Community Building 101: Stay True To Your Values

On a Spaces hosted by FORKED, YGG’s Gabby Dizon spoke with Addy Crezee, Ishank Gupta, Arief Widhiyasa and others on how to drive long-term community growth.

Yield Guild Games (YGG) has significantly expanded the scope of its programs and its audience since its foundation in 2020. Across its global network, the guild protocol now has a reach of over 7 million. This impressive growth has partly been driven by the simplicity of YGG’s mission: empowering the world to find opportunities in web3.

The consistency of YGG’s messaging through the years has enabled it to stay true to its original values and identity while adapting to an ever-changing industry landscape. Regardless of where they are in the world, what language they speak, or what games they play, YGG’s network of gamers abide by its core values of collaboration and cooperation. Across the guild of guilds, which represents many micro communities with different interests and goals, the YGG network maintains a strong sense of unity. 

Recently, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon joined a virtual panel hosted by FORKED and Ozaru founder Addy Crezee, to speak about the most important steps web3 leaders must take to maintain the growth of their communities while adapting to passing trends. His fellow guests included GATH3R co-founder and CEO Pichapen Prateepavanich, OpenSocial Protocol Community Lead Sheraf, E-Constellation co-founder Elisa, KGeN co-founder Ishank Gupta, Confiction Labs CEO Arief Widhiyasa, and Saakuru Labs co-founder Jack Vinijtrongjit.

The following is an excerpt from their conversation, where Arief, Addy, Gabby, and Ishank reflected on how the messaging an organization puts forth has a direct impact on the quality of people it’s able to recruit to its cause. In the case of YGG, this has been focusing on the broader goals of participating in web3 while placing a premium on positive, community-building interactions.

Listen to the full recording on X.

FORKED: Power to the Players Vol. 4

Arief (37:00): If we see an entertainment product, like a movie or game, usually the visuals are what get people in. But in games, what makes people stay for the long-term is actually gameplay. The quality of the product itself and the quality of the community itself.

If we transfer that to the current existing web3 community, usually, the chance or potential to earn is the hook. But that hook is not really sustainable. People will always min-max opportunity versus their time or effort. And as Gabby says, sometimes the available rewards go up, sometimes they go down.

The biggest question here is, what is the long term value that we need to build in a community to make them stay long-term? Gabby mentioned a lot of things like common interests and doing activities together. The other thing that I think is also important is how we can build an individual sense of belonging within our communities. There's a lot of ways to do it, but if they feel that, the goal is to make them become advocates for the community. So the way we recognize that, the way we support them, is also a very important point. If they become the loyalists of the community, then that's very, very valuable long-term.

Addy (39:09): If you've airdropped some tokens and they’ve made some money, that's good in the short term maybe. But how do you make a person an advocate of your brand in web3? That's the question. Especially since there are not that many people in the ecosystem. I mean, there are more and more people onboarding in web3 every day, but how do you do that?

Gabby (39:37): The way we think about it is that a lot of our messaging and the communications that we give out talk about the values that are really important to us as a community. YGG itself is not a single community. It's hundreds, thousands of players. Lots of different guilds with their own micro communities that may have different values, but they know that they want to stick together and play together. YGG as a platform, as a protocol, gives the opportunities for these community members, these guilds, these players, to shine.

So, I think the communication you give out matters a lot. If you talk a lot about earnings, these are the people that will show up. If you talk a lot about what you stand for, people who resonate with it will show up.

It also matters a lot in our hiring. A lot of people apply for YGG or want to work with YGG because they like the values we stand for. They like that we're here for the long run. We want to give people opportunities to be their best selves, to learn a lot, to be able to contribute in these communities and to own a part of that network. So, I do think that how you present yourself, how you communicate yourself, really matters.

Ishank (41:08): Apart from what Gabby already covered, there are a few things that have worked really well for us. The first one is following through. Whatever your communication may be, it could be earnings, it could be power, it could be just some access to new things, cool shit, whatever it may be. Following through on what you're claiming is super important for the community, because a lot of people make a lot of tall claims, and people do tend to get disappointed.

The second aspect is transparency. I mean, everyone fucks up. Any community could fuck up, any community leader could fuck up. That's okay as long as we transparently address the issue and accept the problem. Transparency plays a big role in retaining members. We've had scenarios where people have been pissed off, or people have been unhappy because of some campaign here and there. But when you get together and talk to them and transparently share with them what really transpired, that always helps.

The last part, which is a little underrated, is empathy. In community building, empathy plays a very, very strong role. Empathy could show up in different ways. It could show up in caring for people when they may be down due to certain events that may have happened in their area, or it could be somebody somewhere that just needs some help. If one of your values is standing by each other, the question is, how many times do you really show up?

You can listen to the full recording on X.

Follow Gabby, Ishank, Elisa, and Arief for expert insights on building strong web3 gaming communities.

Follow Pichapen, Jack, and OpenSocial Protocol to learn more about the role web3 infrastructure plays in growing the ecosystem as a whole.

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