[serious] The danger of online community behavior | A very grim case study of the TIME Wonderland Discord

During October – December of 2021 I spend around eight weeks in the TIME Wonderland Discord server. Naturally, as someone who researches behavioral economics somewhere on this globe, I am very interested in the behavior of people in online crypto communities. Now almost eight months later, I decided to write what I observed there. Something that initially started off as something very interesting, almost companionable, ended with some very dark events.

On October 27 I entered the Discord channel of TIME Wonderland and saw around +- 9000 very active members there. To clarify what the token is; it is a rebase (inflationary) token which gave you roughly a 2% daily APR if you staked the token. This meant that after staking for 365 days, you would end up with an APY of 80.000%. This ofcourse attracted lots of investors who enjoyed the thoughts of becoming a millionaire within a year without investing even a monthly wage.

The first days I spend a lot of time in the chat (we were also in a soft lockdown) and I noticed that the general consensus was that ‘everyone was going to be rich within months’. This was during the crypto boom and with the outrageous APR, some people that invested early October doubled or tripled their $20000 investment during November. I chatted along but couldn’t help myself trying to temper expectations. I tried to explain that ‘just’ doubling your money in 365 days is considered a fantastic return, and that the market cap of the coin would probably never exceed the BTC market cap. Messages like these immediately got shot down and labeled as ‘FUD’ or ‘hater’.

I decided to become passive and my attention shifted toward the voice channel. It was very active, where on busy evenings there could be 40 people chatting there. One guy., ICED, caught my attention because he was very vocal, he worked in finance and seemed like he knew what he was talking about. He held an AMA in the voice channel, answering questions from everyone, and the voice channel was packed. The AMA was recorded and posted here, you can listen to it here:

Iced AMA

From here on it gets very obscure. I noticed that a lot of people here assumed that this person was an expert, derived from the questions they asked, and probably also by the fact this person started a self-proclaimed AMA by himself in the voice channel. He invested six figures into Wonderland TIME and Snowbank and quit his job to ‘do this stuff now’. People were asking if they should refinance their house, maybe quit their job or study and ICED gave them advice in a very confident manner.

I decided to look this guy up by searching his chat history in Discord, and almost fell off my chair when I saw that he just entered two weeks before the AMA, and was asking for help with his wallet because he was ‘new to crypto’. Listening back the AMA recording, it is scary how quickly people are influenced by others, especially when there is a (unwarranted) sense of authority/expertise present. During this period, ICED kind of became famous in the channel, jumping in and out of the voice channel to give advice to others.

In December, the bull market ended and projects started crashing. Wonderland TIME and Snowbank crashed hard and I noticed that ICED’s activity started to lower. During one afternoon, I saw that a relative had reached out to the Discord community via Twitter, asking for any information about the past online activities. Shortly after, his account/message disappeared from the Discord. People in the chat spoke about his suicide, having lost his life savings during the crash. It’s hard to confirm and not everything on the internet is true ofcourse, but my gut feeling was not good. I was shocked, although I initially disliked the fact that he faked his expertise, I have to admit that you have to be very charismatic in order to convey the messages the way he did, and gain a status in a community that quickly, which I admired. Listing to the AMA now, is chilling because of both the possible death of the speaker, and the ease of how quickly people buy into the story of expertise.

Please be very careful around the internet.