Great proposal but i think you might have sold yourselves short on wages. If you dedicate your time solidly, i feel you should be paid accordingly. I don’t know what the Secret Agents make but they put in a lot of work keeping that project rolling.
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Great proposal @melch18 et al! This is exactly what we need to keep our Agents engaged at the dApp level. I hope the other core dApps on Secret look at the Shade Warriors as an example.
Whatever you need from us with our experience of building out Secret Agents to the behemoth it is today, you have it!
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I can totally second this. There is nothing more valuable than a community (spartans) that backs shade cause of a natural interest of it succeeding. This is where true value is created and will evolve and it will not need financial incentives.
Even though I give my full support for shade warriors to be pushed forward I think we will need to be very carefull with the incentives. Im not an old veteran on secret network but to me this secret agents program has failed. SEO wise there is basically nothing to find about SN. Regional communities are dead, or at least the ones I am in. We need to watch out that this programm wont turn into a „i make this tweet about shade so i can get „x“ free tokens/rewards“.
If I look back at the LUNATICS it almost felt like a cult. Dare to try and say something against luna and you will be burried and spammed by an army of lunatics. God, even while it was heading to zero these delusional people defended it to the bitter end. If a shade warrior can live by this cult with a sustainable project like shade this will be more valuable than any rewardbased warrior task. In order to achieve this I suggest to have some sort of application process in place. A warrior needs to be proud to be part of this movement and needs to earn it to be worthy this role✌️
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I agree. I think it needs to be thought of what the incentives are to join, and its meaning before this proceeds. We need to move away from Secret Network’s warm body strategy toward something which is more effective. How do we quantify quality of warriors? Should this be different than Spartans or a way to help identify and recruit more Spartans? A lot still to be answered.
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Thank you for the input Jimbo. I agree that we are asking for much less than any other ambassador program that I’ve seen. The scrt agent proposals are public and the community can see we’re asking for much less. Here were my thoughts on choosing these amounts.
- Bear market requires financial responsibility
- SHD being a young startup requires financial responsibility
- This trial period will act as proof that our team can deliver
- I expect a lower number of warriors to join because of market conditions. As the community and workload grows I see us being responsible for more and requesting a larger amount when needed
We’re definitely bootstrapping this one to get it off the ground. Something I’ve felt the SHD core team has done well and set a good example.
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Great thoughts and question Ranger.
My vision for the program looks like this.
- What works well for the agents we will implement (learn from those that came before you)
- Agents program has over 20k members and they’ve personally found & groomed 20% of the top full time hired positions (ex: foundation, dev committee, etc) really impressive
- Warriors main focus won’t be (pay for retweets program - this will be very small)
- Warriors will be the beginning funnel that shows what community members put in Spartan level dedication. It will be the program that places talent where needed (design, dev, etc), give low level contributors direction (social media boosts, small projects) and reveal future Spartans who will make up the strongest section of the community.
We need a way to find community members who want to be Spartans, who have proven they contribute like a Spartan and have the skills to perform like a Spartan. That’s the Program Mission.
The program will also place members into correct contribution levels they desire. Specific missions are designed to get members using SHD products/Dapps as well (main purpose of any community right)
Long thread here but I agree with you that it’s an important focus. Please let me know what you think and if there are areas that I’ve missed.
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Comparing existing programs does provide a lot of value & good idea chatting about them. As the warrior program grows I see a balance needed.
There will always be low level contributors who only desire easy ways to support SHD protocol. There will be many less contributors who want to be Spartan level. I don’t think we should hate on the easy ways to contribute like “tweet for tokens” but I do agree that we need incentives to show this correctly.
Keep in mind, for real ROI ambassador programs need to act like a sales funnel. It’s great to have the low hanging fruit easy missions that fill the top of the funnel with a lot of warriors. This is what filters out who stands above and does bigger/harder missions. The members that do the bigger missions well can easily show if they desire to be Spartans.
In my opinion, I’d like to cultivate a less cult like community than the Lunatics. You said it well Rabbit, they didn’t have enough balance to make the necessary changes and survive. I hope this provides some clarity on the vision of warriors 
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- What works well for the agents we will implement (learn from those that came before you)
Can you expand on this? I think without the full thought process it feels like jargon. I don’t think we should ever do a RT for SHD. You don’t get BTC for tweeting about it. We need to change our frame our reference from SCRT completely for this to be successful. You said you wouldn’t want to run the program like the LUNATICS, but I would argue that is the most successful community that has organically existed within Cosmos. People putting in effort to promote their product from a place of ideology is the purest form of awareness. We need to find out how to do that.
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No doubt Lunatics had a strong community but they’ve collapsed. Without balance they’re project has lost the trust of the community and no longer exists.
I’m on the same page as you, Spartans have lead through example and we will focus on this very true statement.
I work for the scrt agents as a coordinator so I get a behind the scenes look at what works. The agents program has a lot of really big wins that I feel the community oversees.
You asked for an expansion on this here are a few:
- They have sourced a large percentage of the top talent that now leads teams as hired full time
- They have onboarded a large number of agents and retained them
- They are the only University outreach efforts that gives customized presentations to Uni blockchain groups
In short, it seems that the biggest concern is receiving tokens for retweets. For the trial period I have a very low number of tokens requested to give away. This is intentional as it will be rewarded to those who achieve bigger tasks and do them well. Future proposals will show the exact framework for who receives tokens and for what work. If the community is against the idea of tokens for tweets then I have no issue with it. I want to reward those that bring the purest form of awareness as you mentioned.
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as usualy , amzing job melch
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This is a great take on community engagement that is quite interesting. This kind of goes against the whole Secret Agents and any promotional-incentivizing programs, and instead brings it back to simple community.
I would argue that there are a few Web 3.0 protocols that are still around based on community & decentralization; we see that with Ethereum, Bitcoin, Terra, MakerDAO, etc. However, I don’t think they took the same approach as the Secret Agent’s program.
Instead, what we saw was committed and passionate users of the community who wanted to help out where they can. The issue is this - how do we continue to drive demand for being a community member, while also promoting and acknowledging high level community members?
Shade Protocol holds the highest standards, so by proving that you are an experienced, committed, and highly skilled contributor should be rewarded greatly.
On the flip side, I think that average community members should not be paid SHD to engage on the surface level. To me this goes back to the Secret Agent’s program where customers are practically being paid to promote and use a product. This isn’t the most effective way to bring in community members and keep them around.
Shade Protocol itself is a financial system that will allow others to do more with their money than ever before, and that should be the best financial incentive to attract community members. For individuals who get the vision, proven their commitment, proven their skills, and want to contribute passionately should be the ones who are rewarded.
@Ranger_Ranger touches on it well - we need to set the culture for Shade Protocol and what it means to be a community member. Remember folks:
- SHD is scarce and valuable
- Earning SHD should not be easy
- Community members should ALL be acknowledged
- High-level contributors should be easily distinguished
- High-level contributors should be rewarded highly
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This makes sense to me. Secret foundation is shaky and we need to question the assumptions its built on.
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100% - I think we should move this conversation to a broader “Shade Culture” topic in the general category. I would love to hear everyone’s input on this.
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Just to be clear I 100% agree and the Warriors won’t be a program that pays for low level contribution 
This is why I have such a low amount for my “mission rewards” request.
The feedback I’m learning from this post is to include an exact structure for rewards (non-monetary) in my next proposal 
Great proposal! I absolutely think you guys should get paid.
However, I’m not so sure about the Shade Warrior program. Not going to lie, I never really liked the secret agents program on SN, I think it’s flawed and ineffective. Basically everybody joining, is getting incentivized for participation and not for contribution providing real value. There are great agents, though, and they deserve every bit of it.
Having looked into the Shade Warrior Handbook, I don’t think people should get incentives for such tasks, like tweeting, recruiting etc. The community should thrive organically, this would ensure sustainability and I believe it has so far and it can going forward. As we all believe in Shade and that it will prevail.
Perhaps this program can be remodeled somehow. I was thinking, maybe the funds should be deployed more target-oriented, first I would rather pay you three more and second, directly onboarding someone or even few with a specific role, responsibility or skill set. Let’s say, like, marketing or SoMe/public relations, that way the funds would be funneled more effectively, imo.
And in the future, we’re gonna use exclusively SILK for grants and compensations, right? Well, we should
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Hi Ranger, totally agree that Lunatics were a great community and engaged selflessly because they simply believed in Terra. Why so? Because of all the different protocols building on the blockchain, dexes with high tvl, multiple defi from anchor to kujira or mars. There was different nft platforms and multiple quality projects launching. This and bull market conditions made for a snowball effect.
To some extent there already is a strong community within Secret. But the network is for one smaller in number of protocols (as of today ) and tvl is shared with other cosmos projects like osmosis, juno and now evmos.
I believe the one thing that the agents program is flawed is that there are just too many missions and some are irrelevant.
( promoting certain projects that are just unknown or aren’t complete as an example).
When different protocols succeed on secret is when true community will grow. Shade is the front runner but is still building. V-irl as an nft play is also growing. Once Jackal, datavault, maybe hydro start really delivering is when true growth comes.
A good and rather inexpensive way to promote shade is with amas, maybe not weekly but at least every month to inform people on what shade is, all the applications coming and answer general questions they may have.
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Just mentioning, this is planned in some extent. @melch18 created a Weekly Warrior Chat event that is for informal conversations, chatting, asking and answering some questions
There’s also a Monthly Dev Roundtable which is more formal and team updates community about new features and products
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I absolutely agree with this as well.
I used to work in web dev/design/digital marketing, so SEO & content creation was my thing.
I’m thinking we should get a blog started over on the decentralized blogging platform “Hive”, specifically their sub-frontend/community “LeoFinance”. Comdex recently approached us (WhisperNode) to start writing over on there, as there’s a large community of active Cosmonaut investors that are pretty much “untapped” when it comes to content (besides their native community members).
They recently just created a new feature where we can actually create “Communities” - Comdex has their own landing page over there now, where all content “Comdex” can be aggregated into one spot, on the #1 decentralized blogging platform.
We should do the same for Shade - and I’m happy to lead the charge and actually start the community (I’ve been a Hive member for a few years and have some established relationships over there high up).
Let me know thoughts!
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State of the Current Proposal
There are obvious similarities between the Secret Agents programme and this programme. The Secret Agents programme has a number of fundamental problems:
- A volume-driven programme aiming to attract a number of agents over quality;
- Missions tend to result in low-value shilling on social channels for points;
- Mercenary-like in nature, outside of incentivised missions, very few contribute; and
- It requires a massive amount of administrative time and cost.
A number of these problems translate into the Shade Warriors programme:
- Requires a lot of moderating to “qualify good contributions and the point system”;
- Any significant growth in the programme will result in significant increases in cost;
- Creates a culture of contributing only if incentivised (for the average person); and
- The potential for low-quality raiding to result in negative imagery for Shade Protocol.
Sean has mentioned that the Shade Warriors programme is considering non-monetary rewards but this may struggle to attract any users outside of those who already planned to contribute (which brings the value of the Proposal into question).
Recommendations
Timing:
I generally feel that it is too early for such a programme on Shade Protocol as we haven’t provided any time for the Protocol itself to organically demonstrate growth.
We also naturally have an advantage that we exist as a DAO, organisations which naturally breed tighter communities than standalone chains (which do offer these programmes like Avalanche, NEAR Protocol & Secret Network). This has been seen time and time again within many DAOs - both stemming from projects and from pfp NFTs.
Structure:
As opposed to investing a significant amount of time in setting missions for all users and rewarding them with points (to help attract them to the programme) - look to replicate a Flipside Crypto-style system where all users are free to contribute to all bounties and the top 3 people on each can be rewarded.
This should hopefully reverse the current construct which requires two people to support onboarding, validating and attributing points.
This can also support marketing initiatives as users can be required to:
- Demonstrate the value of ShadeBonds;
- Post it on social media (preferably Twitter); and
- Share the link to the bounty.
While the specific metrics for reviewing do not have to be set in stone - they can use quantitative metrics such as likes, comments, retweets and views, to reduce the amount of lifting from people.
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I couldn’t have worded this better myself. I agree 100%!
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