I love what I read here and now I learnt something brilliant.
so I was in a community last year, the edeXa community. I applied for their ambassador program and got into their discord. not long after, they introduced a discord campaign where top 10 receive rewards, plus other rewards attached to quizzes and stuff like that.
I got 6th position the first month, then 2nd position the following month. the money was much (not that much tho), but after a while I started feeling like showing up in the discord wasn’t really adding value to the community anymore. cos the conversation started turning into arguments. everyone just wanted to be top 1, which is normal.
after the second month, i had already collected all roles there, and I was even acting like a mod sometimes because I was really active and answered questions others didn’t know. I read their docs too and created some content about the project on X (while still grinding).
so later I decided to focus more on building my brand on X while still writing about the project naturally. and this was months before the campaign even ended.
then the following month, I got spotlighted in the discord. I wasn’t expecting that at all, especially because I didn’t even participate in the campaign that month. my friends messaged me to tell me I made a wrong decision and come back.
I didn't answer. later on, I got a DM that they'd start paying me, their CTO, cm, the project, and edeXa Labs too followed me on x . meanwhile, I was the only one that got all that attention. some people even tried copying the same moves later on after the campaign started slowing down, but it didn’t really work for them because the team probably felt they were only doing it because the campaign was ending.
to keep it short lol, I think what pulled me across was recognition outside rewards. I joined for perks at first, but at some point I started showing up because I genuinely felt the project deserved it.