mercenaries vs missionaries: what makes an ideal community? after i saw that @icobeast viral post, i did see a lot of people attack him, but looking at it objectively, i agree with him. disclaimer: Before you pick sides , I don’t think farmers are bad people. i farm what can be farmed too. But understanding intent helps us see why some communities last and others fade. after the whole back and forth on ct, a question did pop to my mind. Every project dreams of a strong, active community, but who is the ideal community member? from my experiences, there are two profiles of people you will find in most crypto project community channel and a distinct difference between the two is their intent 1) we have the real users/intending users, those i will refer to as missionaries. they stay with you because of a shared mission, they care about the purpose behind a project,their investment is emotional and intellectual, not just financial. this may be because the project solves their pain point or they just want to help shape the future of the project together. these are the type of people who will still use the product when there is no incentives attached. ct accounts who falls into this category (those i'm aware of from observation). -> @SerrDavee and @basit_ with megaETH -> also @SerrDavee with Plasma. -> @GeminiWiston with jumper. we all are a geniune user of aat least one product or the other. i have seen these people talk about these projects just cos they enjoy it. and the truth is we may not be an ideal user/believer of every project and thats fine. 2) The second type of people you will find here are aidrop farmers, those i would refer to as mercenaries. they dont neccessarily care about your mission, their energy is transactional: they give only as long as the rewards flow. they complete quests, farm points, retweet everything, and join every space. they parade as community members to farm rewards. (those are the people icobeast was reffering to) But once the incentives dry up, so does their presence. tbh, this was how many of us came into this space. we had someone made money clicking some buttons. why farmers exist but airdrop farmers are'nt neccesarily bad people, farming activities exists because we have systems in place that encourages it. this is caused by 2 reason imo: -> the first is that a lot of project in the past rewarded this farming behaviors in the past, like discord messages to grind roles which adds zero value to the project in real sense. obviously, when projects created incentives that rewarded farming. those behaviors spread culturally (“I made $10k grinding discords!”). then projects copied each other, optimizing for vanity metrics. we now have cylces of: Projects rewarded empty activity → people hypes them → new projects optimized for it → everyone calls it community growth they believe you somehow found value in the gm and 1K tesnet transactions, that was why you rewarded them for it. they carry this mindset to the next project that comes up too. i personally believe any project having 5 to 10 grindable roles is optimizing to be farmed. and if your testnet is not to make the products more useful through feedbacks why are you encouraging people to test them? as @leonabboud once said. "your ideal community members have high standards , they do not have time to grind". -> Secondly (also related to the first) as @blendino put it, "mismanaging expectations is bad" i havent said anything about the recent monad airdrop stuff because i know its all a marketing stunt, right from the begining. they sent people testnet tokens to indirectly encourage them to farm and celebrated testnet trnx milestones on tl, they kept people in a closed tg while they keep contributing with arts and posts, it is normal for these people to expect something in return for their efforts. thats also a peak farming behavior(from the project end) no matter what you think about it. if you dont want to be farmed, communicate early, megaETH did, fluent did, arcium did, anil kumar of rome protocol did. and what happens next after they did this , they dont have inflated metrics or ct hypes, which they are fine with it. this price is what most project dont want to pay. and from the image below, the third point @anilkumarRome mentioned shows that some projects uses these vanity metrics as a marketing scheme to aid VC raises, this is why they dont set things straight from the get go. and for the projects who claim they dont want farming behavior buts still have a handful of grindable roles in thier dc, several point farming campaigns , its time to question your community managers, because it is either you hired someone who is not aligned with project goals or you are actually lying. good to see @itachee_x is fixing that about rialo. because , If people grind for months with no clarity or reward, frustration is inevitable, and the responsibility sits with how expectations were managed. If you want believers, design for belief , not farming. community building in this space needs a lot of work. ( any contrary opinions are welcome )