TBA DAO is a community for compassionate, authentic, and ambitious people. With the emergence of Web3 technology, there is an opportunity for us to unite compassionate, authentic, and ambitious people, inspire them, and provide the resources needed to build impactful projects and communities. We will create online and offline experiences where our members can come together, share ideas, and create.
COMPASSION
Among emotion researchers, compassion is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another's joy or suffering and feel motivated to become joyful or help relieve the suffering. We are a community of people who do our best to understand each other so we can be of the most value to one another.
AUTHENTICITY
Rumor has it that there are no two snowflakes who share the same shape. This is also true of the human experience. Our community encourages each other to always represent one's true nature or beliefs and to stay true to oneself. We believe the more authentic we are the more we can learn from each other.
AMBITION
"If your dreams don't scare you, they aren't big enough" - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Our community inspires each other by sharing big ideas. The bigger the ideas, the bigger impact we can have on our world. One of our goals of our DAO is to onboard 100+ million people to Web3.
To join TBA DAO you must earn an invite from an existing member, collect a Freedom Flower NFT, or hold one of our social tokens.
There are four types of membership opportunities in our DAO:
Network Members (anyone who uses our app or owns our tokens)
Collaborators (collaborate with us on a Web3 project)
Partners (selected individuals/groups who support our mission)
Supporters (members who support one of our projects)
Core Members (limited operating group working on impactful projects)
byTBA is our incubator program that allows our core members to create their own community or project.
What we know so far:
We partnered with The Blast App Inc. to create our own Web3 communication app TBA!'. In our app, members of our DAO can blast mass messages to each other via silent push notifications. When recipients reply they have the option to reply privately or reply publicly. Think BCC on email but for mobile messaging. All blasts (messages), chats, and reactions are deleted after 24 hours to reduce our member's digital footprint and to keep content fresh and updated. We have spent a substantial amount of time thinking about solutions to solve the four main problems the major Web 2.0’s social apps face — Clutter, Trolls, Incentives, and Algorithms — and here is what we came up with:
CLUTTER
Our promise is that the content from the community members you care about the most will be silently delivered directly to your lock screen without you having to search through algorithms to find it. You also have the option to control which member's blasts get sent to your lock screen and which member's blasts appear only on your feed inside the app.
TROLLS
We created a feature called “Hide” which allows members to hide anyone they think is annoying or abusive. Once you hide someone they will not be visible to you on the app. It’s as if they don’t even exist.
INCENTIVES
We created TBA-LP / TBA Loyalty Points to display the value each member brings to our community. Members receive points for sending blasts, leaving reactions, and more. The goal is to turn TBA-BLP into a fungible token in 2023.
ALGORITHMS
We do not use many algorithms. We use an algorithm to display your most recent blasts and reactions at the top of your feed. We also use an algorithm to show the blasts and reactions with the most BLP. That is pretty much it.
My name is Jhamar Youngblood and in 1998 my mother was one of the first people in our project building to own a personal computer. I was 10 years old and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I spent most of my time in AOL Chat Rooms communicating with people of all cultures and backgrounds. I then spent the next 15 years being the first person in all of my friend groups and family to join every new social online application; from Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. But five years ago I watched these communities transform into platforms and my fruitful online communication experiences started to ruin. Newsfeeds and timelines started to become more cluttered and the surveillance economy started to mature.
So in 2013, I started working on the TBA app while in graduate school at Dartmouth College. My goal was to build an online communication experience that promoted authentic communication and gave value back to the people who were using the app.In 2018 we partnered with the Kik messaging app and their token $KIN to become the first app in Apple’s App Store to allow people to earn and spend cryptocurrency [read more]. Then in 2021, I came together with four other women to create TBA DAO. We admit we were too early in 2018 and we are now looking to use our experience to continue building in Web3.
As pioneers of society-friendly software, we once dedicated our lives to inventing simple and easy-to-use digital products and services to help our society operate more effectively, efficiently, and authentically. Our mission was to not cause harm to our society and we used our energy to inspire people and their communities to help make our world a better place.
We are in this for the long haul and we are excited for you all to join our journey.
Jhamar Youngblood
Founder + Community Assistant
The Blast App Inc. + TBA DAO