My thesis as a delegate is: “Nouns has a unique role in the ecosystem as a gathering place around public goods.”
Most of my votes as a delegate focus on the “public goods” part of my thesis. This one is more unique, since it focuses on the “gathering place” part of the thesis.
Explaining what Nouns does is extremely important. Even within Nouns, there are differing visions of the goal: A space for public goods? A meme to proliferate? A treasury that should focus on growth? When Nouns itself has so many different visions, it becomes especially important to synthesize and explain those visions to the world.
As someone who’s worked on explaining complex spaces like DAOs from scratch, I know that this is really, really hard. Getting the messaging right, finding the right balance between simplicity and nuance, and then getting the content out into the world takes a long time. It’s a full-time job, and not one that is easy to decentralize. Just like how crypto startups shouldn’t decentralize before they have product-market fit, crypto media shouldn’t decentralize before they have “narrative-market fit”.
I understand the desire to decentralize. I understand the concern about reach. I understand the hesitation about the size of the ask. But the reality is that, in my opinion, it’s too early for those things. Nouns needs to figure out how to tell its story, and frankly it’s not very good at it right now. Before we add many narratives and styles into the mix — which we should! — we should try to get one right.
Let’s see what Nounish produces, give them time to accomplish the huge task in front of them, and then fund even more voices. Their content is easy to discover and remix — that is already a foundation for others to build on top of. The decentralization and reach will come in due time. It took half a decade for people to begin to understand what a DAO was. And then suddenly, it clicked for people all at once. Nouns is on a similar journey. Let’s give Nounish the time and resources to grow. This won’t take months. It will take years. Let’s give them the ability to make this happen.