Today I want to talk about the state of ICON community, an opinion piece you rarely see from me. I just have one question to ask before you read on, am I the only person who is more and more frustrated with our own community members?

Who the hell is 2infiniti?

You might not know who I am but you should’ve seen some of my contributions at one point. Just to brief you, I was around pretty much since day 1, I was among the early contributors and one of the first to fully review ICON project from due diligence to detailed technical analysis. I was also the creator of the first ICON fan site icon.support, creator of DAPPs portal site dapps.icon.support, creator of ICON Community Alliance HX57 hx57.io. Administrator/CM/Ambassador of our main channel, creator/admin of many other ICON related channels. Misc efforts you might’ve seen like ICON FAQ Bot, ICON markets, Virtual Step Calculator, etc. Lately you may have seen several ICON DAPP building tutorials from this medium account or my tweets about ICON issuance model/IISS/P-rep governance etc. I might’ve answered you on TG, we could’ve chatted about the project, about crypto, or maybe just random shit in life. The point is, I was there, I am one of you. I’ve gotten to known many by first name, and have even met a few in real life. I have also visited Korea office, SF office, and met with many team members and foundation councils. I am quite positive that my observations are not only thorough but also quite confident about being objective.

A throwback to presale days

During this period, everyone was exploring the project, learning, and exchanging thoughts, very good thoughts. Visiting our channel was almost always the first thing I did every morning. I was eager to learn new information, there were always interesting conversations that I wanted to take part in, and I could always learn a thing or two from community members. It was a very healthy and fun community to be in, and the focus was always the long term vision and how we plan to accomplish it. Without price being in the equation (ICX was not listed then), everyone spoke with great rationale and activities were without intentions but to learn from each other.

Fast forwarding to today

Lately highlights are centered around FUD, sometimes FOMO and memes, but rarely any good discussions.

This is probably okay for someone like me who spends several hours a day doing research and has the patience to explore. I can’t imagine what its like for an average person who only has 30 minutes to spare for ICON during their busy day, visiting our social channels and forums just to get mind fucked with senseless rants.

No, I am not talking about constructive criticisms, I am talking about personal attacks, racial slurs, conspiracy theories, accusations or people who just build unrealistic expectations and act entitled and demanding all day long.

Let’s get to criticisms, they’re fine, really. I think this is one of the easiest ways to contribute to the project. Yes complaints can be contributions, if they’re presented constructively, well organized and thought out. By doing so, someone from the community or the team can help resolve and improve upon these suggestions. One example is the recent reddit AMA thread I started, these are all the questions that I collected from other community members. To me these were suggestions for improvement or questions needing research. I was able to provide most of the answers correctly, this is evident with the team’s latest announcement. Did I have more information than the rest of you? No. Did I know more than most people? Yes, because I have the luxury to read everything published, sometimes twice. I understand some of you just don’t have the time to read everything, but this is the purpose of a community, we help each other out. During this process I also had to weed out many unrealistic expectations, things like “Show me team members’ wallets so I can monitor their movement because this is a blockchain company” or “the team needs to announce the buyback wallet and timeline so we know they’re actually doing it”. My only suggestion is, have better expectations, they really just don’t make any sense. I also get requests like “Explain why the team sold 5% of their tokens in the open market, someone told me”. I am sure even you don’t believe that, you just want to throw it out there.

A consistent trend

There’s only one consistent trend currently — Toxic people speaking louder and louder, well researched people becoming much quieter.

From my observation, this is mostly due to sentiments are directly correlated to price, much less project progress. Whenever I visit our subreddit or telegram channel, what I am about to see is quite predictable. Price goes down, the team did something wrong, fuck ICX, exit scam. Price goes up, best project in the entire universe, I just loaded up my bag, to the moon.

I am no longer looking at any goals or problems to solve, I am just looking at every reason an angry investor can think of, mostly to justify for the price drop/inaction.

Let’s also face the reality that, even if the project is progressing well for the most part, if the price drops, we’re probably still going to blame the team with something.

Personally I am just a bit exhausted and burned out, having to deal with people who can’t think beyond their own reasons, and that’s on a good day. On a bad day, people won’t even read digestible bites presented to them. They choose to criticize everything they can think of and stay in their anger zone, this trend has also become quite prevalent.

These nonconstructive criticisms only degenerate the community, where people start taking frustrations out on each other and the team.

This is also a vicious cycle, people stopped teaching each other, people stopped learning from each other. The rooms are consistently getting more and more toxic, and it only goes downhill from there.

So what is it that we want?

We need to somehow normalize this experience, maybe consolidate criticisms into fewer threads and discuss solutions there. Or start new initiatives and spark interesting ideas. Perhaps look into the technology and start some actual development. Or even just sharing industry news and analyze our competitive advantage will be interesting. There’s plenty of things to talk about and there’s plenty of knowledgeable community members to discuss with. I remember the day when I brought up the community alliance idea, people got so excited and all swarmed in ready to help, sometimes all we need is for someone to take this first step. It is really in all of our hands, how exactly do we go about this I do not know, but I do know that this is definitely fixable. We just need to remember the goal of having a community, it’s really all about improvement.

I can think of a few advice to give to our community members,

Stay informed, stick to facts

Be mature, discuss rationally

Be forgiving, then create realistic expectations

Be optimistic, even during down times

Have patience

I know these are moot points that have been repeated too many times, but it is what it is, you won’t help the situation staying pissed the whole time. This leads to another point that I wanted to remind everyone. I believe the majority of our community base are all after one thing — protecting your investment. I know I am doing everything to achieve just that, are you?

Why is ICX is among the top worst performers?

I can’t speak for every project, but at least the projects that I closely follow, ICON’s development progress both tech and business are among the top performers. Most of you would probably disagree with tech progress, but most of you probably also never looked into the code. It is sometimes happening so fast that I have a hard time keeping up. Feel free to ask any community members who track closely with tech development, members like spl3en, Jerome, nicolas, the folks at ICON Dev channel, we know better. Tech development is not just “when YP pt3”,“why no dex”. T-bears improvement, additional SDKs, refactoring and testing ICON Service Core, upgrades in JSON RPC Server, Governance API specification, general technical documentation, there’s a lot of things happening concurrently, necessary steps to ensure a long term robust, secure, scalable and extensible system. It is one thing to hack out something that more or less work, just to meet deadlines. Quite another to be build with highest standards every step of the way, even at the expense of missing deadlines and taking heat from the community.

So why is ICX among the worst performers? Is it simply BTC correlation? I think not. Is it team’s poor performance? I just disagreed. My observation is that, our community members generally have better clarity of thought, more experienced in life, and very capable of convincing others with their own reasons, this is a double-sided blade. During the bull market, we were mooning harder than all others. It took us a little over 2 months to go 100x from ICO. In the history of cryptocurrency, only a handful of ICOs pulled this off, we also started with one of the highest market cap at $43m. I felt our community members were definitely a great contributing factor.

Now we’re in a bear market, our thoughts turn negative. Our community members as usual provided great analysis how things might’ve gone wrong, at first. They’ve gone great lengths providing further thoughts, some emotional and irrational, to a point they started name calling getting personal, making stuff up, looking for every way to let out their angers, just mere vengeance for a sense of satisfaction. They basically got lost in their intentions, which is to protect their investment, instead they’re sabotaging in every way possible.

Unfortunately during this process, weak hands got shaken out, new investors are afraid to come in given what we’re presenting to them, buyers stopped accumulating just observing if the sentiment or market will turn at some point.

Other communities all have FUDs of some sort during this bear market, they all criticize their team one way or another, but not many do it as well as ours (lol?). Of course this is not the main reason of such a drastic drop in price, but it is definitely a contributing factor that we all possess some power to make a change.

We should also take a step back and inspect what’s changed fundamentally since our ICO. More top talents recruited, more work is done, more partnerships signed, ETH raised barely spent, ICX tokens still at a healthy 3x+. Is the team in a bad shape in any way? Not at all. What has changed fundamentally? It’s our community.

Now my question back to you, do we want to get together and turn this around, together with the team, and make ICX great again? Or do we want to go down that rabbit hole and never see the light again? If you can think of one thing the team didn’t do well, so can you with one thing the community can do better.

You reap what you sow

Now enough about our community, what about the team? Are they doing everything so perfectly that you have to blame us for everything? Definitely not. The source of anger really boils down to two major categories.

Communication

This include transparency in business developments, like I also have been wondering what the team is currently doing with all these different partnerships and MOUs. What projects are in active development, what type of collaborations can we expect from LINE or SKPlanet etc. People want transparency because it shows progress, and progress tells us if the team is on the right track, at what speed, then naturally we can build better expectations.

From team’s stance, a lot of the information just cannot be disclosed ahead of time, especially for the intention of speculation. Plus releasing information prematurely will lead to all sorts of false expectations, we’re just really good at doing that.

So what is the middle ground here? Things that can be communicated should be communicated, be more proactive. I am not talking about some top-level classified initiatives that competitors have the chance to front-run you if they find out. I am talking about smaller updates with new information, “Yes we have been working closely with LINE, some of these plans will be announced when things are ready, and this goes way beyond a simple partnership agreement” basically what Henry revealed in this interview. More of these, we want to hear them.

Communication also includes clearer explanations. I have on many many occasions seen the same information interpreted very differently. This includes things like 800m total supply, 20% issuance upper-bound, to latest announcement of the 5m buyback. Even though I felt things were explained perfectly clear, but if this is a common problem, it is a problem.

We should also treat ICON members with respect, just like how they have been treating us. Yes we have concerns / criticisms / frustrations, but you really don’t have to be rude about it. We did have a communication bridge, Min. He has been active on twitter, shows up to our telegram channel from time to time to help answer questions and provide insights and look at what you guys are doing to him. The guy who has the most answers and you spend the opportunity to bash him because the price is down? Try to get answers instead, even if its not immediately responded, you know the message is delivered to the right person who will try to resolve it for you.

Obviously the team also has new plans to improve communication, the new head of contributor relations Ricky and this new FAQ portal that’s supposed to serve as curated AMA. Let’s leverage these, as these are your best bets at getting answers directly from the team. Ranting on telegram will never get you answers.

Roadmap

This is another raging point, and I don’t expect everyone to understand delays or reasons for not delivering (pivoting, priority shift with resource re-delegation, projections vs actual deadlines etc). I know the crowd expects a deadline the team adheres to and deliver as promised, and that’s perfectly acceptable. This is however extremely difficult for a large-scaled, fast-paced project like ICON. Again in a situation like this, instead of abandoning the roadmap altogether, we need to have a middle ground. I have been suggesting a percentage based (or at least change log updates) roadmap instead, as far as I can tell, most people are more interested in progress, less deadlines. More about honoring promises, less about deliverable.

The above two areas I am with everyone here, there’s definitely room for improvement. The team can think of their improvement ideas, but we should also let them know what the popular opinions are within the community, properly. “The team has zero communication” just won’t cut it, extend on that, suggest your way of improvement if you don’t like what the team is doing. Email the team with your plan, submit your suggestion via the new FAQ portal, write a community improvement proposal and get the whole alliance on board, ask your favorite YouTuber to request for a formal interview. Whatever you think works better, but you need to put in some efforts to be taken seriously, shouting out loud on Telegram really doesn’t do anything but escalate your own anger. Don’t stop at rant, lead legit criticisms to actual improvements through proper channels.

TL;DR

The purpose of having a community is improvement, criticisms should lead to solutions, remember your goal is to protect your investment.