How to Make Meaningful Content in Web3

One of the problems with the internet is that so much of it is simply a wasteland of out-of-date information. "Content" is not cleaned up in the way that it should be. Looking for the gems in the dirt is difficult if any old trash is just allowed to pile up on top, obscuring the stuff you need to get to.

Search engines are supposed to be engineered in such a way that they'll find the stuff you need, and disregard the old stuff that is no longer relevant. But they are far from perfect - and I'd rather not begin on the limitations of AI in this pursuit.

This is not just some absent-minded ideology. The reason for this blog's existence actually came during a recent message exchange I had with Shawn Tabrizi, one of Parity - and by extension Polkadot's - most experienced engineers. He's also a member of the Polkadot Fellowship.

I wanted to knit together two pieces of content that Shawn has on his GitHub profile because I thought it would make a nice blogpost. Those pieces are his "Polkadot Playbook" - a guide to what Polkadot is and why it is the best place to build Web3 applications - and the "Awesome Polkadot" page - where Shawn essentially lists his favorite Polkadot resources, things like wallets, educational guides, tooling, discussion forums, and so on.

Shawn Tabrizi speaking at sub0 Asia, Bangkok, March 2024

The resultant amalgamated article was - of course - to be presented very much as one person's opinion. However, when I presented a draft to Shawn, he didn't like what I'd done and felt it was not a helpful piece of content to publish on the Parity blog.

Little Value in a 'Snapshot'

His issue was that a snapshot of the content as it currently looks would provide diminishing value for readers over time, and in a year or two would just contribute to the morass of useless content on the net that I alluded to in my introduction.

I gradually saw where he was coming from. The whole point is that Shawn works diligently to keep his resources constantly updated and relevant - and this wouldn't be the case with any blogpost showcasing it at a single moment in time.

In truth, a lot of what he said resonated with me, after some reflection. For instance, when the new Parity website was built earlier this year, it was felt by certain people it would be helpful to retain almost ALL of the old articles in the blog archive.

I saw little value in this, and ultimately we only retained a small selection of what was in some cases an overworked back story of half-baked partnerships and minor technical upgrades. While it is important the internet retains some freely available historical content to provide background information for researchers, the truth is the vast majority is simply not required.

The Distractive agency, which has taken over Polkadot marketing in incremental stages from Parity since the start of the year, equally decided that many of the pages on the old Polkadot website were not valuable when it came to creating the new one.

I contacted Alberto Viera, a developer relations specialist within the Polkadot and specifically Moonbeam ecosystems for some years. He now heads up PaperMoon, which believes "complex builds can be achieved with the right instructions." Alberto's task, with his team and other contributors, is to produce those instructions for Polkadot.

'Bad Documentation A Significant Barrier'

He says: "Polkadot is a complex project that enables people to build beyond smart contract-based applications. For some time, external developers have perceived it as a challenging ecosystem and tech stack to work with. One of our primary goals is to improve our storytelling by introducing a new Developer Documentation hub designed to guide developers through their journey of building on Polkadot.

"Access to up-to-date documentation is crucial when attracting developers to Polkadot. During my onboarding into Web3, outdated or non-functioning documentation was a significant barrier when trying new tools, libraries, or ecosystems---a sentiment shared by many developers.

Alberto Viera (centre), speaking at Polkadot Decoded, July 2024. This panel examined the developer experience

"Polkadot has been somewhat fragmented, with each team or project operating independently and often distanced from it. This is reflected in the way its documentation is structured. However, having a heterogeneous ecosystem does not mean that developer documentation should be fragmented. Developers building smart contracts on parachains are as much a part of the Polkadot ecosystem as teams building parachains themselves."

The Polkadot Developer Bounties repository has a broadly similar goal. It seeks to coordinate and incentivize community-driven development and maintenance of the ecosystem. It is powered by the Substrate Tip Bot, a GitHub application which can submit tip proposals to the Polkadot Treasury.

As members of the Polkadot community, we at Parity are also keen to seek out truth through our own internal networks. For example, if multiple people had their own version of Shawn's "Awesome Polkadot", we could develop an up-to-date list from the "best bits" of all this content. This would be unbiased, with the object of providing truth among the crowd.

An Open-Source Website for Polkadot?

Distractive's challenge in keeping all pages in the new Polkadot website up-to-date, removing old ones, adding some that detail new features, and so on, is a considerable one. How best to do that remains a debatable question: should the entire project be a beacon for open-source content in Web3, for instance? That would be the perfect decentralized approach, after all.

Some closing thoughts. If you are someone who cares about providing quality Web3 content to be shared and distributed online, consider using resources that accept contributions such as GitHub, instead of popular blogging platforms like Medium.

Consider, too, the value of describing high-level architectural decisions and protocol designs which are likely to stand the test of time, instead of specific features which may be adapted or subsumed by something else. And try to link to sources of truth. This is particularly important when you present anything based on metrics. With a link provided, readers can easily check the latest numbers.

Whatever the market vibes of Web3 are at any given moment, this is a space where competition will always be fierce. With that in mind, tinkerers, retail users, enterprises big and small, old and new, have an awful lot of options to pick from when choosing where to build.

What you don't want them to find is documentation, articles, video how-to guides and so on that are at best a waste of time, and at worst providing dangerously erroneous information. It is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that, when choosing between ecosystems, decision-makers may pick the one where all the good info is easy to find and succinctly presented.

There is no suggestion that Polkadot is a particularly bad culprit when it comes to content saturation, but there is no harm in us all doing our bit to clean it up, refine the message, and highlight the good stuff.