Nice conspiracy theory Elliot. I already knew you didn’t know what you were talking about, but just these little mental gymnastics you do - accusing Ozy of market making or thinking that p0k is Sol (lmao) - are chef’s kiss
I’ll break things down as much as I can for you.
The request for a community based marketing initiative came from NEAR Foundation to Ozy, after your beloved Tinsman was sacked. And no, it was not from Grace. It was from Illia himself. The Foundation was asking Ozy to support them with marketing, and it was Erik who wanted to keep the “'degen army” a lowkey group. Why Ozy? Well, I guess because Ozy has been in the ecosystem since May 2020, and he founded 4NTS + grew it into the ecosystem staple it is today.
Here is Illia’s own recommendation for the program on Twitter. If you click the link to the form in the embedded tweet, you will see that it leads to the application form I linked to you before. Seem familiar?
You are right. There is opacity to what the degens do. And that was by design and request. NEAR Foundation has its official line of marketing. Then the community “degens” assist by creating noise on social media, engaging with everyday investors online, hyping up new projects and announcements, and overall lending a hand to grow the at-the-time underdeveloped NEAR community. So the degen army launches in late May 2021, just 2-3 months ago.
With the approval from NEAR core, we started intaking applicants on the basis of a 1 month trial period. If they perform that month, we reward them with 300 near. Our requirement is that they contribute 20 hours of work a week: either in quality or quantity. If they fail to perform, we cut them off. Ozy and I were personally monitoring activity in the first two months: checking their activity and engagement levels on Twitter, frequency in our Telegram chat, how much they contributed to Telegram moderation for NEAR official chats, whether they contributed in their own way my producing content or networking with other communities/projects etc.
We started with about 30 originally, then grew to 50. But more than half the people we started with in late May were cut out. As a result, the 50 we have now range from highly active people who basically take this as full time work, each of them leading their own sub-teams with specific activities (which I will list below), to people who regularly put in 20 hours of work a week by tweeting about NEAR, growing an audience to create better reach, moderating + engaging with ppl in the chats on Telegram, participating in testnet for NEAR projects, creating their own guilds to share tips on DeFi and so on.
Here is the rough organizational structure we have so far.
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Reddit/BitcoinTalk/Youtube Comments team: see report on metrics here report
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Youtube team: NEAR Degen Syndicate
Their July report: NEAR-Degen-Syndicate-stats - Google Docs
- Twitter team.
Members who do not belong to a specific group activity focus their efforts on Twitter. This means everything from RTing and liking NEAR related content, to targeting influencers, to creating threads sharing info on NEAR, creating and posting memes, growing an audience to become a KOL with a xxx.near name so as to give NEAR that much more exposure… etc. So in general, increasing NEAR’s social volume and supporting NEAR marketing.
Here’s is the list of all the current degen members on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1418925482331017224?s=20
These people come here everyday, some every few hours. The content varies from simple shills, original memes, more sophisticated threads, key infographics for NEAR news and projects, and even community organized giveaways. If you are on Twitter and follow NEAR topics, chances are you have seen some of our degens’ tweets.
Chances are, if Ref.finance or AwesomeNEAR or Metapool etc post a tweet about their event or launch, within the first 10 minutes dozens of likes and RTs - at any given point during the day - will have come from the degens. This is also why more than half of the “Marketing Distribution” chat for NEAR on Telegram consists of people in the degen group! Because they are always here and always ready to go for NEAR.
In terms of metrics, as of last month, we cut off 10+ ppl from the previous 60 we were trialing. The people who survived produced between 200k to 20k impressions on Twitter in the month of July. We do not yet have statistics for August, well because August only started.
July: last 28 days analytics (*Twitter analytics of members who are primarily in other groups are also included. Some other users are missing simply because this was just a trial for the system we were going to establish from this month on)
Now let’s get back to your “investigation”. I’m curious as to why you, or any of the devs in your Russian community chat who’ve been gassing you up, simply didn’t just speak with Ozy. Or me. You know I replied to you in the original forum post. You’ve seen me in your Russian chat.
Ozy offered initially didn’t he? Or why not talk with anyone else in the NEAR Foundation - given that the it would have been relatively easy for Evgeny or Vadim to do that? How is your “investigation” this sloppy and reliant on your own imagination than any real evidence? You had already determined that people were stealing money. And you looked at evidence to fit your narrative. Rather than asking someone who might actually know. Or simply agreeing to a conversation when it was offered.
As for the NEAR that the degens have been “selling.” How would you know if it went to Binance to be sold or to be staked? Because that’s what p0k - who you name - has been doing.
And second of all, if so, so what? It’s called having an income. These people work this hard and genuinely devote themselves to NEAR because they make money that is good enough to motivate them. You think you could do this with zero pay or locked tokens? I would love to see you try.
The thing is, NEAR needs this more than we do them. Because a community doesn’t just blossom by itself. You don’t have a healthy, robust ecosystem just because numba go up. Especially not if it’s potentially a bear market and there aren’t enough active dapps yet to steadily grow a user base. Yet what we have now today - when I see the NEAR chats, the newcomers who have taken up roles in DeFi DAOs and the guild program, and twitter - what we have now is so much more lively and bigger than what we had mere months ago. If you don’t think that’s valuable, and worth spending 300 near per person to foster, that’s your loss.
