As Munger once said: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." That principle perfectly captures what's happened to social platforms lately.

I've accumulated roughly $30K from creator payout programs, but honestly? I'd return every cent if it meant we could rewind to an era without financial incentives for posting. The whole creator payment model has fundamentally warped platform dynamics—alongside the emergence of socialfi platforms and constant algorithmic reshuffles, it's been a race to the bottom.

When you pay people per tweet, you don't get authentic engagement or quality discourse. You get optimization theater. People game the system instead of building genuine communities. The financial incentive creates perverse outcomes: more noise, less signal; more engagement bait, less meaningful discussion. Socialfi platforms amplified this by tokenizing every interaction, turning conversations into speculation vehicles.

The irony? The platforms solving for engagement metrics created the opposite of what made them valuable originally.