Hello, after while I decided to write short comment. So, lets start. Communities. I keep an eye on crypto for some time and realized, that community is very important for crypto projects. Every coin claims that " we have the best community, we achieved this and that... together with our community..."
Many times I was surprised, I saw some big number of followers on twitter, or members in slack or discord, it looked nice. These numbers might be impressive. But when it come to something real, like "we need your votes to get listed to exchange, we have fund rising for new feature", then... the real power of the community is visible. Does any one remember Dogecoin? Coin created for fun, but they were able to collect enough funds to sponsor Nascar driver or raised funds to cover expenses for bobsleigh team of Jamaica to participate in Olympic games in Sochi 2014. Do you believe that any of current coin could achieve that? Together with its own community?
Nowadays, we have coins such as Smartcash where community can create proposals and vote about them (but they have treasury for funding of their projects, where 70% of rewards goes there), i.e. food distribution in Venezuela, etc. There is a question, how it would work in the case, the treasury would not be there, but they do really interesting things and deserve respect for it. Of course, there are more coins with similar approach, this isn't the only one.
During last days you might read about Verge, which was able to collect 75M of Verge (around $3M at that time, which is quite impressive) to release "huge" announcement, but 66M was donated by their partner TokenPay (even though it is impressive, do not forget, there is huge amount of speculation due to announcement, which should be done on 17th April, not only belief into the project). We will see how strong this community is, if the announcement won't be what is expected.
Sometime it is even interesting to visit communication channels of coins. Quite used are reddit, slack or discord. What surprised me a lot is how differently they are handled. Some of them suffers from huge censorship (of course who wants to read trolls messages), but some channels ban users, because they disagree with something or have critical view on some topic (at least discussions about decentralized stuff are controlled, heh) Just be careful, if you will see any claims how wonderful community the coin has, it is better to check it by yourself. Unfortunately more than one time I saw there a guy asking for help, and did not get any answer, is that sign of good community? Who knows.
To sum it up, community is important for sure, but some time this word is exploited only to attract new investors which might rise the value of the coin. Which community do you consider as the best? Or which disappointed you the most? Feel free to share with others in comments.