Money Over Community

Supreme alpha. Only for those who really read my stuff. And congrats — if you're reading my stuff and putting it into practice, you're going to do better than 90% of people in crypto.
tl;dr - reread the article title until the phrase becomes a part of your soul.
NFT communities do one thing: Drive monthly active users (MAU) so projects can fool VCs into funding rounds.
In web3's "cUnSuMr Ec0nOmEe," the return for participant communities is a share in profits through airdrops/raffles.
That's a lot different from virtual friendship, global network, digital nation, pixelated homeboy, or whatever other lame shit your founder sold you so you'd buy that NFT greater.
Smart PFP NFT holders have a value they put on the community's friendship. When the cash value of that NFT exceeds the value of the community's friendship, the sale is made and profit is collected.
Those who don't put a hard number on that metric buy BAYC at 30E or an Azuki at 10E and firesale at 12E/4E because the bagholding becomes too financially and socially painful.
This gets even worse if you bought into a vanity NFT project like Cyberbrokers at 5E and are now looking at an FP of 0.14. Like me, you confused a decentralized corporation — which has yet to find its way into existence — with a cult of personality. Some are more obvious than others. Research Supducks and Loser Club Official if you want to see blatant vanity projects from individuals that somehow raised insane amounts of money for some unknown artist in the right place at the right time.

Ask Not What Your Community Can Do For You...

Actually, that's exactly what you should be asking.
For those unfamiliar with the quote, it reads in full

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Some US president said that in a big speech one time and got everybody clapping and shit because the notion of the American dream was still intact for a large enough subset of people as to impose delusion over the wider populace. Different times.
Every founder will be larping as your friend asking you to sacrifice time and timeline for the group. You should only do so if the financial rewards justify the action. 
You'll get community members kissing the ass of the core team and founder. These are usually super poors who have put all their expendable capital into this NFT. Here's the thing to remember — they're looking to sell, too, and as soon as that FP can buy them a house so they can stop renting in roach motels, you better believe that sale will be made. They'll have some lame ass goodbye post thanking the community and kissing the founder's ass one last time. This is a larp, too. Don't believe it.

My Experience

My biggest losses in crypto came from my need to join NFT communities and hang around like they were really communities. I've done this with almost every big NFT community in web3 and have found them all similarly structured. I'm not the kind of person to rely on some founder I've never met to increase my net worth, so that might have something to do with my attitude here. But the whales in every community, which included the founders, formed moats around themselves, using the hopeful, naive small fries as exit liquidity.
You'd better believe I'm squeezing every last drop of value out of the communities I'm still in. But you can't look for that value strictly in the floor price. The number one and only benefit to look for in any community is simple:
That community better get you closer to the center of crypto's money — to become a beneficiary of the Cantillon effect rather than a victim of it.
The center of crypto money are BTC whales. Satoshi's friends, Richard Heart (somehow), and a subset of libertarian technologists like Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, etc. You'll never get here. It's too late.
That center flowed into the ETH whales and created a new set of ultrarich technologists who formed the Ethereum Foundation. You're not getting here. It's too late.
ETH whales distributed enough ETH to create subcommunities like Polkadot, Binance, Cardano. Now you're getting into places you can at least see. Because even with all the new wealth created from the BTC and ETH explosions, these communities still needed and invited VCs to capitalize them. As revered as CZ is, he can still be elbowed out of his position by traditional powers. It's not a coincidence that normies can still touch CZ at conventions and even look to him for investments.
[Note: VC in this article stands for "visible capital" not "venture capitalist" because it includes all the money BTC and ETH whales made visible to traditional finance as well as super old money that made itself visible to capture web3 market share]
These subcommunities are now moving into touchable places. The L2s, high level vanity projects, middleware bullshit. VCs are heavily involved here, because the founders at this level aren't rich. They're high level professionals, Ph.Ds at distinguished universities, competent businessmen. But they're not untouchable anon elites. They have to come out, dox themselves and tap dance on convention stages to get capital to build.
This is the level most of you are on. Your founder is one of these subcommunity leaders who has shaky connections to VCs and needs the collective power of a community to get himself over. Same as any wrestler or actor who pulls his next paycheck from last movie's box office take.
So there's no way I'm sucking this guy's dick if he's got to suck some other guy's dick just to get the "partnerships" and capital to move his project forward. I'm viewing my position as it is with eyes wide open.
Now me personally, I'm here to extract as much (money! get your mind out of the gutter) as I can from this dick sucking marathon and put that capital into a new paradigm that doesn't require dick sucking. That's just me, though. Doesn't matter what your motive is; I'm just here to explain the landscape so you don't have any deluded notions of what's going on here. Take your place at the end of the human centipede if this is your desire.

How Communities Help

There are three major ways I've found that your community should get the Cantillon effect working for you.
1️⃣ Get you into VC groups that aggregate funds for big ticket project raises
2️⃣ Boost your likes/RTs/quotes for airdrops that measure Twitter engagement
3️⃣ Bring copious amounts of raffles of desired projects into the Discord
Number three is by far the least important, but I will say this: I won a raffle in one of these communities that got me my ROI on the original NFTs I bought (around $12,000 USD). So now I can hold those NFTs risk free. So don't discount raffles.
Oh yeah and 4️⃣ Intro you to skilled professionals to start your own project.
If your community isn't doing at least one of these things, drop that NFT like a New Year's resolution. And fud the founders on the way out too, especially if they're posting shit living it up at business conventions with your ETH.
No founder is alpha, kid, not even the good ones. No project is the alpha. You're the alpha. Remember that.
I'll name names after this bull run is over and I've collected all my goodies from these communities and their NFTs are sitting safely losing value in someone else's wallet.