cuevasm
commented
5 years ago My original issue doesn't state that social media influencers shoudn't be counted - it doesn't take a position as this isn't my decision to make. My opinion, however, is actually that there's nothing wrong with influencer marketing whatsoever. It's a proven and effective marketing engine. I'm not sure how we could get into deciding for other projects what audience is relevant to them or what is 'fake' (beyond the algorithms and systems Awario already has in place to exclude the obvious). I don't think projects should be held to only marketing in audiences that are relevant to Blockstack, there are plenty of people outside that audience that are interested in their dapps.
Second, I disagree with you that influencer marketing is somehow not inline with the objectives. The objectives are to grow the visibility of your project and ultimately increase the surface area by which you can acquire users. Influencer marketing most certainly accomplishes that on numerous levels - almost every company in the world is doing some form of this type of marketing. Any level of social marketing will have some bots or fakeness to it, I think it's the nature of the beast, but there's a lot of good that ultimately comes with being successful there.
dantrevino
hstove
andresousa
jyudkin1
friedger
stackatron
What is the problem you are seeing? Please describe. It is unclear whether paying for marketing activities (or which type of activities) is currently allowed. Furthermore, it's unclear whether we want to stop certain paid efforts (such as paying for tweets) or if we see this is a positive activity when building up Reach and competing with centralized services.
How is this problem misaligned with goals of app mining? Everyone should have clarity on what is allowed and not allowed and have the chance to make their case for why they should be able to do something. The current mystery is unfair as some may not be trying things they assumed wouldn't be allowed.
What is the explicit recommendation you’re looking to propose? I propose that the community of active Miners determine if there will be restrictions on the types of marketing that can be done or not, starting with a list of the items people have currently raised as an issue (i.e. paying for someone to tweet about their project).
Describe your long term considerations in proposing this change. Please include the ways you can predict this recommendation could go wrong and possible ways mitigate. I worry that trying to regulate individual marketing strategies will be really tough at scale and never fair to everyone. I worry about us determining something valid for one project is something we don't want in the competition and it hamstrings their marketing efforts. I worry about policing this effectively given no one can prove who bought what tweets for who, etc.
Additional context Ultimately I think it's usually pretty clear if something is shady or not. I think in these cases we should just ask the Miner what they are thinking and then determine if we think that should be able to continue based on their explanation. If not, we ask them to stop and ideally they stop. I want to believe in the best behavior of everyone in this program to respect the request of the other Miners or decide the program isn't the right fit for them. I realize this will not satisfy everyone.