Produce educational videos covering most frequent support questions and ENS mechanics

DAO-Wide General Discussion
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Hey all,

While at support role you just see same question all over again, I felt that it would alleviate the workload considerably if in certain situations I could point person to a video.

One of the most common questions which can be covered by video goes something like this

"How do I transfer my eth from Coinbase wallet to Metamask wallet to register that ENS name"

or

"I’m trying to send eth to my .eth name and not receiving anything" and so on.

What this tells me, is that a lot of people do not understand relationship between

private key / seed phrase <-> public address <-> wallet as software <-> .eth name as smart contract

Technically ENS should not be taking on itself responsibility to educate the whole world on basics permissionless blockchain concepts, however it just so happens that all those concepts are so closely interrelated that its difficult not to cover them.

Very often I would end up explaining what is private / public key relationship, how to import seed phrase, and what exactly “importing seed phrase is”.

If we had 1 video, or set of video professionally produced, that would lift so much work off support immediately.

I would think that tenders needs to be conducted among such video content builders, to see who would be the best partners to work on that issue with ENS.

Some other questions which come to mind which can be covered in videos:

  1. Of course basic short promo video explaining what is ENS, and what are use cases, I think its important to highlight here that protocol can be used not only to send tokens, but also to label any entity, such as smart contracts, or even songs, images, ?robodogs? :sweat_smile:. Sort of try to very carefully “not to generate technical moot” on one hand and on the other hand try to show this potential future, what can be achieved with ENS. Very often you see that in general - “oh hi guys, so what do I use .eth name for” - you can just plug video as reply, and then as second reply plug link to registration manager.

  2. relationship between ENS token and .eth names as NFT token. Users might get confused because token is a token.

  3. Very often I saw people with “stuck” txs due to low fees, and it was really painful to release those. Typically those were sent with wallets other than MetaMask, however hard I tried I couldn’t get most recent version of Metamask to produce infinitely pending tx, even with “low” fees - network would always catch up (MetaMask is that good nowadays). We can’t really cover all the possible interfaces, but maybe we can at least cover concept of stuck transaction due to low fees? Because people with that problem keep flowing to support anyway.

  4. It is possible that there may be some confusion with rent / ownership concepts for .eth names. User is paying fee, which can be seen as rent, then “landlord” can take .eth away, but he can’t, so its not really a rent but rather fee. I think that point deserves clarification, additionally explaining that if you want to have your name for life, then you just pay 100 years fee in advance.

  5. Coinbase has those “tutorial” videos with very small compensation attached to them, once user passes the test - 1USD denominated in that blockchain currency is issued to his account. From what I understand there are no tutorial videos like this attached to ENS on Coinbase. They are very short, 1-2 videos max, but can really help users understand what ENS is and most importantly point them towards site to register .eth name.

A lot of support questions are related to interface, how button is stuck, what is 1 minute wait, how do I complete the registration after initial commit and so on, I would think that we don’t need to immediately produce videos to cover any of that, since most of those issues should be addressed in new iteration of registration manager.

Either way looking for suitable partner who can produce quality videos is a lengthy and difficult process on its own, I suppose it’s better to start doing this sooner than later. Developing working relationship with such agency is important, because once we have that “connection” we can produce videos “on-demand” so to say, because common guidelines on style, approach and so on will already be developed.

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Building a knowledge base

The solution to the issue you’re referring to is the Learn Docs. The Learn Docs are a repository of the most frequently asked questions sourced from the Discord support tickets. The Learn Docs will go along way in becoming the go-to resource for onboarding new users to ENS, troubleshooting, and building context around web3 and blockchain tech. As a side note, I imagine the Learn Docs would absolutely include gifs and short screencasts to aid post, which is much more sustainable and economically over a long period of time.

The most valuable resource to point users to over the past few months has been the ENS Medium posts created by brantly.eth. The Learn Docs are intended to build on the success of the Medium posts by bringing everything into a single repository that is able to expand as a knowledge base over time.

Video content

Quality video explainers are incredibly expensive to produce and very difficult to get right. You also face the obvious problem that if anything changes with the manager app or the answer becomes out of date, the video instructions would no longer be accurate. With written content on the other hand, a post can simply be edited and updated.

I will refer you to the recent troubles MakerDAO have had in the area of content creation. They recently disbanded their Content Unit because they were unable to create content after 8 months and over $1m spent. I think it’s a good thread for everyone here to read to get a better understanding of how hard it can be to create content. Link to Maker DAO forum post.

An alternative to outsourcing to an agency would be to have a bounty system where you request content and people create content to collect the bounty. I am not a fan of this approach to the extent that a bounty is paid upon completion and not based on quality. In this sense, retroactive grants/awards are a much better way to reward contributions because value has already been established, whether it is the number of views or comments on a video, or likes and retweets of a tweet thread.

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Agency vs Community

With most work within the DAO, the first thought I have is whether existing community members are able to do the work. The power of community within web3 is that members are given opportunities to meaningfully contribute without a decision being made to outsource work to an agency who are likely to care little for ENS beyond how much they are paid, and how it might help them secure their next piece of work.

One reasons that traditional companies, including tech companies, pay agencies for content creation is because they can’t organically source user generated content (UGC). UGC is the holy grail of content marketing because a video, tweet, or blog post from a real user is much more impactful and authentic than a 1 min long polished video with flashy graphics by a professional agency. What makes adoption and education so incredible in web3 broadly is the rate of UGC. If companies had communities like we have here in web3, they wouldn’t rush to agencies.

I am firmly opposed to a centralized effort to create video content. I would prefer to put out a call for content and then retroactively reward creators with $ENS where appropriate. We should be tapping into community talents rather than going to an agency. The ENS community in particular is extremely diverse and it seems like a good first step to put the call out for content internally, within the community.

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It does not have to be outsourced to a company only to be charged premium price. I went to the Academy of Art in San Francisco where i’ve acquired the skills to do these types of projects (i.e, Ui/Ux, motion graphics, and the rest of Adobe CC.) It will require collaboration between a few people and discussion that clearly outlines the material that needed to be shown need to happen. Hard pass on agencies.

I think that it is our duty to be in the informative educational side as well. Essentially, this is the product of any and all efforts of members. Why would we hire people who don’t care about the product as much as those who are actively involved and searching for opportunity. Most of us have this expertise knowledge. Let’s make sure that good information is being projected.

Although I would need to upgrade my machine sometime soon, I can make this happen for far more cheaper than $1M. 😵‍💫

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how does the outcall work for something of this nature. Obviously we wouldn’t want 10 people to work on the same thing and then have 10 of the same projects. Would it be a sort of lottery or assignment system?

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This was a great read. Replying to encourage others to read it.

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This is the beauty of retroactive funding. Many different people can create the same content, whether it is a post on x or a video on y. At the end of a set period (month, quarter, term) stewards &/or WG members &/or community members &/or TNL/the core team can vote on how much value a particular piece of content has provided to the ecosystem as assign tokens (or ETH/stables) for the contribution.

In this post on Retroactive Funding by Optimism PBC, vitalik.eth states:

The core principle behind the concept of retroactive public goods funding is simple: it’s easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful .

It is far easier to look back at content created or projects built, and decide what was useful, or added value. To take a forward looking approach is the legacy mindset, which is susceptible to significant wastage. If people don’t want to spend time working on content upfront without payment, that’s their prerogative… but based on my experience as a content creator, there will always be others that step up and fill the void, whether they do it for their own personal growth or in hope of a retroactive grant… it doesn’t matter to the DAO.

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Wow this is really brilliant. I agree and I guess it often comes down to initiative. People are just really used to having an agreed upon or promised reward to [at least] provide the initiative. Maybe motivation is a better word? Words are hard.

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I know how to make movies too , that’s what I do for work and if we got a nice team together than anything is possible

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that sounds fantastic. you are brilliant.

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That is kind of funny you mentioned that ‘words are hard’.
You are so correct. The state of our society has established such a negative connotation on almost every three syllable adjectives.

‘Motivation’ and ‘Initiative’ truly are HURTFUL words these days–to a lot of people. Which is seemigly—well…I don’t know. Words are hard. lol. :drum:

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Movies!? That is a lot more work than any of us ar bargaining for. Those are multi-year projects.
Cool stuff.

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Haha it’s one of my favorite sayings. After learning Spanish and German growing up, then starting completely over and learning Korean… it’s true. Words are hard.

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Hey everyone! At RabbitHole, we are aiming at creating some content for protocols we have governance over, ENS being one of them. Last week we brought up some of these ideas and had very similar thoughts you are having here. We currently have a tutorial page in our Discord that we are looking to expand on as well. I can get in touch with some awesome people in our content team and see what we can come up with, would love to get together on this.

@SpikeWatanabe.eth you mentioned ENS should not be taking on itself responsibility to educate, this is something we would love to help you out with!

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Hey, great call, thanks for reaching out

I think we have a lot of resources available, we have our support team, I used to volunteer as support myself, so I know hands on the kind of problems which needs to be tackled, and seems like we have some content creators on board as well. I’m bit tied up here with various stuff, but let me have a look at this whole thing properly. Again thanks for reaching out!

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