Kaito Traps KOLs in Algorithms

Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher

Is it "Yap-to-Earn" or "Earn-to-Leave"?

In the Crypto world, "attention" is gradually becoming an asset that can be priced. And Kaito is a star InfoFi project that has emerged in this context. Backed by top capitals such as Dragonfly and Sequoia, Kaito was once regarded as an innovator of "information financialization".

However, in just a few months, more and more voices began to question its algorithm mechanism and ecological impact. Kaito wants to use AI algorithms to capture users' attention, but at the moment, the community seems to have lost patience first.

Is the creator ecosystem destroyed?

The water problem has been controversial since Kaito launched the "Yap-to-Earn" mechanism. The X platform is full of "industry in-depth analysis" posts with similar styles. On the surface, they are full of professional terms and structured analysis, but in fact the content is empty, the interactive content is superficial, inefficient, repetitive, and born for profit.

Community member @0xcryptoHowe once used "Crypto version of elevator advertising" to describe Kaito's dissemination mechanism. He pointed out: "Kaito's long-tail traffic effect is essentially like elevator advertising, which repeats content in a closed space and pushes traffic in different time periods." For the audience, this is indeed a method of quick memory and exposure, but problems also come with it: when the platform is occupied by "homogeneous content", KOLs are pushed by algorithms to produce repeatedly, and the final result is an information closed loop - like being locked in a "closed elevator" that never stops playing advertisements, and it is difficult to access truly valuable new content.

At the same time, many people questioned Kaito's mechanism for "freeloading" the traffic of mid-level creators. Crypto KOL @connectfarm1 once pointed out that some mid-level accounts whose single content value starts at 500U are willing to accept returns far below the market price because of Kaito. This strategy not only depresses the true value of the content in reality, but also allows some creators to only exert 50% or even less expressiveness.

Kaito may be making the evaluation criteria for content creation monotonous, tying creators into a system oriented towards "algorithms" and "scores". As community user @0xBeliever said: "There are many evaluation criteria for KOLs, but the appearance of Kaito makes it a bit monotonous."

The team frequently makes mistakes

In addition to the mechanism controversy, the Kaito team has also had some minor episodes at the operational level recently.

On March 16, Kaito AI and its founder Yu Hu’s X account were hacked. Team member Sandra posted on the X platform that “the attacker chose to launch the attack late at night in Yu Hu’s time zone and took control of the account while he was asleep.”

Then on April 27, founder Yu Hu posted that the platform accidentally backfilled the new algorithm to the past 12 months, causing users to see a longer time window and incomplete front-end data.

Although the two incidents themselves did not cause serious consequences, the small flaws that appeared one after another also aroused everyone’s attention to its stability.

"Relationship-heavy" algorithm controversy

Kaito's core selling point is its AI-driven content scoring algorithm, which claims to be able to identify valuable Web3 content. However, as users use it more deeply, this algorithm has frequently caused controversy.

User @Jessethecook69 ranked ninth in the world and first in the Chinese region on the Kaito Yapper list in just 24 hours with only three "marginal" contents. This can't help but make people question: Is such an algorithm really screening valuable information?

Many users pointed out that Kaito has a low weight for reading volume, and the algorithm focuses more on the interactive performance between high-impact accounts. What's worse is that some ICT (Inner Crypto Twitter) began to "group together", further amplifying this algorithmic tilt.

Crypto KOL @sky_gpt bluntly stated that Kaito's algorithm is essentially designed to seize the KOL agency market, which seriously damages the ecology of ordinary creators. He pointed out that a 30w dry content he wrote received almost the same score as a 2k advertising post that a project paid to buy a list, while non-Kaito related content was systematically suppressed in the algorithm. "The top 50 KOLs on the list are making a lot of money," he wrote, "Kaito is cutting off the path for newcomers to rise."

When newcomers are trapped in the invisible ceiling of the algorithm, and when creators are forced to cater to the algorithm's preferences, we can't help but ask: Is an AI-driven content platform reshaping the information order or replicating the old power logic?