The Nouns Daily: The First Decentralised Twitter Account Ever

NounsDAO Small Grants
1

I am thinking about proposing this on the Prop House but first I would like to get feedback & advice from you so that I can improve my proposal.

tl;dr

Start a decentralised Twitter account that tweets daily about the most interesting things and takes from the crypto world.

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Description

We want Nouns to have the first decentralised media publication. It starts with a Twitter account where anyone can suggest content to be published. The content gets sorted in a decentralised way (described later). The best content gets published and contributors are rewarded according to their contribution.

Why?

We believe that having a high quality Twitter account is important for the Nouns mission of proliferating Nouns. Our most ambitious goal is to replace New York Times with The Nouns Daily.

This is also a fun way to engage the Nouns community, amplify the voice of their talented members and create value.

How does it work?

  • The Twitter account has specific guidelines saying what can and canā€™t be published.
  • A moderation team (initially just me) enforces these guidelines in a transparent way.
    • The community will be able to change the moderation team and the guidelines through voting.
  • When someone suggests a piece of content to be published, a prediction market is created. It will allow people to bet on the number of likes the content will have 24h after being published on Twitter. The suggested content is sorted by its estimated number of likes.

The smart contracts and UI to do this are already implemented and currently deployed on the Mumbai Testnet. The tool we will be using to manage this is called: Writing Monks.

You can see the smart contracts code here: smart contracts
UI here: https://writingmonks.com
And learn more about it in this 5 min blog post: blog post
Or in this 5 min video: demo video

Tokenomics

There is an ERC20 token attached to the Twitter account, called $DAILY.

Every time the account makes a tweet a constant number of tokens are emitted and distributed in the following way:

  • 50% author of the content
  • 20% subsidy to the predictive markets (to incentivise people to sort the content)
  • 10% moderation team
  • 20% dev team

Why is the token valuable?

If we manage to create a successful twitter account with many followers then we can 1) monetise it or 2) use it to proliferate other Nouns products like a newsletter or a blog.

Monetising the twitter account
We can auction sponsored tweets to be published once per week. The sponsors would bid using $DAILY, the winning bid gets burnt and the tweet gets published.

Proliferate other Nouns products
In this case, to be sustainable, we would need to continue to receive funding from the Nouns treasury in order to attract good content producers and good people at predicting what good content looks like.

Funding

Goal: To attract a community of good content producers.
Budget: Īž 2.7

How will it be used?
We will use the funding to guarantee that $DAILY is value right from the beginning.

With Īž 2.4, we will fund a smart contract that accepts $DAILY and gives out eth. The exchange rate will be fixed: 3000 $DAILY equals Īž 0.06.

For every tweet, 3000 $DAILY is emitted. So this means that we can fund 5 tweets per week, for 2 months. 5 x 4 x 2 x 0.06 = Īž 2.4.

The remaining Īž 0.3 will go to:

  • Īž 0.1 to create an icon and a cover image for the Twitter account
  • Īž 0.1 to pay the gas costs for the community
  • Īž 0.1 to cover our initial airdrop of 5000 $DAILY to the early supporters of the project

Important Note: During this period (first 2 months) NO funding will be used to pay the salaries of the moderation and dev team. We are using 100% to bet on the success of the Twitter account.

The dev and the moderation team will use their tokens for only two things 1) bet on the predictive markets, or 2) exchange the tokens for USD and use the money to buy ads to advertise the Twitter account.

Team

My name is JoĆ£o Abrantes. Inspired by the Nouns I have created an on-chain CC0 NFT art collection called polys.art .

I have now founded Writing Monks. Itā€™s a brand new project but has already won 1st place on the Chainlink sponsored prize for the Polygon Buidl it ā€˜22 competition.

In the past, Iā€™ve founded a VC-backed startup (optimal.ag).

Roadmap

  • Sign up at least 50 users (airdrop them the initial tokens)
  • Write down the guidelines and iterate them with the community
  • Deploy contracts on Polygon Mainnet & Fund smart contracts
  • Start tweeting! ~ in 4 weeks since funding received
2

Hey Jaoa, welcomeā€¦interesting idea! I think I would have to see this work out to fully get it and know what I think of it, but the idea is intriguing. You asked in Discord for help making the prop strongerā€¦here are a couple things that come to mind that could be considered ā€œweaknessesā€ in the prop:

  1. For a decentralized Twitter account, it feels a little centralized in that you are in charge of it and most people probably donā€™t know you or know you well. I realize it has to be that way in the beginning and you want the community to vote up/down posts etc, but at the end of the day, you are in charge of the account. The more nouners and the community can get to know about you the more you would help that. This is the type of thing that there are obvious people in the Nouniverse who are much more known entities to do something like thisā€¦doesnā€™t mean you canā€™t or shouldnā€™t but itā€™s a hurdle to overcome. Also the prop doesnā€™t show much about whether you are the right person for this in terms of success on Twitterā€“do you have successful and engaged account(s)ā€¦I would say include that.

  2. It feels like the idea sounds great, but getting people involved on Twitter for this may be a challenge. A large portion of the Nouns community isnā€™t great on Twitter and the many that are good on Twitter have a lot going on and I donā€™t know theyā€™d put the time into this. Just giving you my opinionā€¦could be wrong. Iā€™m not sure how to strengthen the prop in this area, but I see it as a potential weakness and thought Iā€™d mention it.

Hope that helps and good luck if you decide to put the prop up!

1 Like
3

Hey bradq,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback - really appreciate it!

I will try to address your points one by one:

  • Centralisation: Excellent point! I am happy if someone more well known to the Nouniverse wants to hold the password of the Twitter account. They simply need to give API access to us, and they can revoke that access whenever they like. In the future, I think there are multiple ways to fix this centralisation. One example, would be to put a big deposit on smart contract that uses Chainlink to access the Twitter account, if the smart contract loses access to the account then I would lose that big deposit. Another option would be to form a company and write a legal contract describing who owns the account.

  • Getting People Involved: The whole funding will be used to attract good content creators. We do need to allow people outside of the nouniverse to suggest content (there are only 463 nouns). But, to ensure that the account serves the goal of the Nouns community we could make it so that only the Nouns can vote on the moderation team and on the guidelines. Or something in between, the Nouns have 50% of the voting power, and contributors to the Twitter account have the other 50%.

Iā€™ve already posted on the prop.house (just a bit before your post!) but your questions will definitely help guide the discussions if I win some funds :smiley:

cheers!