I was on a call last week with a friend, catching up and chatting about the state of the Web3 industry/ecosystem. As always, I moan about the ‘GM’ copypasters, grabbing at any interaction they can get in this ‘bare’ market, yet giving no real value or input to the ecosystem. - Rant over! BUT he brought up a very interesting point, What is the cost of a ‘GM’? More specifically, what’s the carbon cost of a ‘GM’. Naturally, we are talking about a tweet, or ‘post’ in the X era.
This made me think, what is the daily GM cost to the environment? Is being a GM reply guy killing the planet? Do they care? And will ETH staking reduce the carbon footprint of the ‘GM’ culture?
If you know me, most people don’t, you will know that I’m not the biggest fan of what the ‘GM’ culture has grown into. I love where it came from, it was a great method of spreading unity and self-identification. But it has been turned into a gimmick and over-gamified by try-to-be influencers. I'm not saying it shouldn’t be said, just maybe try saying more than just ‘GM’ every day. Right now it feels like we are stuck in an echo chamber for first cyclers who haven’t done any homework and hope that if enough people ‘say it back’, number will go up.
Ok, I ranted again, on to the carbon. Our industry has an issue with energy usage. It’s no surprise, but it is a concern, how much energy the ecosystem uses. From mining farms, node clusters, API systems, cloud wallets, dApps and everything in between, we put out a lot of carbon! Over the past couple of years, especially with the explosion of NFT’s, the attention and energy cost of onChain activities and the supporting systems have been pushed into the spotlight and talking point.
But we are forgetting something thing very, very important, communication. Web3 is a huge user of communication systems to allow the web of distributed teams and communities to build, grow, love and learn. There is so much going on, and much of that iceberg is in private, it would be nearly impossible to calculate the full cost of web3 comms. But what if we reduced it to the most basic of basic? Maybe the most common communication method in the communities? Of course, tweeting ‘GM’.
It has grown to be instantly recognisable and used as a badge of identity. Starting from humble good vibes and the roots of a digital counter-culture. It has grown into a mass of spam replies, generic engagement farming and a sizeable chunk of most NFT-X account posts. All of this has to add up, right?
So, how much carbon does a GM use? Luckily for me, the Paris-based agency Greenly released a Report estimating that each tweet consumes on average around 0.26g of carbon. Obviously, this is a closet average, the amount of carbon will be greatly affected by the number of views, shares, re-posts and comments a tweet has. The larger the account the more carbon each tweet will consume.
Also, 0.026g doesn’t seem like but, but we need to remember that over 500 million tweets are posted each day. So it really starts to add up. That isn’t then including other services on the platform like adverts, direct messaging and posting media.
ㅤ | Daily | Weekly | Monthly | All Time |
Purely ‘GM’ Posts | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ |
Contains ‘GM’ | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ |
#GM | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ |
Reply to Post | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ | ㅤ |