How to improve the SNS framework?

Developers
8

Thanks @aterga for proposing this improvement to SNS. I’m Yan, the founder of ICPanda DAO, and I’d like to offer a suggestion beyond technical aspects.

I believe that SNS project teams, users who bought SNS tokens, the Dfinity team, and many ICP holders all hope for SNS projects to succeed. After the successful launch of an SNS project, people might assume that the project will thrive through the efforts of the team and community governance. However, looking at the development of over 20 SNS projects, success is not easily achieved.

I think the reason for this may be that SNS project teams, often tech-focused startups, lack experience in other entrepreneurial areas. Their overall entrepreneurial ability may be weaker than Web2 startups, and relying on community governance to fill the gaps is even more challenging.

Take ICPanda DAO as an example. We were honored to be recognized by the community and passed the SNS. We were confident, thinking that focusing on product and technology would solve everything. Yet, we encountered two main difficulties:

  1. Issues with the SNS framework and proposals: Even after repeatedly reading the SNS technical documentation, I still faced:

    • Some SNS initialization parameters were not as I understood.
    • I was unsure how to draft different types of proposals for the first time because I didn’t know their underlying mechanisms and feared making mistakes. I wanted to reference successful proposals from other SNS projects but couldn’t find any, so I put all our successful proposals on GitHub for others to refer to.
    • During SNS management, we encountered problems that other teams had faced but often had to consult Dfinity members on the forum to resolve. I suspect future SNS projects will face similar issues.

  2. Challenges in marketing and promotion: Despite our efforts, we still felt disconnected from the ICP community:

    • Our free airdrop, with its low threshold and social viral mechanism, distributed tokens worth 1800 ICP, bringing nearly 100k ICP users from Twitter and gaining us 180k Twitter followers and 2k OpenChat members. Yet, this didn’t seem to make any waves in the ICP community.
    • Our lucky red envelopes, which seemed to be the first on-chain red envelopes running on Twitter, achieved good numbers within a month but didn’t make an impact in the ICP community.
    • Our technical lessons aimed to introduce the core ICP technology in simple language, received many likes and shares, but didn’t seem to resonate in the ICP community.
    • Our DeAI demo, believed to be the first LLM running in a canister (at least I haven’t seen others), also received many likes and shares but didn’t seem to make an impact in the ICP community (though it did catch Jennifer’s attention).

The reason we feel disconnected from the ICP community is that during our promotional efforts, we would At the official ICP account or influential OGs in the ICP ecosystem, hoping for attention, feedback, or retweets, but received none. We remain relatively unnoticed. There are certainly areas where we fell short, but we don’t know where the issues lie or who to consult.

Relying solely on project and community autonomy is difficult for success. My suggestion:
I hope Dfinity can initiate an SNS support alliance to provide guidance, consulting, and resource support for SNS projects. This includes, but is not limited to, knowledge sharing, technical guidance, resource connection, promotional exposure, and market activities, helping SNS project teams solve problems, avoid pitfalls, and grow quickly.

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