Mindless or Mindshare?

Mindshare? Or Mindless?

I keep seeing InfoFi threads pop up. Everyone’s talking about “mindshare,” “attention mining,” and how Kaito or Cookie3 are the next wave of marketing.

The idea is simple: talk about a project on X, earn points. Do it more, climb a leaderboard. Keep going and you might get rewarded with tokens for all that effort.

It’s clever in its own way. But here’s the real kicker: this isn’t actually marketing for the project. It’s marketing for Kaito and Cookie3.

They’ve done something quite smart. Instead of calling it “engagement farming” or “spam-to-earn,” they gave it a fancy label.

They called it mindshare. Sounds powerful, doesn’t it? Like you’ve lodged the brand deep into your consciousness and now dream in product slogans.

But we both know that’s not what’s happening.

When I scroll and see 30 identical posts saying “Check out XYZ project, I’ve been following them for a while,” the only action I take is muting the keyword.

Nobody is reading those posts and suddenly researching the project. Nobody is downloading a demo or joining a Discord.

The content isn’t built to inform, it's built to grind. The project is a token vending machine. The real goal is to tweet enough times to move up a board.

Here’s the irony. Real mindshare is when people are thinking about your product because they care. When someone is actually curious. When your game or tool or platform has earned a spot in their mental rotation.

Not when they’re typing the name twenty times a week to tick a box.

To be clear, I’m not going to wade into the debate over whether this is “good” for the projects themselves. That’s a whole other mess.

But what I will say is that this system is nothing more than pumping vanity metrics with extra steps.

It gives you quick wins and a temporary rush, but it doesn’t build long-term interest. The second this space gets noisier, the whole thing gets lost in the feed. Like every other engagement gimmick, it eventually collapses under its own emptiness.

For now, it works. But not for the reasons people think. The ones winning are the platforms behind it, not the projects in front of it. That leaderboard isn’t building community. It’s just measuring repetition.

And the audience is already tuning out.