Increase adoption through changes in community management

[erikblues]

In this topic I would like to talk about some of the areas in which Dfinity’s adoption is suffering and discuss proposals to improve.

Note:

• The examples I will give are meant as examples and should be taken as broad guidelines. Please focus on the broader picture and the general direction of customer/developer relationship I am advocating for.
• I have over 15 years of experience in the tech-strategic-marketing field and am offering this advice for free to support this project, so please don’t treat this as FUD.

So let’s get this started: Why is Dfinity’s adoption suffering and how could things be done better?

The main big issue at the moment is the way the project engages in what some might call “corporate-overpromissing-Marketing”. This is the type of marketing most companies still use, which is why it is such a great opportunity for Dfinity to set itself apart and do better.

To understand this better: Dfinity creates content from the same perspective as one would create advertisements: The content is intended to paint over the bad parts, oversells the good stuff and avoids talking about sensitive issues.

This is all good for webpage-frontpage slogans or adds, but it does not work for community management, neither for gaining trust and least of all for gaining loyal users who do the most important part: spreading the news mouth-to-mouth (or click-by-click, same thing). This type of content ends up sounding like most advertisements out there:

“look how great, amazing and trustworthy this product is, and you should believe us because we are saying so”.

People have learned to be distrustful of this type of messaging and not believe in what companies promise. At every corner people are bombarded with messages trying to sell them products that, most often then not, end up underperforming.

Nowadays, it is not enough to simply say “we are great and we can be trusted”, a company has to put more effort into it and back it up with hard-evidence. And that evidence comes from real user reviews and word of mouth, not advertisments.

You might disagree, and believe this type of effort can bring some good results. However, because this approach copies the type of messaging that “evil” corporations use, it also positions Dfinity an old, slow, corporate and a bit evil. This is not the image a project like Dfinity should be aiming for. It should instead aim for a similar image as a startup: young, agile, trustworthy, caring about its users, and not focused solely on the money.

Why is this important?

• This type of corporate image that promises much, but never connects-to or answers its users tends to be associated to big companies like Facebook/Amazon, famous for not caring for their users or even employees, for being focussed on making money, and for not caring about their users. And in the crypto space it is even worse: on every corner users see projects overpromising or, even worse, scamming their users.
• It would be much better for Dfinity to position itself as a company that cares about their users, that stands for innovation and transparency, that cares about people and not money. As a non-profit, Dfinity should already stand for that, but that is not the image that is being projected at the moment.

So enough of me stating what is lacking. The important part is:

How can all this be fixed and create a better image for Dinfity?

I will go over the requirements by dividing this effort into 3 main topics:

• transparency,
• inclusion,
• and activity.

Transparency:

Dfinity doesn’t give users enough reason to trust the project. This company has so many advantages over other crypto projects when it comes to transparency, and very few are being used to set the project apart from others in the space. Examples of what could be done:

• Show photos of the offices - So many projects don’t even have an office, and Dfinity isn’t showing the many offices they have. Why not?
• Show people working. Dfinity has a huge team, why not display it regularly in an instagram feed or similar? Include people in the pictures of the offices and make it look like a living-breathing place. The latest office picture I saw was a computer-generated 3D model of a new office. For the skeptical viewer this just screams “fake”, so put some life into things!
• Be transparent about the network and tokens: give users tools to access the blockchain and see how many coins are being minted and to which wallets those coins are going and for what (early investors, network-hosts, staking rewards, how much and % is going to each etc).
• And for Canisters: Don’t just display the total canisters created, but also how many of those are active, how many are being actively developed/worked on, how many are inactive/abandoned. Since the network can’t be hosted by anyone, at least put some effort into making it look like more than just some script to auto-generate empty canisters just to inflate numbers. This is to remove any doubt and show investors and developers that adoption is really happening.
• Show users how to check for themselves that the foundation really exists, really is a non-profit and what is registered under that company. Where can this data be found and how to verify it? Can that be accessed on a government webpage? Display whatever else you have that can help put people on the other side of the world at ease about this company being serious and legit.
• Be transparent about expenses. Isn’t Dfinity a non-profit? So why not use this to your advantage? Display expenses openly, use it prove to users nothing shady is going on. If possible, display a government issued tax-expenses report.

You might think that some of this info can be found if the user puts some effort into research. But why make the users go through that trouble? Make it easy and remove space for doubts, especially to attract more app-developers.

Inclusion:

If you want loyal investors and developers to use ICP, you need to give your users a voice.

People who come to support projects like ICP are people that are sick and tiered of large corporations ignoring the requests of their users. Dfinity has to work harder on making sure their users feel listened to.

However, since it is impossible to answer to each and every comment, this is hard (impossible) to do when using broken forum tools like Redit or Discourse (this forum is built using discourse).

That is why companies that wish to give their users a voice usually use tools that allow users to vote on each-other’s ideas, bug-reports and requests, so that the company can focus their effort into replying to the top-voted contributions. That is the purpose of a forum: to direct the company’s attention to the most-requested features. Check Spotify’s forum in comparison and see for yourself: Ideas - The Spotify Community

So be sure to replace the current forum with a tool like Spotofy uses or, if you want something cheap and easy to setup like Discourse, check out the tool Talkyard (very cheap and free if self-hosted). Forums need to be a place where users feel they can contribute and help steer the direction of the project. Your forum does not have upvote-capabilities and doesn’t allow posts to be sorted by most-voted, which means users are unable to support ideas/issues/bugs they care for. You need to give users these tools so that they feel part of the project and feel like they have a voice. Young people do not care to follow corporations that ignore them. Why should a developer build his app on a tool that does not allow him to report bugs and vote on the bugs that need most attention? If the forum has voting features, people know that the company can’t afford to ignore issues that are upvoted in masses. And that is what the type of user that is running from traditional corporations like facebook/google/amazon is looking for.

Discourse is broken in that regard, since it only tracks replies to topics, and not votes/likes. It is also lacking the feature to have comments sorted in nested format, which makes it harder to have productive conversations in which the best comments can easily be found in long conversations.

Talkyard does it similar to Reddit, but without the same issues (reddit is timeline oriented, which ruins any forum, since ideas posted ‘yesterday’ would end up being hidden and forgotten about ‘tomorrow’).

Talkyard preview:

By putting more effort into giving users a voice, Dfiniy will gain trust and loyal users who spread the word through mouth-to-mouth. It will also attract more developers who will feel confident that the most reported issues are paid attention to and aren’t forgotten in a long feed of comments.

Activity:

This is the part that most people understand as traditional-marketing. However, as mentioned before, all of the current activity is focused on content that is very corporate and could very well be faked. The materials Dfinity currently posts are good, but are not the main area a project like this should be focussing on.

The type of content users are looking for is content that can’t be faked or produced to make things look better than they are. Since the competition are crypto-projects and corporations that lie to their users, Dfinity has to position itself as a human, real, and caring project.

Examples:

• Post weekly updates of what the team has worked on. What has the dev-team been up to? No need for fancy pictures or over-the top design-work, just post short, real news in approachable-human language that show real people are really working on things, that the project is alive and IC is being worked on. The average user does not understand or have the patience to go through pages of Github logs. Don’t be shy, and don’t be afraid to say things like “this week we didn’t get anything done”. Being transparent about small setbacks makes people gain more trust when you post news about accomplishments. A company that hides all the bad things doesn’t feel trustworthy when it publishes the good things.
• App-developers: none of the developers that gained the funds to create apps on the IC is posting any news. All the projects feel dead. If you are giving people money for free to develop on the IC, you need to demand in return that they also post these types weekly development news.
• Dfinity can take those news and re-post them in the Dfinity blog under a new category so that people can see all the activity from all the apps that are being built on the IC. This not only generates trust in Dfinity, but also in the apps themselves. And as a bonus, this periodic reporting makes sure these projects also keep organized and on track, helping them succeed succeed in the long run.
• While you are at it, also ask those apps to use a forum tool like Talkyard, so that users can give feedback on those tools as well.
• Create a new blog area for the “employee of the week”, in which each week you introduce someone from the team. What they do, what previous experiences they have, where they come from, what they have been working on… Give people reasons to trust your company. Doesn’t Dfinity supposedly have some very accomplished team members? So why not show them off to the community? Why is it so hard to find any real info.

To summarize

Dfinity can’t stand there claiming to be an innovative company, while still doing marketing in a way that feels like a 100 years old corporation. If Dfinity wants to succeed, it needs to present itself as a forward-thinking company that respects its users.

This is the fastest path forward for Dfinity.

If any of this resonates with you, please leave a comment and let the Dfinity team know your thoughts. I truly believe this is a good way forward, and I would love to see the IC reach true adoption before ETH2.0 comes out.

.

Extra Points: About the apps being developed on the IC

We should also talk about the apps receiving grants to be developed on the IC. What is the point in making a ‘clone’ of LinkedIn, a clone of Reddit, a clone of WhatsApp? It is not enough to use new technology, it is also important to reinvent how things are done and present NEW solutions to users.

To most end-users it does not make much of a difference if they their app is hosted on AWS or on the IC, if both apps do exactly the same thing. These apps need to have things that set them apart from other products out there. It is not enough to be “the same thing, with similar features, but on the Blockchain, so your data is secure".

So to take the Reddit-clone DSCVR (https://dscvr.one)as an example: it is nice that it runs on the IC, but like Reddit, it allows for communities to be centrally owned by users that created them. This means communities like #cryptocurrency can end up being managed by a handful of people that can sell-out and/or censor content to satisfy their views/needs. A decentralized forum running on the IC should, for example, differentiate between general-public communities (like #cryptocurrency) and privately owned ones (like a company or project), so users know where they can go for true unbiased opinions.
In short → Decentralized communities for a decentralized network.

The point is: decentralized apps need to have more than just a decentralized backbone, but also a decentralized approach to how things work and how it feel to users.

If any of the app developers want some feedback on their app, feel free to ask for feedback on this topic. And if you prefer to talk privately, get in touch and let’s work together.

[lastmjs]

I agree with the sentiments on DFINITY’s marketing efforts. The marketing put forth often feels disingenuous or unauthentic and may be much more harmful than good.

DFINITY should be as transparent and trustworthy as possible, allowing trust to form more easily for others who can’t or don’t take the time to look into the tech and verify for themselves.

I also have this feeling that DFINITY should scale marketing way back and instead double-down on deep research and development.

Google and Tesla are two great examples of companies that created amazing technologies that spoke for themselves. They didn’t need expensive unauthentic marketing campaigns to achieve mass appeal.

It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that one of the Internet Computer’s big problems is its perception fostered in part by DFINITY’s unauthentic marketing efforts. At least that’s one of my major critiques of DFINITY.

[Zane]

That’s an interesting take, personally I thought one of Dfinity’s problems was the lack of any substantial marketing effort and relying too much on the tech to speak for itself, that and the occasional problematic tweet by Dom.
What do you think came off as unauthentic?

[lastmjs]

I could go find specific tweets for you where I feel the claims and characterizations made were IMO exaggerated or untrue, even when DFINITY has tweeted about my own projects. DFINITY should hold itself to the highest standards of integrity, as I hold myself and hope others will hold me and DFINITY.

I want DFINITY and the Internet Computer to be the best they can be, I hope none of this comes across as me trying to harm DFINITY’s reputation. Rather I think DFINITY is harming their own reputation to some extent and I’m trying to help them remedy that.

[GLdev]

Wow, that’s a lot of passion there. Kudos to you for taking the time to write everything, there’s some things worth discussing here.

Marketing is not my thing, so I will defer those points to people more enthusiastic in this area than me. I’d like to touch on two points, though.

1. On the forums.

This is one of the best ran community forums I’ve ever seen in my 22+ years of Internet spelunking. I don’t know what @diegop did in a past life, but he was probably a Legendary Cat Herder or something, as he is exceptionally good at gathering questions, points and feedback from the community, taking it to the team and coming back with either on-point responses or introducing more and more of the team to the forums.

I can’t see how asking people to vote on things would bring more value to the community than having the actual researchers, engineers and developers from dfinity join discussions, provide feedback, hold long-term intro meetings and so on… The time they spend on the forums, answering our questions, helping us navigate tricky situations, etc. is absolutely, unironically priceless. Imagine having 100 Satoshis or 100 Vitalyks join a forum and engaging with their communities… This is what this forum is, right here. Please don’t change it for some popularity contest voting thing.

Final thoughts on this voting thing. I will paraphrase a guy famous for bringing to market innovative products: If you were to ask people what they want their next chain to look like, they’d tell you to build a Bitcoin with cheaper transfer fees and an Ethereum with faster transactions. That’s how you get all the bitcoin clones (litecoin, doge, etc) and all the Eth “improvements” like cardano, polka, etc. Instead, we get the IC that’s simply not that, in the best way possible. This isn’t just a better Walkman product. It’s the freakin’ iPod!

2. On the apps

Yes, the apps look like lamer clones of the web2.0 counterparts, right now. That’s kind of inevitable, IMO, as the “classical” versions have literal decades of head-start. The core thing about these clones, however, is that they’re built mostly on-chain. That brings with it the promises that once every piece of the puzzle is finished and put into place, we’ll have this wonderful mythical web3.0 thing working. We’ll have the tokenized voting, and the rewards, and the sharing, and the empowering, and the accounting and the community voting, and so on and so on. That’s the promise. That’s the end-goal. That’s why most of us are here.

Will it succeed? I honestly don’t know. I hope so, but it’s not a guaranteed thing. I do know that keeping our heads down and focusing on building features is a way forward. Perhaps the best, perhaps not, but it’s the way I choose. And that’s why I have faith in dscvr, and distrikt, and openchat. They look like clones now, but their devs are keeping their heads down and they have the chance to become something better if this web3.0 thing succeeds. And if not, the journey would still be worth it, at least for me.

To paraphrase a famous subreddit slogan: I am on the #IJustLikeTheStack team

[erikblues]

@GLdev

I can’t see how asking people to vote on things would bring more value to the community than having the actual researchers, engineers and developers from dfinity join discussions, provide feedback, hold long-term intro meetings and so on…

I agree with this sentiment. I dont mean that dfinity should do what the votes say, I just meant that by HAVING the votes, it gives users the FEELING of being heard better.

Think of this from the perspective of an app-developer, what would make you feel better:

• posting a bug report and getting a reply like “yeah we will look into this” and then silence?
• or having your post reach 200 votes and stay in the top-voted bug-reports as long as it isn’t solved?

This is not a critique on Dfinity’s work itself, it is a critique on how dfinity presents this work to the users.

Having a bug-report, suggestions etc forum that can be sorted by priority also makes things easier for the dfinity team: each month they can run a meeting basically just sorting the forum by most-voted and focusing on those issues.

But only when those issues make sense, of course. Here is another opportunity for being transparent: if an issue does not make sense (even with high votes) it can be closed with an answer explaining why it can’t be done or doesn’t fit the project’s standards/goals.

It is much better to have a high-voted post with an explanation to why it can’t be done, then multiple unanswered messages.

And yes, most posts are answered, but at some point the project will grow to a size where not everything can be answered anymore. It already happens on reddit sometimes. The voting system creates a promise-relationship with users/developers: “if your issue gains enough traction, we will give an answer”, this makes developers more eager to create things on the IC.

In short: dev’s feel more comfortable whent he bug-reports area can be sorted by most-voted. This gives a better feeling of “people are listening”.

Hope this clears it up a bit.

[erikblues]

@GLdev

On the apps

Yes I agree with your points. The innovation will probably follow later on. I might have added that part out of my interest to work with app-developers on these issues. Maybe I should have kept that part out of the post (also to keep it shorter). What do you think?

[anonymous]

Man, this post is literally gold.

[Mathias]

Great Post!

I think these ideas should be extended to general discussions around how the IC achieves its unprecedented scalability. When I started to be interested in the IC I literally watched and read every explanation on it that was out there. What was bothering me a lot was how unclear it seemed whether the claim of “unlimited scale” can be substantiated. To this day I think it is all that matters. If you can show a dev or a user that this system scales orders of magnitudes more than traditional blockchains, even if they implement their own scaling solutions, they will almost certainly be interested (nobody wants to dedicate money or time to the losing chain). The problem here is that nearly every layer 1 is promising tremendous scalability and they are all really hard to understand.
The foundation should be extremely transparent about the system’s shortcomings. This absolutely has to include what tradeoffs it does in respect to scalability vs. security. And also things that are just not there yet, for example, the lack of node shuffling, which implies (AFAIK) security does not scale with more usage right now. Also for everyone who was following the Bitcoin block size debate years ago, the idea of using data centers sounds like absolute madness. These concerns have to be addressed through communication.
All in all, I think transparent communication about the ICs shortcomings would have led me to commit to the ecosystem much quicker.

[erikblues]

@Mathias

The foundation should be extremely transparent about the system’s shortcomings.

I completely agree. And by being open about IC’s shortcomings, it will also come across more believable when IC’s strengths are presented.

That is part of what I meant with “old-corporate-marketing”: When companies only talk about the good things it makes people start doubting everything that is said.

[jzxchiang]

Great post.

I do think that DFINITY is trying to build a more technical and polished image, as opposed to a more “hip” or “fun” vibe like Solana.

To me, I think it’s totally appropriate, as the Internet Computer is the most complete technical blockchain solution I know of. But I can see how others may view it as “corporate”.

I know many who don’t even like the name “Internet Computer” because it sounds like two technical words thrown together, and gives off a scammy vibe. Personally, I think it’s a brilliant name that succinctly summarizes the aspiration of this incredible project.

• Show photos of the offices - So many projects don’t even have an office, and Dfinity isn’t showing the many offices they have. Why not?

• Show people working. Dfinity has a huge team, why not display it regularly in an instagram feed or similar? Include people in the pictures of the offices and make it look like a living-breathing place. The latest office picture I saw was a computer-generated 3D model of a new office . For the skeptical viewer this just screams “fake”, so put some life into things!

I really like this idea. Humanizing the project (when others cannot) definitely helps build trust.

I think it’s also really important to compare the IC with other blockchains. I think DFINITY refrains from stooping to that level (at least officially… Dom’s twitter is another story), but when you have the best product you shouldn’t be afraid to compare it with others. It’s very difficult to find thorough comparisons between the IC and other blockchains like BTC. As OP said, transparency is key, so highlighting shortcomings would also help… IMO there aren’t many.

[jzxchiang]

At the end of the day, the most valuable resource that every L1 blockchain is competing for is… developer mind share.

IMO nothing else matters long-term.

Either people build web3 applications on top of your blockchain or they don’t. If nobody builds stuff, then your blockchain will be obsolete by the end of this decade.

Getting that mind share should be every L1’s top priority, and I can see that DFINITY is working hard to achieving that (e.g. grants, funds, community conversations, etc).

For me personally what first got me hooked on the IC was these slides.

[erikblues]

@jzxchiang

I do think that DFINITY is trying to build a more technical and polished image, as opposed to a more “hip” or “fun” vibe like Solana.

Yes! It is not about being “hip”, it is about building technical trust in the project.

And of course: generating trust by having an active instagram, for example, also makes the company look more hip as a consequence. However, that is not the goal of these proposals.

The goals are:

• To make developers believe that it is worth building apps on the platform.
• To make developers believe that, if their app stops working because of some bug, they can go to the forums and demand changes, and not have to wait for months/years for a fix.
• To make developers believe that the project wont suddenly change rules further down the road without warning.

Developers tend to stay clear of new technologies when they are unable to report bugs in a “vote for the most-critical bugs” kind of system because it make the project look like the company will always make those decisions internally, without consulting the community.

And it is not just about looks: it is humanly impossible to keep track of every post, every comment, every idea, without a system like that in place. Who will read through a 200 comments-thread and sort the comments by “agree/disagree” to know the weight of an idea? Will that be done every week? By hand? Probably not.

In forums like Discourse (the one we are using), posts get sorted by most-recently-replied-to. And sorting by “most number of replies” and/or “most recent reply” does not always grant attention to posts that have the most support, and more often than not reward users for spamming and “bumping” their threads over-and-over, while other more serious issues might not gain the recognition they deserve.

I know it sounds like a very small detail at first glance, but being able to sort suggestions/bug-reporting/questions/ideas categories by most-votes is a very powerful and indispensable feature for community management, bug-tracking, idea-tracking and, as a consequence, for building community trust.

Expected results:

• Community members feel like their issues will be tended to if they are important enough;
• Developers feel safer, reduced fear of “it will leave them hanging” with a bug later on;
• The community feels more appreciated and their input valued, which helps with organic word-of-mouth growth;
• Better organized forum, easier to find “current issues” (and avoid them during development);
• It becomes much easier to feel the pulse of the community: instead of having to read 100 posts + comments, sort them by different ideas and summing the number of users that agree/disagree with each… the forum would take care of that.
• Ability to (optionally) ignore posts until they reach a certain threshhold. The Spotify forumdoes this with an automatic post response that says the idea will be seriously considered if it reaches 100 votes or more.
• Reduced effort from Dfinity team but much greater results.

@jzxchiang

I think it’s also really important to compare the IC with other blockchains.

I also agree with that, though from what I have seen so far it is sometimes hard to compare things since other projects aren’t very transparent about their limitations. It becomes a sort of “they says vs we say” argument which for the passing onlooker has a hard time believing either side.

I think the biggest proof of Dfinity’s power will be adoption, and the best we can do for adoption is to treat the community (investors+developers) like they can help shape the direction the project is going into, which is what I was aiming for in this post. Decentralized projects need a bit of decentralized decision making thrown in the mix. And yes: I know there is voting about implementing proposals, the forum-voting would be an additional way to show the community they have influence.

Of course, final decisions need to be made by Dfinity itself. Forum-voting is not about implementing what most users vote for, but LISTENING+ANSWERING to what the community is worried about.

@jzxchiang

Either people build web3 applications on top of your blockchain or they don’t. If nobody builds stuff, then your blockchain will be obsolete by the end of this decade.

I couldn’t agree more

PS: This became longer than I planned to, might edit it later to shorten it.

[Heihachi]

We must protect the meanings of guarantee and quality
We must set a group of governance proposals for Decentralized justice
One thought is that every project must set as a guarantee one 8year non dissolving neuron of 200icps for 10k nfts
The less the nfts the more the icps
Additionally we must build an inside code in our tokens so we can track them in case of scams
We agree that freedom is not looting and infite dynamics do not mean endless rubbishes

[Forreal]

I love this kind of post and there was nothing FUD about it. Frankly, this is how Dfinity improves. I am not going to pile on.

[Heihachi]

By decentralized Justice I mean a group of guarantees where no cheats, no scams, steals exists.
The initiative idea is to create a legalized infrigment where in every circumstance of illegal activity there will be refund of the icps, charity activity and burning icps

[Heihachi]

For example there is the recent fact of mutant baby apes and Bob Bodily who tries to find answers in his logic questions
If we consider that if mutant are about to generate a 10k collection of nfts without any boundary then we face untrusty dilemmas about authenticity, legal activity etc
Now if we consider that they have given an 8 year undissolved neuron of 200icps as a boundary to entrepot then I think this could regulate any strange activity
In any case of unwanted results then the neuron is bounded by entrepot and the 50% goes to charity and the rest is burned.
I know that noone can touch a locked neuron but as I said this is an initiative idea

[erikblues]

@Heihachi

For example there is the recent fact of mutant baby apes and Bob Bodily who tries to find answers in his logic questions

I like the outcome you are looking for, but I wonder if the approach you are talking about would be possible. For example: when a project starts, it is usually valued much lower than what it will be worth later on. So the initial staking of ICP would hardly “cover” the values that the project can reach later on.

Also, it makes it hard for small dev teams to start projects if they have to invest not only the cost of development, but also stake that much.

I saw this other post talking about having a group that verifies projects and gives the community a “seal of approval” if the project reaches certain standards (transparency, accountability, source-code, etc). I think that approach is more feasible, and could generate a new product at the same time.

Maybe take a look at this post: ICProposal Rug Pull and idea about how to prevent similar scams from happening in IC ecosystem

Similar to how companies verify and test food to give out the “is organic” stamp.

Take a look at that thread, it seems to go in the direction you are talking about and I agree that it could help ICP as a whole.

[erikblues]

bump, would like to hear dfinity’s thoughts on this.

[free]

[I’m posting this as myself, not in DFINITY’s name. I’m only a software engineer here.]

@erikblues

Show people working. Dfinity has a huge team, why not display it regularly in an instagram feed or similar?

Believe you me, you don’t want this. Due to COVID-19 I have spent the past 2 years working from home, mostly in pyjama pants and a t-shirt. I don’t have photos of it. You don’t want photos of it. (o:

@erikblues

Include people in the pictures of the offices and make it look like a living-breathing place.

More people have started going to the Zurich office recently (myself not included), but there are at most 20% of the employees in the office at any one time. Based on the couple of Zoom chats I had with people in the office recently, you’d probably need to Photoshop in a handful more people to make it look like a “living-breathing space”, I guess that’s not the feel you are going for, though. (o:

@erikblues

Be transparent about the network and tokens: give users tools to access the blockchain and see how many coins are being minted and to which wallets those coins are going and for what (early investors, network-hosts, staking rewards, how much and % is going to each etc).

Leaving aside the jokes above, you can see all transactions on the public dashboard. They’re not categorized by reason (“for what”) or by category (“early investors”, etc.) for a couple of reasons:

• No one knows who owns a neuron (whether it’s an early investor, an exchange, a whale) except for a few hundred neurons created at Genesis. For everything after that, your guess is as good as anyone’s.
• This all requires work. A lot of work. We literally only have a couple of people working on the public dashboard and they’re expanding it weekly.

@erikblues

And for Canisters: Don’t just display the total canisters created, but also how many of those are active, how many are being actively developed/worked on, how many are inactive/abandoned.

We don’t have per-canister metrics, because we acknowledged early on that there would be too many canisters to collect meaningful metrics about. We are still considering how to expose those metrics at all, since they would also help when debugging mainnet incidents, but the truth is they are simply not there. And if they would be, they could show you e.g. how much traffic a canister is getting, but not whether a dapp is actively developed. E.g. it is totally possible that if someone builds a storage layer for their dapp, they may never update those canisters (which would likely constitute the large majority of canisters making up the dapp) only the backend canister. How would you differentiate between that and a single-canister dapp that is actually abandoned?

I have created a handful of mildly popular GitHub repos that I’ve unfortunately pretty much abandoned for 2+ years now. They are still getting significant traffic and downloads.

@erikblues

Show users how to check for themselves that the foundation really exists, really is a non-profit and what is registered under that company. Where can this data be found and how to verify it? Can that be accessed on a government webpage?

Try canton Zurich’s commercial register. Unfortunately it’s in German, but I’m sure Google Translate will do a decent job.

Taking a step back though, I agree with the sentiment of your post. It’s just that all this requires significant work. Work that we are doing. And that the community could also do, there isn’t much information that is private to DFINITY, beyond the raw metrics. (That we are still thinking about how to publish/decentralize in a meaningful way.)

And part of it is really hard or impossible to do. E.g. my colleagues and I would also be interested in metrics regarding token/neuron ownership. But the best we have are Genesis metrics. Or actively developed dapps vs. abandoned ones. The best proxy we’ve come up with so far is to search GitHub for Motoko repos or Rust repos that import ic-cdk.