Vitalik Buterin: The incentive effect of creator tokens is limited, and the core issue is insufficient quality content filtering

Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform discussing the design ideas of creator coins, pointing out that the overall effectiveness of the crypto industry in the content incentive field has been limited over the past decade. The core issue is not the lack of content supply, but rather the insufficient mechanisms for filtering and discovering high-quality content. In the current context where AI can generate a large amount of content at a low cost, the industry goal should shift from "incentivizing more content" to "identifying and amplifying high-quality content."

Vitalik believes that Substack is a relatively successful case of creator incentives, with the key being the platform's active selection and support of quality creators, rather than solely relying on mechanism design. He points out that existing creator coin projects generally have a structural problem of "high social influence users dominating the rankings," rather than truly reflecting content quality. On the proposal level, Vitalik suggests establishing a non-tokenized creator DAO, which would select creators through member voting while maintaining clear content positioning and scale control to build a stable brand and commercial bargaining power. At the same time, creators would be allowed to issue personal tokens, and if they enter the creator DAO, the DAO's profits could be used to buy back and burn the creator tokens, transforming the role of speculators into "high-quality creator predictors," thereby reducing pure speculative cycles and improving the efficiency of high-quality content filtering. Vitalik stated that future effective governance mechanisms may increasingly combine prediction markets and multi-party governance structures to enhance the system's resistance to manipulation and goal consistency.