[COMMUNITY DISCUSSION] Should @HNS twitter be community-operated for marketing purposes or remain inactive indefinitely?

[Chjango]

Opening up this topic for an informal discussion since there's been ephemeral conversations about this happening over Telegram.

In my personal view, I view Twitter as an effective marketing tool to address a crypto audience. Crypto Twitter is where most new retail investors look to to find information they can't get elsewhere. Keeping the @hns handle inactive indefinitely is leaving the opportunity to speak to that audience on the table.

From a decentralization perspective, the factor that matters most is whether the protocol—and the governance over that protocol—is sufficiently decentralized. Whether or not a Twitter handle is communicating updates about said protocol ranks much lower on the list of factors.

There were concerns raised [1] [2] about the inactivity of @hns being perceived—to the detriment of Handshake—as Handshake being a "dead project" or a "ghost chain". You and I know that this certainly isn't the case; but this is the reality of the optics.

From a market standpoint, there are 99,999 other projects vying for retail attention. And retail pays attention to Twitter. If we care about Handshake price, then it should be competing for some of that attention. If it remains inactive indefinitely, then, at least for the short run, Handshake runs the risk of not being discovered while we're in the heat of a DeFi and dWeb summer.

That's my vote. Would love to hear your input, and looking forward to having a constructive discussion. The fact that we're having this discussion merits a healthy ecosystem already.

Onward!

[pinheadmz]

Thanks so much for opening this discussion, soliciting input from the community, and being a friendly benevolent custodian of a very important asset - with over 14,000 followers. My only input to the @hns policy is: please tweet hsd and hnsd releases, and especially critical security update announcements like the recent inflation bug patch.

[johnnywu-namebase]

I'm all for the @hns Twitter account being more active, the main thing is who would manage it? The dWeb Foundation?

It's a super big role to play and any position the @hns Twitter account takes regardless of how minor will be seen by outsiders as representing the entire Handshake community's position. For example, I don't think the account should "like" a Tweet that even suggests a roasts towards another project, which makes it a tricky decision on whether to promote community events like #monthofmemes.

That said, I think @hns should help promote objectively positive community events such as HandyCon or the Flamingo Handshake auctions.

[smcki012]

The greatest net positive returns for the Handshake community (especially in regards to social graphs and reach), would be if keystone community, technical, business, and educational stakeholders amass and refine their own social reach and referent authority/social legitimacy by directly engaging and interfacing with the community at large.

Great examples of this would be Kiba Gateaux, Mark Smith, and Handshake Jesus: all have built a loyal community following and social legitimacy based on their perceived inputs and how they interfaced with it using their accrued social capital.

If you wish for Handshake to stand on its own merits, and not create socio-technical debt, the best course of action would be to leave the handle vacant, and just put a bot to automatically share all latest releases/merges/and emergency patches from the hsd reference implementation. However, even this is dangerous, as it creates social authority around 1 fullnode client, and puts it on a social pedestal above alternate implementations -- something that has irked JJ himself for a long time in Bitcoin, from my recollection.

14,000 people is nothing without impressions, and without a consistent ethos and messaging, that account is mostly just a glorified sounding board for technical releases. There would be better net returns socially if the community capitalized on bringing in younger and more adventurous/boisterous types to echo the communities' messaging and hardwork, and celebrating those who have done a great job of it thus far.

A realignment of where we place our values and appreciation for those who have already created a lot of traction would do us much better than coming to a contentious social decision that just ends up an opportunity for traders to profit off the angst and uncertainty; Handshake fixed DNS, not human psychology.

[DIPMR]

Best would be to take the link off the official website and use it, I would say even take off the Reddit link too. Link only the Github, that's Handshake and that's what world needs.

[alchmind]

I agree with the opinion that the project should shine on its own merits, but people have invested in this coin not only for the strong tech but also for the chain design. The more people we have investing in the coin, the more the project can self-perpetuate with the airdrop funding mechanism and bring in even more developers (and make it worth their time). I don't like speculative fervor in the crypto markets (if that is a concern among community members), but I'd argue we're not going to spark rampant speculation just by posting about our developments. We're not going to get everyone to understand the tech and its philosophy the way the core community does, but that's not our main concern. Our main concern is making sure that we achieve the goals of decentralization, censorship-resistance, and the free exchange of information to be had, and that people can experience that. We can at least use the account to post TheShake weekly or something so people know the progress. People just need to know we're not dead, and being that HNS tech is running in the background most of the time, no one will notice unless we broadcast this.

We can have the greatest tech in the world but if no one knows about it, no one will care. Right now, our main concern should be reaching a critical mass of adoption and legacy players to adopt after that. We're not doing coin holders or the dev community any favors by holding back the @hns account.

[troq]

Handshake not having a centralized organization driving it carries some weaknesses but also enables Handshake's greatest strength — a resilient decentralized community that makes Handshake one of the strongest communities in crypto. @hns changing course to become active threatens that strength because it's a centralized point of authority in the community and introduces governance concerns. Handshake is already seeing great progress both in community growth (HandyCon was a huge success) and industry adoption (NameCheap is now purchasing Handshake domains and hodling HNS). Instead of introducing a point of centralization into a decentralized community, we should solve the root problem you mentioned of people looking at @hns and thinking Handshake is inactive; I recommend that whoever controls @hns pin a post that says that there is no official twitter account for Handshake because it is a thriving decentralized community.

[peepohns]

I agree with Chjango.

[agaamin]

I think the twitter handle should be used, and used heavily to promote Handshake.

IMHO the best thing about HNS is not the decentralization and and standard crypto benefits list that gets touted, instead It's the immense potential it brings in terms of possibilities to build new tools, products and services. If handshake needs to be useful to humanity it needs to be mass and mainstream. And it does not help the cause to for some reason to avoid one of the most popular platforms of crypto verse.

Also The idea that Just because someone manages a social media handle it would "centralize" Handshake is simply not true. I manage the Facebook, Insta and Linked in Profiles for Handshake. In fact recently i have ensured its presence on Hive and Steem blog ecosystem also with Handshake community. I don't see how these handles are going to take a decentralized product like Handshake and make it centralized.

In fact we should use as many tools that are out there to create awareness about Handshake. And twitter is one of the important avenues. If it helps we could perhaps create a community that manages these social handles so that fears of centralization ( if any) can be addressed.

[Anunayj]

Personally imo the @hns twitter handle should only be used for announcing Blockchain related changes (Bugs, soft forks, potential future hard forks). Any marketing related announcements can be done from unofficial individual controlled accounts, (say @HNSUnofficial ,which can be given a shoutout from the @hns handle).

The reason behind my opinion is, having a official twitter handle makes handshake feel not so different from ICANN/other centralized naming systems. It gives the view that the person operating the twitter handle somehow speaks for the community.

In the short I can see how marketing the coin can help with the popularity of the coin, and increase in it's price. But in the long term, I do not think the goal of Handshake is to be yet another cryptocurrency going to the Moon, but be a alternative decentralized naming system that doesn't just favor the corporations.

[Falci]

My opinion: no use is also a message. But it's a negative message.

[evbots]

Shifting operations of the account away from "the founders" and towards a for-profit company or a nonprofit org with transparent membership would do a lot to solve the problem of the public thinking that account "speaks for the community." At least then people would be able to judge the intent behind the tweets a little easier. Regardless of the path - it should be very clear who is behind it and the current "status." the situation now is just confusing.

[tynes]

In my personal view, I view Twitter as an effective marketing tool to address a crypto audience. Crypto Twitter is where most new retail investors look to to find information they can't get elsewhere. Keeping the @hns handle inactive indefinitely is leaving the opportunity to speak to that audience on the table.

I agree with this generally but what sorts of community members do we want? Do retail investors add value to the community as a whole or are they there to attempt to extract value? (and then get dumped on by insiders)

From a decentralization perspective, the factor that matters most is whether the protocol—and the governance over that protocol—is sufficiently decentralized. Whether or not a Twitter handle is communicating updates about said protocol ranks much lower on the list of factors.

The perception that the community holds directly influences the governance. Communicating updates about the protocol is not speaking to retail investors. Those are very different modes of communication. Is there an expectation that retail investors will not participate in the governance in the future? Will their initial perceptions of the community not impact the way that they (the small % that do become active community members) try to govern and participate in the community?

There were concerns raised [1] [2] about the inactivity of @hns being perceived—to the detriment of Handshake—as Handshake being a "dead project" or a "ghost chain". You and I know that this certainly isn't the case; but this is the reality of the optics.

This is disappointing but there needs to be a killer app for Handshake that just isn't possible anywhere else. Right now the main usecase of Handshake seems to be domain speculation which isn't particularly adding value to the world. The potential usecase of making domain names into cryptographic assets is huge. Getting to this point is going to take some time.

In my opinion, Handshake isn't a project for retail investors to yolo buy without doing research. Its the kind of project that developers need to adopt first as part of the tech stack and natural utility will lead to price appreciation. I doubt that retail investors would add to the community (unless you count making the insiders rich) and Handshake will never outcompete the flavor of the month defi farm that spends all of its time attempting to sell to retail.

Making the insiders rich does bring funding generally into the Handshake ecosystem but there is no guarantee that the money will be re-invested. Optimizing for marketing towards retail investors puts a lot of faith that money will be reinvested into the ecosystem at the expense of having a credibly neutral, long term reputation of the project.

I generally agree with @troq and think that its more important to think about the long term. Would namecheap have joined the community if the twitter handler was tweeting to retail? What future community participants wouldn't join if the twitter handle started doing this? Being credibly neutral about "pumping price" from legitimate sources is important for a project to be taken seriously by the people that matter. The infrastructure people will be turned off by tweets that appeal to retail.

One interesting point is that Flashbots doesn't have a twitter and its working fine for them. Its a lot of responsibility to do a good job at the voice of authority. Existing Handshake influencers could work together to get views on some random twitter account that they make.

The fact that we're having this discussion merits a healthy ecosystem already.

You can never just be in a state of healthy ecosystem. Its a constant battle to maintain a healthy ecosystem - continual effort over time.

[pinheadmz]

I agree with @tynes as well. I would like to see a heartbeat from @hns but I think it should have no personality and generally be boring. The personality comes from the sparkling creative community! As @smcki012 mentioned, several influencers have already emerged and do great work to promote HNS without any kind of "official" stamp.

To expand on @tynes comments about the retail audience, I think @hns should be forbidden from low-effort comments about price. This tweet is well-intentioned but tagged with "#hodlhands" which in my opinion is inappropriate and unprofessional. "HODL" means "buy this without thinking, never use it and never sell it." That sentiment seems antithetical to the everything this project is designed for, disregards all the amazing work by contributors from all over the community building exciting use cases for Handshake, and puts HNS in a box along with every other blockchain project that adds zero features to the ecosystem.

It seems like there is a general feeling that @hns should still do something, and so the original question is approaching an answer. I think the next step is a community drafted and approved policy that the @hns custodian must follow.

We can leave this issue open for a while to collect more comments, then the next thing to do I think is:

@Chjango opens a pull request to this repo that adds a new html page (i.e. handshake.org/twitter.html) that specifies the behavior of @hns with little room for interpretation. This will make the custodian's job easy, and provide continued influence by the community (who can open new PRs to update that policy).

Examples:

• No hashtags or cashtags
• No price commentary, speculation or "buy and hold" comments
• No competitive comments targeted at other blockchain naming systems
• Retweets:
  • Never with additional comment
  • Software update announcements from handshake-org, kyokan, handyminer, sinpapeles, hmail, namebase and any other service that clearly supports more than (lets say) 100 handshake users
  • Influencers in the community that clearly provide financing or education

[FistFullOfAss]

Agree with @pinheadmz and @tynes the twitter shouldn't focus on retail attention, but developer attention instead. Along with community events like Handycon and Flamingo handshake and updates regarding hsd and hnsd, I think the Twitter should also be reminding devs that the airdrop is there for them to claim. The airdrop is Handshake's main distribution mechanism that will incentives new devs in the community and hopefully more websites on Handshake domains and products working with handshake. The promotion of products like Hmail, hsnsearch, and XNHNS would also be fine in my eyes to show the already growning ecosystem around Handshake names. Trancparancy is also key, whoever the admins of the account are should be easy find and to communicate with and should be able to be replaced through some type of community consensus.

[hns-tld]

I agree with @agaamin that we should use as many tools as possible but we should communicate only 1 concise message.

@smcki012 suggestion of a bot make sense and comes with its own set of issues but at least it will not be left up to individuals.

This will deter messaging that could be bias or have an agenda that could be harmful to HNS and all those invested in its success.

Remember:

"Every single person is a genuine and authorized Director of The Handshake Project. If someone has given you a document or business card representing themselves as a Director of The Handshake Project, they have full authority to represent as Director of The Handshake Project with their own personal viewpoint, So Please Treat Them Right. You, the reader, are also a Director of The Handshake Project and have equal claim on authority, action, and viewpoints."

@hns should detail the how to, technical, technology, projects and anything else that is not related to individuals.

I suggest that as a community we are all responsible to spread branding, tech news, memes and overall marketing of HNS.