Advice on next steps for Creative Funding

Since Proposal #23 was passed on December 8, 2021, the Creation Fund Committee has been in operation for 18 months. I would like to thank several committee members for their willingness to take on this important responsibility for the community.

The history of the creation fund* is much longer than that of the committee, almost born together with the LikeCoin project, and earlier than the Appreciation Citizenship Program. In July 2018, the LikeCoin team held an event for the first time to distribute LikeCoins to encourage authors, and the "Turn Likes into Rewards" campaign was launched; since then, readers clicked likes, and the concept of "LIKE" was easily spread among the creative community. It has been five years since then. years.

However, the creative ecology, the cryptocurrency market, and even the social environment have changed rapidly in the past five years. LikeCoin's experiment has gone through multiple iterations from the initial conversion of praise to the current Writing NFT. The operation of the creation fund should also be innovated with the changes of the environment and products, so as to achieve the goal of promoting the LikeCoin creation ecology.

From Appreciating Citizens to Writing NFT

The Creation Fund comes from the community, mainly for supporters who are willing to invest in LikeCoin who expect to achieve a more ideal creative ecology. The purpose is to expand the LikeCoin ecology, attract more authors to join, and encourage readers to interact with authors by pressing likes. We believe that as long as readers develop healthy appreciation habits, authors can earn money. In the long run, the author has to rely on the support of the readers, and the role of the creative fund is only a seed or a medicine. Therefore, the appreciation of the citizen movement was born, and the readers need to pay real money to support the author. The creative fund has evolved into a matching fund, which appreciates citizens' contributions and magnifies the author's income, hoping to generate the momentum needed for the creation of the ecology.

In the above design, the money paid by readers to become appreciative citizens is the long-term source of income for the author.

However, the bar for asking readers to interact so frequently may be too high, and the incentives may not be enough, because readers need to like articles one by one in order for authors to earn income. After several years of experimentation, the growth of the appreciative citizen community has indeed encountered a bottleneck. So in August last year, Liker Land launched Writing NFT, trying to use the analogy of "souvenirs" that collect works in the real world as an incentive, so that paying users can not only support the author, but also get some real items in return. Since then, "Like" is no longer the focus of the product, and the author's source of income has shifted to selling the NFT of the work, or using the NFT of the work as an incentive to attract users to pay. The payment method for purchasing NFT in the future is more likely to develop into a monthly subscription, which is convenient for readers to collect a large number of works; it may also be combined with the current Appreciation Citizenship Program.

Creation fund as promotional budget

The most important goal of Creation Fund is to convert readers into paying users to support authors. However, although the focus of LikeCoin has shifted to attracting paying users with Writing NFT in the past six months, the creation fund does not have any design to support this direction.

In addition, to promote the development of the ecology, users need to be familiarized with the operation of cryptocurrency tools step by step, such as encouraging authors to upload content to the chain, readers to support works with LikeCoin, etc. Therefore, one of the most important goals of Creation Fund is to provide incentives to help users overcome technical barriers, such as installing wallets and using LikeCoin products. Therefore, the main funding target of the Creation Fund is new users, helping them take the hardest first step. However, according to past data, most of the funded users are old users, which cannot effectively help the community grow.

In summary, I think the three main goals of the Creation Fund are as follows, and the distribution system should be designed in this direction:

• Pull new users into the ecology

• Encourage the use of Writing NFT as a tool

• convert paying users

Reorganization of the Creative Fund Committee

Since proposal #23 was passed, a 7-member committee of the Creation Fund has been in charge. The necessary duties of the committee are to initiate a proposal to ask for funds from the LikeCoin community fund and regularly review the use of the fund, followed by promoting the improvement of the use of the fund. In the past year and a half, the committee has been able to perform its main functions, but it has done little to improve the use of funds. As one of the committee members, my reflection is that the operation cost of the committee is too high, and the term of office is too long. Compared with the later period, the personal status of each committee member has also changed greatly. I think that the composition of committee members needs to take into account both representativeness and efficiency. In the past months, I realized that too many people lead to inefficiency. Therefore, it is suggested to reorganize and reduce the number of committee members to 3 or less. With the establishment of the new committee, improvements to the Creation Fund can be implemented more efficiently.

Mechanisms don't have to be eternal

There is still a long way to go before the LikeCoin ecology matures. There are opportunities to encounter various challenges along the way, and the environment may change drastically. As a means of promoting ecological development, the creation fund does not necessarily exist forever. It should be reviewed in due course, and can be replaced or even canceled by other means when necessary. No matter how the environment changes, what tools and methods are used to deal with it, LikeCoin has moved from Kai Tak Airport to the Star Ferry Terminal, the only thing that remains unchanged is the original intention of serving creators**.

I would like to invite people with lofty ideals to participate and discuss with the above. When the time comes, I intend to introduce a community motion to reshuffle the committee in July.

* Refer to " A History of Appreciation " by Daisy, one of the members of the Creation Fund Committee

** Quoted from " From Kai Tak Airport to Star Ferry Terminal: LikeCoin's 10-Year Promise" by Gao Jianjian, the founder of LikeCoin. first half