Case study: A virtual crypto community research
🔥”Hottest token in the world that has acquired more than a million holders in less than two months.”
⚠ Disclaimer: This case study is not financial advice to buy Safemoon or any other token. It is only limited to crypto community research.🙂
Launched in early March 2021, the Safemoon token has broken the internet since its inception. Whether some call it Ponzi or the next big crypto, this token has grown insanely.
The idea that has been attracting the buyers has been their unique tokenomics, which means that the number of tokens you possess increases over time.
We won’t go deep into what Safemoon does, but if you are interested; you can find more about it here.
There are innumerable communities on cryptocurrencies. Our prime motive to go with this particular community is that many newbies in the crypto-verse have joined the Safemoon community recently and there would be higher possible chances of finding interesting insights. Other than this, our personal interest to explore the crypto assets genre has been a major guiding force in this process.
Before diving deep into the research we would like to introduce you to what actually a virtual community is:
- The internet community has boomed in the past few years. We have been using the internet to create, exchange, and share information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.
- Unlike physical communities, virtual communities have made it easier to connect globally even in concerning situations like these.
- In communities like these factors like weather, geographic location, space, scale, and accessibility do not matter.
“Supposing is good, but finding out is better. — Mark Twain”
🌍 We started with Secondary Research
To get an overview of the community, we collected data from different platforms used by them.
From the above data, we decided to go with their discord platform as this was the most central and engaging place to hang out.
In the Safemoon discord community, they have:
- Different channels for different topics.
- Voice Channels for voice chats and streaming.
- International lobbies based on linguistics.
- Various bots for automating diverse tasks.
👥 Users and Audience
There are different groups of people who are a part of the Safemoon discord community and can be primarily classified into the following categories:
- Crypto Beginners: The ones who are starting with crypto and are willing to find other people with similar interests as theirs, to make new friends as they’re totally new to the subject.
- Investors/Recruiters: They are looking for people with potential by analyzing their activities in the community over a period of time that helps them to understand someone on a personal level as well.
- Community Moderators: They moderate the activities, make sure everyone is following the rules of the community and ensure smooth functioning.
🎭 Community Roles
The community members are allotted different roles on the Discord server and can be easily identified based on these. Each role has a specific color to create a hierarchy.
🤖 Community Bots
There are various bots used by the community to automate various tasks or to create features that are not available on the Discord platform.
- Donate Bot- To accept community donation and in return, a “contributor💰” role is offered in the community.
- Giveaway Bot- Community owners host different giveaways using this bot. One has to react to the message to participate in giveaways.
- Groovy- Music bot that plays music in voice channels.
- Dyno- Server Moderation Bot.
- Safemoon Bot- A welcome bot, that greets anyone who joins the server.
- Safe Bot- Custom bot developed by the community to fetch Safemoon coin price for #price-watch channel.
- Simple Poll- Allows creating a simple poll powered by emoji. Members can react to emojis to vote.
- Ticket Tool- Helps create tickets without clutter. But not being used actively in the community.
😳 We skipped the user survey (Primary Research)
Yes, you’ve heard that right. We initially didn’t have a plan to skip the user survey but when we reached out to the members we were not able to get any relevant responses. 🙁
Hence, we decided to take another approach. Before coming to a conclusion, please do read the following paragraph. 😅
We started observing(stalking) them. 🙈
While doing so, an interesting insight we found was that the majority of people disable direct messages from these crypto servers. This is because there are bots that spam their inbox, so the community moderators recommend everyone to do this.
But anyhow we had to do our primary research. Hence, we spent time around the community and noticed some common user behavior. So, this gave us a slight relief.
We continued with our observations and gathered as much data as we could. Some of those important observations were:
- In the crypto communities, almost all the channels are filled with scams and spam links. So it becomes really hard to find the signal in the noise.
- People are generally pseudonymous (i.e., they don’t use their real names) in the community.
We then advanced further to create the user journey map.
❓Problem Opportunities
👨💼 Problems faced by community moderators:
- Community moderators spent most of their time replying to the same questions that have been asked before. This might happen because new members are unable to discover the previous answers as they get lost in chat.
- The biggest problem for moderators is dealing with spam and hate content.
- The moderators were suggesting using the ‘Find’ option before posting any kind of questions during the Ask Me Anything sessions. This is to ensure that the questions that are already addressed before are not being repeated.
🙎♂️ Problems faced by community members:
- It is very hard for newbies to get a hang of discord UI on the first go.
- Most people have hectic schedules, which prevents them from actively making connections, even if they’re interested.
- People also find it necessary to communicate with their peers in real-time.
- People are asking repeated questions that have been answered before. One reason could be that there is no central point in accessing information easily. Most of the questions are answered on AMAs and they are more than an hour long. So, most people avoid watching it.
- Due to the high number of messages, new people often misses the context of the particular discussion going on in the channel.
- Members often deal with potential spam messages in their inboxes.
☘ Conclusion
The crypto community has attracted a lot of people irrespective of the conflicting views around the world. It has been a center for various people globally to come together and align themselves towards a certain idea. This also establishes the possibility of interaction and bonding in the virtual space.
This was our first research project as a part of the 10kdesigners assignment and there’re many more to come.
Please feel free to drop your views below. 🙏
Project Duration: 8 days
Contributors: Jogabrata Jena and Ketan Pandey
