Tip your creators? Crypto and social media

Is the social media tipping trend or new crypto primitive or just another way to spam?

For the most part, decentralized social media platforms like Nostr and Farcaster provide a similar user experience when compared to traditional or web2 social media.

I mean, the basics are there: you like, follow, comment, share, etc.

There are some significant differences, though. And the differences are mainly on the backend.

And by the backend, I mean that what makes decentralized social media so user-centric is that you have more control over your data. You also have control over a lot of the actions you take. This all happens via connecting a web3 wallet.

For background, please check out these related posts. 👇

I’ve never been a big social media user. I would go so far as to say that one of the limiting factors of my growth as someone who makes a living by writing on the internet is that I’m terrible at social media. To me, it’s like a constant battle against the forces of cringe.

But if you want to do the kinds of things I want to do, then you need distribution. Social is a low-cost way to achieve distribution.

In the spirit of experimentation, and because there are a lot of interesting onchain projects launching and getting early traction on Farcaster, I try might to be active there.

If you spend enough time on decentralized or onchain social media platforms you start to notice that people are tipping others.

And by tipping, I mean sending tokens in the comment section of a post. So far, a handful of popular tipping tokens have emerged.

When you think about it, this makes sense. After all, one of the foundational pieces of these new platforms is that they are made accessible via a wallet connection.

Besides confirming credentials or ID, web3 wallets hold crypto tokens and holdings. In other words, it’s straightforward to embed more dynamic activities like buying, selling, and collecting from right within a social timeline.

It was just a matter of time before tipping became a thing.

The TLDR on social media tipping is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of proper etiquette – yet – mainly because it’s so new.

People are tipping for all kinds of reasons. Great content, such as a beautiful image or a great post are obvious places to leave tips.

Other times, people tip because they share a sentiment or as a way to show support.

The cool thing about tipping is that it provides a way to contribute to a creator or to show your support beyond just hitting a like button.

Giving and receiving tips on social media feels a lot like how the gesture of tipping is supposed to work.

It’s not lost on me that social media tipping is showing up at about the same time when other forms of tipping seem to be running wild. It feels like every touch screen you have to look at these days is asking for some kind of tip. It’s excessive and counterproductive.

But tipping a creator on social media (or even better, receiving a tip on social media) does feel like it introduces an interesting wrinkle.

If enough people like my work and are prone to tipping, then just maybe…

One of the most interesting things about making small tips on social media is that it’s a great way to introduce and distribute new tokens and memecoins in a way that feels somewhat fair and honest.

Unlike other token launch schemes, tipping can get small quantities of lots of assets into the hands of many quickly.

Presumably, people who receive tips will then continue to spread the tokens to more people, either via re-tipping or by exchanging them for something else, like paying for a bounty or some other onchain service.

From the token distribution side, tipping is an extremely powerful method to launch a new project.

There’s another idea that tipping — or introducing even small forms of value exchange between creators and consumers could become a way to help fight the bots that seem to be running wild all over all forms of social media.

In other words, tipping or receiving tips could be like a proof-of-humanity, which then can help the network make “bot or not” decisions. Of course, nobody knows what happens if the bots somehow start tipping.

OK, but before we all run off and load up on degen or ham or whatever and start throwing fractions of cents around like we are all major patrons of the arts, it’s important to also understand that tipping on social media can also get spammy real quick.

This is what the social media tipping scene looks like.

On Farcaster, the first tipping token that seemed to gain traction soon had follow-ons and copycats.

Note, if you are active on the platform, you’ll get notifications like the one above. Many of them are only are probably only a couple of weeks old by the time you hear of them.

And there might not be a market for any of these tipping tokens besides re-tipping, which feels like it's just creating more work or adding extra functionality that might not matter.

There are also tip seekers or people who ask for tips without contributing to the network.

This phenomenon seemed to have a moment in the sun and is now pulling back to be more fringe. But there was enough of a glimpse to see what the future could look like if social media tipping took off.

So the takeaway here, is that tipping tokens right from a feed is a fun and new way to support creatives on the internet — and that should be supported.

But, there are downsides, such as constantly keeping tabs and managing tipping-specific memecoins as another function of having a social media presence.

If you like this newsletter, instead of sending me memecoins, please share this with someone in your network and ask them to subscribe.

How does tipping on social media work? And why does it matter?

Could social media tipping become a new crypto primitive?

Wait, is social media tipping just another form of spam?