Author: jamesrichardfry, Head of Marketing at Across Protocol

Translated by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

I have been hesitating on how to begin writing this content. Part of me wants to present it all in a sunny light. To package it in marketing language, to say it grandly, and then just move on.

But that is not entirely honest. If you know me, you know I am someone whose emotions show on my face, someone who cannot keep things inside. So, I will speak plainly.

The community is dead. Of course, it hasn't always been this way. It's self-evident, but I still want to say it out loud.

I still miss those wonderful old days in the Clubhouse and Discord chat rooms. Back then, we would spend a lot of time "vibing" with online friends, chatting about magical internet currencies, the latest NFT releases, the best staking opportunities, joking about the pitfalls we encountered and the money we lost, dreaming together about the next great project, and truly "building" together.

To this day, I still maintain good friendships with many online friends. Some have even become close friends in real life. When the community was great, it was truly great. I miss those days.

To take a broader view, what is a community? During the last all-hands meeting, I talked too long about this, and I could almost hear my colleagues rolling their eyes.

To share some insights with you, here is my view on the community:

A community is a group of people gathering around a common interest. In many aspects of daily life, we have communities.

Communities exist in the schools you attend, the sports you participate in, the religions you believe in, the gyms you go to, and even the grocery stores you shop at.

Some communities are rather superficial. The group of elderly gentlemen I see at the gym Monday through Friday is a community, but it is clearly different from the close-knit community of friends we purposely spend time with.

Web3 communities or crypto communities are no different.

We gather around shared interests. The summer of DeFi. NFT crazes. The decline of NFTs. Various cross-chain interoperability, various zero-knowledge proofs.

No matter what you're into, there’s always a group of people willing to go deeper into the rabbit hole with you.

Some are in it for financial speculation. Others are deeply committed to the early crypto-punk movement. Some crypto communities are rather superficial or performative.

Others run very deep. I mean extremely deep. Like religious groups, fervent followers, deeply rooted beliefs that instill courage in you to take the stage and passionately explain to hundreds of listeners why you believe in the founder, trust the project, believe in the roadmap, and why you are the staunchest "diamond hand hodler" of that project.

Belief. It is exactly this that drove the parabolic growth in the early days. Without community, there would be no crypto world as we know it today.

By the way, Across is no exception. The early days of the Across community were a golden age. The atmosphere was exuberant. There was a deep belief (yes, I have repeated this term multiple times). It was filled with excitement and energy; people genuinely cared about the project because of its innovation, not because of the token price.

We recruited many from the community who still fight alongside us today. Some early adopters remain loyal community members, sharing both the challenges and joys with us.

When the community is great, it is truly great.

But then, everything changed.

Fast forward to today. I will say some summarizing truths coming up. Please understand, I do not mean "all" community members, "every" community group, nor am I generalizing across the board. But if I remain straightforward, I am indeed referring to the majority. The vast majority.

The term "community" has been tarnished by the "exploiters" of the crypto world. In many ways, if you want to understand why "greed is the root of all evil," just look at the countless Discord "communities" to see.

There, thousands of unread messages pour in daily, with astonishing daily active users, and a constant flow of social support until the token generation event (TGE) arrives. We all know how the script unfolds.

The atmosphere before the TGE mimics the emotions of early crypto communities. Deep beliefs. Fire in the belly. The courage to take the stage. Profile pictures and project tags. Life and death together, diamond hands, bullish hodlers.

Then, everyone changed.

One night, before bed, you could barely keep up with the Discord notifications.

You woke up the next morning to find it a ghost town.

Even worse.

You find your loyal "community" coming at you with pitchforks and torches.

Over an airdrop.

You see, the "community" is no longer a community.

It has devolved into an endless stream of AI-generated spam, solely to earn points, to get the hopes of an airdrop, and then immediately dump, followed by complaining about token prices, calling the project a scam or a rug pull (which, to be fair, is often the case).

You know what I'm leading to, right?

The "community" is no longer a community. You all know and can feel it. The timeline has soured. The Discord server has soured. The podcasts have soured. The Twitter Spaces have soured.

Everything feels off, just like "Kang Shifu" is never "Kang Shifu." Everyone reading this article today knows this deep down, even if you've never articulated it as clearly before.

Today's "community" is just a cheap imitation of the early communities that built the crypto world to what it is now. The shared interests of these "community" members can be boiled down to one thing: extraction. Fast. Decisive. Extraction. It is this poison that has stifled what the crypto world could and should have become.

Today, most (reiterating, not all) Discord "communities" are composed of a mixed bag of leftovers.

Some are truly loyal followers and believers. (To those who still support Across, we wouldn't be here today without you. Thank you. You know where to find us; we will always have a place for you.)

There are also those, often the majority, who are there to extract benefits from the project. I won’t elaborate on that here.

Lastly, there are those who only appear to complain. Because in every bear market, these specific types of "community" members will kick you down when you are down, as if the bear market does not affect each team member, and as if we caused the bear market to happen.

Unfortunately, Across Discord has recently fallen into this "majority" category. Our "community" has changed beyond recognition.

Those who recognize the amazing achievements we have made, acknowledge the progress Across has pioneered for the entire industry, and still support us have grown weary of being associated with this extractive "community" and have left Discord.

The few who remain are happy to follow us to Twitter and other channels. The rest are what I defined above as the so-called "community." Yes, I say this with fire in my belly and firm belief.

Thus, today, Across Discord will switch to read-only mode.

This is the first step in our planned complete shutdown of the server.

To the steadfast community of believers, let us continue to build. We have much work to do.

To Discord, thank you for hosting some of the wonderful old times in the crypto world; I will cherish it forever.

The community is dead.

Long live the community.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。