My phone just popped up another red dot: a certain new season of points has started. Tap in and you’ll find a bunch of tasks, check-ins, shares… To put it plainly, this social mining setup now feels more like cultivating “badges” than earning returns. They hollow out your time just to get an identity/status marker, and in the end you still have to keep watching the rules as they get changed again and again—your mindset gets harvested first.

Lately, I’m more inclined to put my effort back into stable pools/structured approaches—slower, but I can sleep at night. Recently, people have been criticizing staking and “stacking yields” like shared security; I get it. Once you keep layering it, the sources of risk start to become almost impossible to count. Anyway, I set a line for myself: if I can figure it out and I can bear it, I’ll do a bit of it. As for the ones that require you to keep showing up and checking in every day… forget it. Even a potted plant needs some time to be watered.