It seems that since the default Twitter algo changed, narrative formation in crypto has been weak, h/t @AlokVasudev. My guess is that half of CT is still trapped on the For You feed which drives TikTok-like engagement.
This feed often shows more polarizing political topics given the election coming up. The other half are on the Following feed whose algo may or may not have also changed from the old one.
In any case, long term narratives seem to have a harder time crystalizing when attention is so fractured. As a result, nothing seems sustainable and narrative cycles seem extremely short and without much staying power.
On top of this, since there is a vague sense that we have too much infra and too few killer apps and there are few projects with actual pmf, we are at the point in the cycle where there is a lot of copycat behavior.
There’s @DriftProtocol introducing prediction markets on the back of @Polymarket’s success. There’s also @sunpumpmeme and @ethervista on the back of @pumpdotfun.
One way to think about this is that the industry has largely run out of ideas on the app side so it’s best to just copy what already works. From a different perspective, @Polymarket and @pumpdotfun could have themselves incidentally benefited from the Twitter algo change.
Polarizing political dopamine from the For You feed could have led to greater betting propensity on @Polymarket. Now you could say that this effect is confounded with the fact that it legitimately seems like this next election will be the most important for the industry ever.
Still I wonder if this isn’t some kind of reflexive mechanism. Maybe greater polarization and attention to politics from crypto => more donations to political candidates => politicians caring and talking more about crypto => more CT attention to politics.
In other words, could it be possible that as the industry focuses more on politics, politics focuses more on the industry?
Popping one off the stack, it’s also possible that the failure of long term narrative formation due to the algo change has incidentally benefited @pumpdotfun and their shorter term narratives.
When attention is fractured and shortened, complicated and intricate mechanism design questions are too tedious for the dopamine-adled mind. At the same time, gambling propensity goes up similar to how it happened for stonks up when Robinhood gamified trading.
So this brings us to two questions: 1) how do we retvrn to a better time and 2) if we can’t, what coins will do well if CT has perpetual ADD.
For 1), I think we are already beginning to see some dopamine exhaustion due to accelerationist forces. Once this is complete, I could see a flight to quality as we reject modernity and retvrn to monke. An NRx moment for crypto.
For 2), while we wait, might as well look for simple to understand, high octane dope as we chase the fleeting dragon. Here you probably want to keep it quick since you don’t want to end up hooked.
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