RFC: Reserve Discord Community

[owanikin]

Introduction

Hey community, I’m Ifeoluwa Oderinde from Lagos, Nigeria. I’m a software engineer (writing smart contracts in solidity and typescript), researcher, and community builder. I’ve been a community moderator with ETHGlobal since August 2022. I discovered the Reserve Protocol during its Launch Hackathon on Gitcoin in 2022. During the past few weeks, I’ve been deep-diving into the Reserve discord community, and super impressed with the quality of discussions going on there, and have identified a few tips on how we can better grow the community and enhance the discussions.

I’ll start with where I believe we can make the most important improvements, and they are:

• The Welcome experience
• Channel descriptions
• Engagements through off-chain quests
• Community assistant AI Bot
• Programming activities and RToken Lab
• The Roundtable

Welcome Experience

Reserve Discord can have a better welcome experience if it includes vetting, roles, and channel information that directs newcomers on where to go for what. An example of this is from the Python discord screenshotted below.

1. 
   2.
   
   3.
   

A setup like this tends to deter spammers, trolls, and bots as they usually don’t complete the onboarding process, allowing real individuals with a community fit to be part of Reserve.

I’ll recommend the @verified, @rsr_hodler, @rsr_staker, and @rtoken_deployer roles for members during the onboarding process. @verified is for every member that gets verified into the server, while @rsr_hodler, @rsr_staker, and @rtoken_deployer roles are for those who identify as that. For those who don’t identify as any of these roles and are just in the discord server to look around and learn, the @verified role will allow them to do just that.

How these roles benefit the community

These roles can provide tangible benefits by creating a structured recognition system, encouraging engagement around specific topics, and promoting a sense of belonging among members who share common interests and contributions. The listed roles are an overview of the core members of Reserve community and here’s how each of these roles can specifically benefit the community:

@verified role indicates a verified community member, minimizing the risk of spam, impersonation, and the need for server clean-up, thereby avoiding the inadvertent removal of inactive members instead of bots.

@rsr_hodler role signifies long-term RSR holders, fostering discussions, sharing investment philosophies, and enhancing credibility in Reserve discord.

@rsr_staker role signifies users participating in staking to support network security, consensus, and yields, enabling discussions about its benefits and ecosystem impact to encourage wider token staking and ecosystem contribution.

@rtoken_deployer role signifies a user who is interested in the development and deployment of an RToken.

As part of the welcome experience, a voluntary Introduce-yourself / say-hi channel where new members can go to introduce themselves, what their interests are, and what they are looking to contribute to / get from being part of the Reserve community can be a cool addition. Voluntary introductions, as it helps strike a balance between engagement, community bonding, and respecting privacy, avoiding both inauthentic introductions and potential friction for new members.

Channel Descriptions

Reserve does not currently have any channel descriptions. So I suggest providing a concise description for each channel to guide relevant discussions. This will focus conversations on the appropriate channels instead of being scattered.

Here are some examples from Tally and Arbitrum.

• Miscellaneous: A general space to chat about all things Reserve!
• RToken Brainstorm: Brainstorm RToken ideas, asset-backing, yield generation, and over-collateralization.
• Community Content: What content about Reserve have you created or discovered on Twitter, Medium, Reddit, Substack, or YouTube today?
• Support: Reach out here for user support from the Reserve team. Create a ticket by pressing and we’ll make sure to get back to you. (see below for the benefits of a ticketing system for support vs a freestyled one)
• Chain Chatter: Drop links and discuss all things about other chains, networks, and products at the intersection of hyperinflation, stablecoins & decentralized finance.
• Technical Discussions: Devs are listening and interacting. Ask questions and talk tech about all things RTokens and the Reserve Protocol.
• Governance Discussions: This channel is for brainstorming governance innovation and how to apply it to RTokens and the Reserve ecosystem. For more in-depth, specific, discussions with a goal, go make a proposal in the forums at https://forum.reserve.org/
• Register Feedback: Share your Register experience, ideas, and suggestions here. Your feedback matters!
• The Roundtable: This is a high signal-to-noise gated channel for Advocates, Missionaries & Revolutionaries thinking and discussing long-term how to grow the Reserve ecosystem.
• Monetary Policy Nerds: Delve into interest rates, money supply, inflation, and economics. Ideal for experts and curious minds to dissect financial complexities. Geek out on fiscal strategy here!
• eUSD: Discuss all things Electronic Dollar (eUSD), a fully backed and overcollateralized US-dollar stablecoin built on the Reserve Protocol.
• ETH+: Discuss all things ETHPLUS (ETH+), an Ethereum liquid staking token basket with over-collateralization protection.
• hyUSD: Discuss all things High Yield USD(hyUSD), a decentralized flatcoin offering easy DeFi yield access, allowing holders to earn passive income.
• RSD: Seems quiet in here. Consider deleting?
• FAQ - I suggest adding this channel of repeatedly asked and answered questions will be great for the community. Responses from Sinatra & Larry the Cucumber (support) can be aggregated into the FAQ channel.
  Description: Frequently asked questions about Register, RTokens and the Reserve ecosystem. Please check back frequently for updates.

Support: Ticketing vs. Freestyling

A ticketing system provides a structured way to track and manage support requests. Each request gets a unique ticket number, making it easier to prioritize, assign and follow up on issues, making sure nothing falls through the cracks. This allows for efficiency as multiple requests can be handled simultaneously, ensuring that no requests go unnoticed. This can allow for easy documentation of support interactions, especially for complex/technical issues, which can be valuable for future reference and analysis, such as inclusion in an FAQ. This system is well-suited for scalability and optimal resource utilization by the team.

Freestyle approach offers a personal touch, which can be less intimidating for users unfamiliar with formal ticketing systems. This casual method fosters community and closeness by enabling direct interaction between users, support, and other community members. However, its lack of structure can scatter issues, straining the team’s resources due to difficulties in tracking, solving, and organizing issues, leading to users’ frustration due to longer response time.

Engagements through off-chain quests

Quests are a guided, narrative-driven series of Bounties with a common theme or mission, designed to have a richer experience than bounties. You progress through the quests by completing its bounties - earning XPs, tokens and NFTs along the way.

Reserve has Zealy off-chain quests running, which can be enhanced through:

• Periodic quests happening daily, weekly, and monthly. i.e. Daily quest: “Participate in Reserve community discussions for 30 minutes”. Weekly quest: “Participate in RToken Lab and share insights”. Monthly quest: “Propose on the governance forum or summarize a governance post”.

• Themed quests that are structured around a series of activities around a specific Reserve topic/theme, such as “Begin your Reserve journey”, “Reserve explorer”, “Governance enthusiast” e.t.c

• A reserve-quest channel could be added as a home base and where community members can speak about the quest and help each other out, while also adding an element of surprise: by doubling the XP on a specific quest during a day, or event.

• Faster review of quests submissions, as some have been “under review” for over 2 weeks (mine actually!). Considering the team’s workload, can we shift to automated pre-set quests that don’t require human review?

Community Assistant AI Bot

You beat me to it and launched Thursday. Good idea!

This will help deliver quicker, expert-like responses when specialists or human support are absent, bridging human availability gaps, and providing rapid, dependable answers for enhanced user satisfaction and smoother support.

Programming activities

There are other activities that can be used to start conversations and increase engagement such as:

• Cross-posting Zealy quests to boost engagement: A good strategy to increase engagement in a channel like RToken-brainstorm, will be crossposting on miscellaneous and other channels saying, “hey everyone, there is a quest out here on RToken-brainstorm channel, go there to get some XPs!”
• Question of the day: Most conversations in Reserve Discord occur in the miscellaneous channel, but they don’t align with the desired focus of driving TVL or RToken development. To improve the quality of conversations on the channels, we can suggest a “Question of the day!” around the kind of conversations and topics we want. i.e. Question of the Day!: How can RTokens, asset-backed stablecoins bridge the gap between traditional markets and decentralized finance? #RTokens #Stablecoins #DefiJourney. For this activity, we want to aim for free-flowing conversations on desired topics and engagement on Discord rather than through a Zealy quest.
• Member of the Month: We can recognize and reward the most active or helpful member of the month with a special role (member of the month), and/or swag. As a community, we can use tools like strawpoll to vote for such highly contributing members.
• RToken Labs - RToken Lab is Reserve’s version of a community call, which is a weekly open discussion forum that happens in the Reserve Discord for everyone who is part of the community to discuss improvements and updates to the Reserve ecosystem. Since this is a community call by the community, for the community we can encourage willing community members to help structure its agenda, organize it, lead it etc.
  • Suggestion #1: Bi-weekly, RToken Lab can invite aligned members outside Reserve (from the larger web3 ecosystem), for example. Curve’s founder coming on RToken Lab to discuss Reserve’s liquidity on Curve. These calls can be posted on social media a week in advance to build buzz.
  • Suggestion#2: These calls can be audio-recorded and shared with those who couldn’t make it. The content can be transcribed into text that becomes weekly “RToken Labs” posts shared across social media benefiting the larger web3 ecosystem. SeaVoice is a good bot that can help with transcription.

The Roundtable

The Roundtable is a gated channel of informed Advocates, Missionaries, and Revolutionaries dedicated to nurturing the Reserve ecosystem. To join the Roundtable, you need 1200 XPs, claim the Advocate badge, and get some more XPs to claim the Missionary and Revolutionary badges.

These ambassadors can be the community on-the-ground superheroes, talking to community members, engaging in community activities, and providing focused feedback to Reserve’s core team. Activities for the roundtable can include:

• Offering focused feedback to the core team, such as “Engagement in our Discord server has been great, but I’ve noticed that engagement on our Twitter account could be improved by implementing more interactive polls and informative threads” or “I’ve identified DeFi projects that can deploy RTokens (stablecoins) on Reserve” and the Reserve team can implement a google doc to catalog such Defi Projects and who to speak with there.
• Shaping RToken Lab agendas with topics and discussions that engage and educate participants while aligning with the goals of the Reserve ecosystem. The structure of the agendas can be posted in the roundtable days before so community members can provide input on them.
• Providing leadership in governance discussions through proposal analysis and summaries. Members of the roundtable can thoroughly review governance proposals, break down their content, and provide clear and concise summaries. This can help engage the community with understanding the proposal’s objectives, benefits, and potential concerns. This activity can also be part of their minimum monthly quests.
• Helping to coordinate and support IRL and virtual events with the Reserve core team. This can include volunteering duties like handling logistics, booth setup, registration, scheduling presentations and just providing general event support.

The Roundtable should however need a monthly minimum quests XPs to keep being part of the Roundtable, and some of the activities highlighted above can count for those XPs.

Conclusion

These are just ideas and suggestions of someone who really likes Reserve and wants to see it grow. Definitely, I must have had a lot of hit-and-miss on the post, so I humbly invite the community to help discuss and refine these ideas. The goal here is to enable community conversations and engagements that are solely not ignited by the Reserve Team but by the community in general.

[Spen]

Good to think about the community aspect. While I like some of your suggestions, others feel like “change for the sake of change”.
I would avoid introducing things which have little benefit but produce work for the moderators, like the question of the day. We rather need true discussions and not artificially forced ones.
Also the input on the ticketing system begs the question if there is anything wrong with the existing model? Don’t change a running system.

Having a good welcome experience and good channel descriptions sounds worth while.

As an aside, the Rtoken Labs are already recorded. The recording is available to members of The Roundtable. Good motivation to get the 1200 XPs on the Zealy quests. But the recordings don’t yet offer an automatic transcription. With current AI tools one could imaging a second step where the transcript is summarized and the summary then posted as message to The Roundtable channel.

To hop on your suggestions to improve the Discord, I can offer some improvement suggestions of my own.

Rename register-feedback to register.app-feedback
It seems reoccurring that this channel is misunderstood.
Using the URL name could help clarify that this is about the register.app.

Introduce reserve.org-feedback Channel
The new website launched and there was an initial feedback channel on it in the form of a Zealy quest and The Roundtable. But now the best channel to raise feedback isn’t that clear anymore and not everyone wants to sign up to the forum just to drop a short comment on the website.

Allow Sharing of Images
Especially for feedback on the UIs, sharing of screenshots is really helpful.
But there are more cases where sharing images is useful.
Moderators can still delete inappropriate or unwanted content (as they can with normal messages).
I don’t see the harm in having sharing of images enabled.

[owanikin]

Thank you @Spen , for the really great feedback and suggestions you’ve given!
On this:

1. The issue is that not enough of these true discussions are happening. So how can we encourage more of it to happen? Maybe through a “question of the day!”, or through. something else? What we want is more of these really great, true discussions to happen.
2. Having support ticketed makes sure that the team gets to see and attend to every real issue, and as Reserve grows it becomes increasingly difficult for the team to track all important issues. In the long run, its organized structure will help in creating an FAQ, for the community and less work for the team.

[Crypto_Goku]

Hello Ifeoluwa,

I would like to sincerely thank you for your outstanding contribution to improving the Reserve Discord community. You have really highlighted excellent aspects and identified areas that are easily implementable.

• I really like the welcome experience, as it’s already familiar from other channels and is certainly meaningful, either for exchanging a friendly greeting daily or for giving new members the opportunity to introduce themselves.

→ However, we need to be careful not to overwhelm, as the anti-bot measures could deter new users. Finding a balanced approach is important here!

• The new role assignments also make sense to me. This way, different users can be assigned specific tasks or affiliations. This can provide orientation for new users. However, I see an issue with how we should carry out these assignments anonymously. Do community members have the ability to assign these roles themselves? Because we certainly don’t want our users to have to disclose their staking address or hodl wallet address. That would only discourage participation and could compromise the privacy of individual members.

→ One potential solution could be to allow these role assignments to happen freely in an introduction room during an introduction round. They wouldn’t be very meaningful in that context, but at least they’d be a starting point.

• The new AI assistant bot is a good idea. However, we noticed that it doesn’t know a lot of information about Reserve yet. This means we still need community members who are engaged and can help others with information that the bot cannot provide (yet). An issue I see here is in terms of user experience: when the bot is allowed in every room, it interrupts the flow of conversation in some discussions each time. Because it takes up quite a bit of space, it often distracts from other conversations as users have to constantly scroll.

→ One possible solution could be to assign the Assistant AI Bot its own room for questions.

• Interestingly, we share many same ideas in various areas regarding Zealy Quests and program activities. Expanding RToken Labs with guest contributions and uploading these discussions as videos would be really beneficial.

→ Perhaps particularly good RToken Labs sessions could be uploaded as videos on Twitter/X to increase awareness of RToken Labs!

• I also think the idea of stimulating the community through daily guiding questions is fantastic. Maybe expanding this to cover an entire week would make more sense (and align with the rhythm of RToken Labs), as most community members have jobs and can’t engage daily.

→ This way, we give users more time to reflect on specific questions. It’s about quality over quantity here.

• Regarding the Roundtable, I would like to introduce a monthly video/voice chat meeting to get to know each other better and possibly establish a structure within the Roundtable where we can openly discuss improvement possibilities for Reserve, as well as Discord-related matters.

Thank you very much for your excellent thoughts, and I hope that my feedback helps all of us in further enhancing Reserve.

Best regards,

Crypto_Goku

[Spen]

@Crypto_Goku

One possible solution could be to assign the Assistant AI Bot its own room for questions.

Oh I like the suggestion to ban the Q&A Bot to a dedicated channel, so it stops spamming all other channels.

[Spen]

@owanikin

The issue is that not enough of these true discussions are happening. So how can we encourage more of it to happen? Maybe through a “question of the day!”, or through. something else? What we want is more of these really great, true discussions to happen.

You will not get authentic discussions when you force the topic. The discussions will just feel superficial/artificial.
This would actually hurt the Discord very much as people will perceive the discussions as spam and will stop reading the chat all together. I would.

I only have limited time to follow a community chat.

I don’t see why we always need “more”? What is wrong with the current level of interaction?

The only thing I see not being discussed enough is new projects bringing RWAs on-chain. Reserve should consider these the backbone of their product. It should absolutely be encourage to talk about other projects within the discord.
This can raise awareness for new potential collateral plugins.

[owanikin]

Really good points @spen!!

[owanikin]

This is really great feedback @Crypto_Goku , thank you for the suggestions!!

I absolutely agree with you. A good starting use-case will be for customizing experiences & tailoring conversations to specific roles i.e RWAs discussions to @rtoken_deployer.

How do you think we should go about this so that it’s authentic and doesn’t feel spammy like @Spen suggested?

I really do like the idea of a monthly video/voice chat meeting for the Roundtable 30mins - 1hr structured to improve Reserve and the community! Will like to see everyone’s faces

[RyanTreeFiddy]

I think this is all great. I used to love the “triggers” for FAQ in the Telegram group. It’s my understanding some thought it seemed spammy but I found it helped keep answers accurate and consistent. I’m for everything you mentioned above. When I’m deciding to do something for my company I always ask myself what the upsides and downsides are. I see upsides here but can’t think of a single downside other than a bit of time to implement these changes. Thanks - RyanTreeFiddy

[Mallo]

Hi there Ifeoluwa,

Thanks for the really in-depth analysis of the Reserve Discord - very much appreciated. I’ll add some comments to the main headings you’ve got - I’ll not go into too much detail if someone has already suggested these are good ideas

• The Welcome experience - I’m not overly keen on a lot of bot interaction because it confuses people - just to click 1 link to get people in is sometimes challenging! Over in telegram we used to have 1 button to prove you were human and frequently had people not know what to do. I suppose you could argue this is some form of natural selection Like the idea of roles for users - there are the current levels through completing quests for Zealy but I think we should broaden it out so people can show what they are comfortable exposing of their position in Reserve.

• Channel descriptions
  Very much agree - we get a lot of crossposting from people not knowing where best to post.

• Engagements through off-chain quests
  There are currently quests through zealy, although I think their scope could be expanded

• Community assistant AI Bot - I agree with whoever mentioned it to keep it in 1 channel so it doesn’t take over

• Programming activities and RToken Lab
  I’m not sure the periodic quests would get much interaction at the moment (which is not to say they wouldn’t in the future) - especially governance as it’s a costly interaction - although that in itself would show how committed someone is to governance and the protocol. I’d like to see more quests for spreading the word on reserve Protocol and RTokens to new communities - i.e. leverage the communities that people are part of outside Reserve.

Not a great fan of question of the day and user of the month - will either fizzle out or be the ‘employee of the month’ in a burger chain - same few people or some form of twisting everyone to win it.

• The Roundtable
  Agree those in their could be used more if they were willing - small teams could work well

Hope this helps - thank you again, it must have taken a long time to collate all that.

Mallo

[Braden]

It’s great to see someone putting so much time into providing clear and thorough feedback! Here are my thoughts:

Building on top of Discord sometimes gives me centralization chills. Using Discord to run experiments that are deemed worth the time investment is good, but devoting too much time and energy to a centralized service could be bad.

Descriptions of channels - yes

Question of the day or week - yes

Offering XP for interacting with the governance forums should be done.

XP claiming process could be made a bit more automatic? If there is a way to make it so some of the XP claims are “triggered” instead of a claim is made, that might help the admin tasks related to it. Not sure if that can be done for all quests?

All other topics like support ticketing, member of the month, shaping RToken Labs, IRL event support etc I don’t think apply to the Reserve Protocol.

Great post!

[socopower]

First of all, I’m glad that you stayed digging into the protocol after the Gitcoin Hackathon.

Regarding your review, it seems to me a very complete view of what there is or what there may be, having said this, I will focus on the points that caught my attention:

1. Welcome Experience: I think what you propose is a good point, it would be great to see an update on this, especially the RSR roles and channel descriptions.

2. Member of the Month: I think it’s great, but I wouldn’t limit it to 1 person, it could be at least 3.

3. Programming Activities: It would be great if the questions of the day were implemented, and said score taken from that activity, can contribute to the election of the members of the month.

[0xJMG]

This was a great post and lovely comments @owanikin @Spen @Mallo @Braden @Crypto_Goku @RyanTreeFiddy.

A few things catching my eye as priority:

1. Add channel descriptions? DONE!
2. Upgrading our welcome experience and roles, but not over doing it. @Larry has some good ideas for this. Already implementing some.
3. Getting folks to expose their interest in Reserve at the Welcome experience and give them a cool badge seems like a really interesting idea. Staker, hodler, curious or poop talker? I’d love to know!
4. Should we move to a ticketing system in the Support channel to prevent misplaced rando questions? tbd
5. A dedicated channel for ReserveGPT so we don’t spam other channels and disrupt conversational flow is coming. Also ReserveGPT has a really cool avatar coming as well!
6. We are also exploring how to breakout Integromat bot governance notifications in a way not to disrupt discussion flow in the governance discussions channel. Better for governance “discussions” and better for governance forum maxi wannabees to keep up with every single notification, not getting lost in the noise.
7. Agree a dedicated quests channel + more interesting and creative quests is a good idea. I am talking to a few veterans on this topic and hope to share soon!
8. @Crypto_Goku hosting a monthly Roundtable call? sign me up! how can Reserve support?

Longer term wishlist:
Get ReserveGPT to scrape our YouTube video close caption files and Medium blog posts, and serve those up in the Discord.

Create a curated videos channel? maybe.