Journalism in the decentralized era

It's hard to see now how reporting on large tech platforms fell into a familiar cycle: company does a thing, company releases a statement (or not) and the POVs for and against neatly fall into a handful of camps and narratives.

Over the platform era, these narratives made it easy to paint platform executives as hero or villain. Heck, one could argue the polarization that tech platforms helped usher in have also polarized the views of the platforms themselves. Despite their complexity, columnists can't resist trying to boil the opinion about Facebook, the metaverse, etc., into "good" or "bad".

This adds a degree of ease to reporting, and to consuming reports. Stories of easy-to-identify heroes and villains, along with black-and-white perspectives about their goodness/badness, make it easier to follow and track progress of these companies and executives. Painting issues as questions of morality help smart reporters to source credible perspectives. And for better or worse, it helps readers follow along with, and form opinions about, complex issues without having to dive into heavy minutiae, most of the time.

One thing we've learned from the early days of crypto: much of this ease will be erased in the near term. This makes reporting on crypto hard, and makes it following crypto news difficult for even sophisticated news consumers.

Some of the challenge relates to the nature of crypto itself. No one owns or regulates cryptocurrency, the blockchain, or the many technologies and products that birth from it. There is no "crypto CEO" to foil or hold accountable. The exact nature of the creator of bitcoin is famously a mystery.  NFTs are tokens secured on Ethereum, which no single entity owns or controls. Strategic decisions happen mainly through disagreements within the community, which can result in changes to cryptocurrency, or outright creation of new cryptocurrency.

So, in the early days of the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency, journalists and readers lack a key trick in creating mainstream understanding: popularizing the people in charge of the biggest players in the space, and sharing their points of view as signals of where the industry may be headed. (I call "mainstreaming" the time during which interest spikes in a niche topic, and the interest spike comes primarily from outside of the community itself.)

Heck, few or any companies exist from whom sources can be gained, expertise or insights can be clarified, or responses can be gleaned - much less in a way that makes it clear for genuinely neutral readers to assess source credibility.

To report on "the crypto POV" is to follow the clashes of immovable religions whose POVs evolve over Tweets from within the communities, whose views change rapidly, and from whom evidence of evolution due to scrutiny and ignoring scrutiny can both be found in abundance, depending on what you want to find or believe.

For reporters and non-community observers alike, that's exhausting; it's hard to follow and harder to break in without joining the community itself. For those who can jump into crypto to learn more, it can be fun and quite interesting. However, not everyone has the resources to jump in, and for those who do jump, the journey can sometimes be murky, confusing, and costly.

At worst, the allure of community, the speed of movement, and the proselytizing of making life-changing riches while promoting a mission-driven technology, can actually prey on the less informed and less wealthy, convincing those with the least to spare to spend riskier than they should. This creates real risk for anyone who "needs to jump in" to learn.

But the "other side of the coin" (heh) of religiously followed, "mission driven" technologies are the zealots. They are indeed immovable and devout.

Reporting on these communities and taking a side that casts doubt on one community, comes with real consequences. Loud, passionate voices from the communities want 10,000 word tomes espousing the virtue of their beliefs, or, they will actively root for your misfortune. (for the grand error of reporting about the merits of cryptocurrency, a paid subscriber told Casey Newton to die.)

Little to no decision-making bodies to speak of; difficult to ascertain credibility; high degree of technological difficulty for casual followers; constantly shifting opinions; and the whole cocktail of risks of reporting on things people feel deeply about on the Internet. That all sure makes ethical, viewpoint-driven, well-sourced and researched journalism daunting!

Why does this matter? Without quality, well-reported journalism that demystifies the mysterious, things will…always seem mysterious! These factors create real challenges to increasing understanding outside of the already interested. It would be a shame if the best crypto journalism simply became a crib sheet for insiders, a la POLITICO but for the crypto set.

What do we do?

The nature of cryptocurrency makes it unlikely that we'll have mutually agreed upon, trusted expert industry sources whose viewpoints shine light on strategy or speak for a majority of the community. Regulation may one day help, but the complexities of regulating global decentralized assets make me believe it won't happen quickly.

So then, rather than waiting for kings or kingmakers to arise, the solvable bit seems to be making up the context that's lost without them. A few ideas on how that might be done:

Make it easier for interested readers to create context and fill in gaps. I have always wished that reporters would provide some kind of "asset bank" at the end of a deeply reported story. What sources did you speak to, and where can I find them on social media in case I want to learn more? What content did you reference to come to your opinion, and where can I find it if I want to do the same? What communities played a role in this story, and how might I join them?

Going further, resource compilers like Twitter lists could come in handy here. Imagine if, at the end of a story that helps readers come to their own take about a facet of cryptocurrency, the reporter provided Twitter lists of expert voices, community voices, and (insofar as they exist) industry voices that readers could add to their own feeds. Same with YouTube playlists, or even reading lists.

Add community voices to reporting. I will not be the first or last person to suggest this, and the idea itself can be hard or even prickly to execute. But one of the chief enemies of context and understanding is distance; if communities are reported on as if they're being observed like zoo animals, of course they'll always appear like "others" to readers.

If reporting aims to add insight to those who cannot "jump in," might there be leading voices among the "jumped in" who could shed light on whatever issue the reporting covers?

Interestingly, could adding these voices help you report on platforms beyond your own where you audience might be, like YouTube or TikTok?

In some communities, trust of media remains incredibly low; low enough that some might dismiss participation out of hand, or worse, threaten the reporter for trying. Proceed with caution.

Shift reporting authority from "top down" to "community led". This idea takes the "community voices" point a step further. If reporting can't signal the thoughts of a few powerful people, what if instead, reporting followed opinions of communities?

For example, what if individuals/news organizations polled a few specific groups (crypto-interested, devout followers, dabblers, etc.), on important topics and questions, and reported on the results?

This would take more work, lots of vetting, and doesn't come without risk. But in the search for context, it could add a helpful tool to gauge the opinions on key issues, as well as the differences from community to community.

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It's clear that some of the old tools of reporting and context creation won't work in the early days of reporting on the development of crypto. These early years will be bumpy, and will require even more bravery and risk-taking from hard-working journalists.