fair. Relying just on $SPACE rewards could lead to short-term hype without lasting retention. The team needs to lock in solid milestones tied to actual community growth and adoption so it doesn’t fizzle out once the incentives dry up.
Competing with Warpcast right now is unrealistic, so Nounspace needs to lean hard into its unique value. They should focus on building features that really resonate with web3 communities.
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0xf84a...b5A8voted against (1) · Oct 3, 2024
I wish the team would be more receptive on input and guidance from day 1, so here it is publicly for whoever is considering building social engagement platform / tools:
social (community) platforms grow through their content creation tools and discovery algorithms.
That's it.
That's all you need to know and apply:
Ship (simple) content creation tools that lean into and amplify the zeitgeist.
It's all about creation + (content) discovery
That's the trojan horse to build out a social platform where people want to spend their time to discover others.
that's how every single social platform started out, grew, iterated to stay relevant.
Obviously it's not that easy and it takes a certain type of team that has their ear to the streets and chains and development force to ship timely.
Focusing on building out yet another framework platform where users can do "everything" isn't it. In a world of abundance, everything means "nothing".
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0x73E0...77Ecvoted for (2) · Oct 3, 2024
The nouniverse has voted through $NOGS ⌐◨-◨
FOR: 7
AGAINST: 4
31680 $NOGS have been shared among the participants.
0xa903...a44Cvoted for (2) · Oct 3, 2024
Nounspace is a cool platform. I'd love to see dev continued. The budget is quite high, so I would expect to see more adoption/usage to validate the spending.
0xcC26...6Ed5voted against (36) · Oct 3, 2024
Nouncil has spoken.
We discuss all Nouns proposals every week in our Discord https://discord.gg/fdjJpMeV6K. The calls are public and all are welcome!
You can find a link to previous call recordings in our Discord "links" channel.
Nouncil has voted Against this proposal, with 14 votes for, 24 against, and 9 abstentions. Thanks for playing Nouns, see comments below:
FOR - 14 VOTES
benbodhi | "Nounspace is a cool platform and I hope we see more and more people using it."
AGAINST - 24 VOTES
borg00000 | "Still too high cost for projected usage imo"
ABSTAINS - 9 VOTES
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0xc6a3...96E4voted against (0) · Oct 3, 2024
Agora stands out for me as one of Nouns tech success stories.
a small team funded 20eth (with eth priced at ~$1,500) to solve a very specific problem for Nouns - delegation. They identified a pain point in Nouns’ tooling and solved it, making it easier to disseminate information and coordinate with aligned individuals in the ecosystem, and saw significant traction among Nouners. (RIP Prop.House)
they came back, ultimately passing a prop for $221k. a hefty price tag, yet there were was a clear roadmap and deliverables providing direct value to Nouns DAO. the product was so good that Optimism, ENS, & Uniswap adopted the product and the company received venture backing
(why Nouns then gave a non-dilutive $500k grant to & created client incentives for a Y-Combinator portfolio company that was on the verge of closing it’s doors to build a governance client when there is seemingly no roadmap to venture scalability or break even revenue generation is beyond me, but “alignment”)
i think what’s missing for nounspace is that it doesn’t solve any problems for Nouns. the mandate for the round was, “to build a dedicated Nouns client to help surface information across the Nouns ecosystem.” a myspace style profile doesn’t serve that purpose; it doesn’t make discussion and coordination any easier, it doesn’t help proposers connect with voters. i have used the product several times. my profile isn’t customized because i didn’t feel the need or desire to save the changes made
regardless of Nouns treasury size, i think it is important that the proposals we fund hit one or more of these:
a) public goods either in the hyper technical definition of non-excludable & non-rivalrous or in the spirit of those words (charitable impact, doing good for the public at large, {strong disagree with nbaronia about physical spaces})
b) provide direct benefit to Nouns voters by solving pain points in the existing processes
c) introduce Nouns to new bidders and builders who can accelerate the memetic flywheel
unfortunately, putting noggles on a website in the name of “proliferation” isn’t hitting any of those marks. it’s a cool idea, and i do wish the team success.
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0xe3D7...A436voted for (1) · Oct 3, 2024
Generally in favor of nouns resources being used to fund software initiatives.
0x9C87...7E02abstained (1) · Oct 2, 2024
0x387a...fffdvoted for (2) · Oct 2, 2024
0x589F...0503voted for (1) · Oct 2, 2024
⌐◨-◨
0x5160...8523voted for (1) · Oct 1, 2024
Web3 based social will continue to grow. Nounspace is a stake in the ground for the Nouns brand within that space.
The team has taken a lot of feedback from the last proposal to heart. With this new proposal we are shifting our priorities to locking onto a clear product market fit. We'll be aiming to provide communities with a central landing page for their organization and iterating quickly based on direct feedback from the communities that adopt our platform.
Nounspace has a lot of potential for different use cases, but right now we're going to focus on delivering clear value and building exactly what our early space cadets are looking for.
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0x2117...E42avoted for (1) · Sep 30, 2024
I've played with nounspace and enjoy it. I think it has the power to really bring something completely net new for Farcaster/web3 and overall our dispersed web3 all into one cozy corner. A mobile app would be appreciated but regardless I am bullish on this vision and the team.
willywonka.eth commented · Sep 30, 2024
0x9AE8...397f
(abstained):
"We still haven't used nounspace, maybe the team could continue building with a smaller proposal and get some more users? We'd be happy to invite them to demo on the PizzaDAO community call 1pm ET Sundays on our Discord." - PizzaDAO Governance Crew
0x6fB5...83b0
(against):
tech should be built to empower communities to do what they are already doing better. you cant convince people to use your tech without incentives and the problem with this strategy is that when incentives run dry those same users seek incentives elsewhere.
i also fear farcaster is losing its traction - too many bots and not enough real people.
thanks for the invite PizzaDAO crew, we'd love to take you up on your offer and look forward to blowing your mind with a live demo soon :)
--
@peterpandam.eth thanks for sharing your reasoning. agree that we can't depend on incentives, but assure you that this is not our strategy. our strategy is to continue building tech to empower communities to do what they are already doing better, exactly what you described. we have real users and communities using nounspace for the tech we've built already, and are just getting started. we believe the ultimate social app for empowering communities will be decentralized and community-owned, and $SPACE is critical to this. the ability for the nounspace community to utilize $SPACE incentives to bootstrap network effects is not only a proven strategy, but also an effective way to distribute $SPACE to early users and cultivate the community.
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0x15BC...2781voted against (2) · Sep 30, 2024
c7
0xC7CC...7d87voted against (1) · Sep 30, 2024
0x6fB5...83b0voted against (1) · Sep 30, 2024
tech should be built to empower communities to do what they are already doing better. you cant convince people to use your tech without incentives and the problem with this strategy is that when incentives run dry those same users seek incentives elsewhere.
i also fear farcaster is losing its traction - too many bots and not enough real people.
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be
0xBe14...57e6voted for (1) · Sep 30, 2024
I continue to be bullish on Nounspace, the team and the product. Excited to see them implement some of my own feedback to make the user experience better.
9a
0x9AE8...397fabstained (1) · Sep 30, 2024
"We still haven't used nounspace, maybe the team could continue building with a smaller proposal and get some more users? We'd be happy to invite them to demo on the PizzaDAO community call 1pm ET Sundays on our Discord." - PizzaDAO Governance Crew
willywonka.eth commented · Sep 30, 2024
it was just brought to my attention that voting early for your own prop can be frowned on 😅
apologies to anyone that's turned off by this! obviously we're in favor of our own prop, but now that we know this is a no-no, we won't dao it again 💜
always learning ⌐◨-◨
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willywonka.ethvoted for (1) · Sep 30, 2024
Strongly in favor of nouns allocating a portion of its treasury to open source platforms with the potential to be killer web3 apps that proliferate ⌐◨-◨ in positive, scalable ways. Beyond supporting projects like nounspace with funding, I think the nouns community has an unfair advantage to leverage our individual skills, experience, and networks to support projects in ways that don’t cost the treasury anything.
It’s time for us to take some shots on goal. Most will fail, but all it takes is for 1 to succeed. If we score, not only could Nouns survive, but thrive. If we instead focus the treasury on props that, while impactful and sometimes cheaper, don’t have the potential for significant scalability and upside, I’m not sure what the plan is to reverse the current treasury trajectory.
While success for nounspace depends on finding product market fit, we have all of the right ingredients. Building a competitive Farcaster client is a significant undertaking, but will yield invaluable benefits if Nouns succeeds. Supporting nounspace with $200k from the treasury as well as individually with our own skills and networks will significantly increase the odds for success.
At the very least, I hope you’ll all give nounspace a try, and if you don’t like the app or the prop, tell us what you think would need to change in order for this to be a heck yes.
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0x41CB...be4Avoted for (1) · Sep 30, 2024
Supporting this proposal is crucial to keep the momentum and potential of nounspace moving forward. Our team has shown resilience and adaptability by refining our approach based on feedback and lowering the budget request, while maintaining our vision for creating a powerful tool not just for nounish communities, but for any web3 group looking to elevate their social presence. Voting 'no' without clear reasons only creates confusion and stifles progress. A ‘yes’ vote here is not just a vote of confidence; it’s a vote for the future of decentralized social. I belive on Farcaster potential, I believe on nounspace application and I believe in Nouns as the central hub for the social of the new internet.
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99
0x9997...8eEDvoted for (1) · Sep 30, 2024
Absolutely! Nounspace has been one of the most promising projects all year.