Nouns to Shut Down Discord on Halloween
The Nouns DAO Discord is slowly being shuttered, according to a Discord message this week from co-founder punk4156.
The private Nouner channels have already been switched to read-only and the rest of the channels will face the same fate on Oct. 31, according to punk4156. The Nouns DAO co-founder said the decision is based on the incongruity of a centralized meeting place for a decentralized protocol and the rise of “unreasonable” people congregating there.
“It’s super clear to me now that creating token-gated access to private chats is a terrible idea,” punk4156 tweeted two days before officially announcing the closure. “It’s basically a convoluted version of a 1-900 service where community members with social skills subsidize those with none in the name of sustaining NFT prices. Truly bizarre.”
For now, the project will keep information on its website, Nouns.wtf, and Twitter. Punk4156 further expanded on the reasoning in a Twitter Spaces put on by The Noun Square.
“And in this space, you can’t unfollow anyone. So you create the space where really like the loudest and the most argumentative people, who don’t have a platform elsewhere, are kind of able to thrive,” said punk4156 in a Twitter Spaces. “And there’s a sense in which you’re kind of like feeding the reasonable people to the unreasonable ones.”
Adding: “It is as sensical to have an official Nouns Discord as it is to have an official Bitcoin or Ethereum Discord.”
One Twitter user, @ojuice_eth, questioned the move, saying Twitter is “unusable” and was worried about the lack of organization due to “fragmented Discords.”
“Just feels like it will be messy and potentially detrimental to engagement (and proliferation),” @ojuice_eth said.
Punk4156 said he wouldn’t rule out creating a new Nouns Discord for “builders who want to work on Nouns without (meaningful) compensation.”
“No proposals, no business models, just building for the sheer joy of it, would donate a noun to the cause that we can all own via multisig,” punk4156 tweeted. “Would this be of interest?”
There are already a few established Nouns-related communities. The developer of Nouns Center and host of the Noun O’Talk podcast, cdt.eth, shared a list on Twitter that included 37 Discord links to groups that include international communities, Nouns-related projects, and Nouns DAO builders.
Steve, owner of Noun 309, was active in the Discord in the beginning of 2022 and the platform became his “go-to,” as he was getting to know people with “similar interests in developing products that are crypto native and can proliferate a meme with a feel-great vibe.”
But that vibe changed as the Discord grew, Steve said.
“Many new speculators became interested in the project and the discord became the central focus point for all Nounish conversation,” said Steve in a direct message in Discord. “And I think what was lost in translation in this period of growth, is that people lost focus that Nouns aren't a company or an organization.”
Steve said he agrees with the decision “whole-heartedly” to close the Nouns Discord.
“If nuking the Discord kills Nouns, then this was never a neutral protocol to begin with and I prefer a swift death,” he said.
When Nouns launched Aug. 8, 2021, there was “internal debate” about if there could — and should — be an official Nouns Discord, punk4156 said.
“In hindsight I wish we had called it the Nounders Discord and I think that would have given us a lot more discretion to kind of curate what went on in there,” he said.
