Web3's Bootcamps, Ambassador Programs, Growth Fellowships, Campus Leader tracks, and "internships" have stopped being talent pipelines. They're industrial attention factories. The old playbook was KOLs, ads, airdrops. The new one is cheaper: recruit thousands of students who want to break into the industry and have them post, repost, run Discord, host AMAs, ship memes. Manufactured grassroots, at near-zero cost. Framed as education, co-building, builder ecosystems. In practice it's free KPI labor for BD, growth, and ecosystem managers. The students think they're interning. The whole industry now optimizes for DAU, engagement, reposts, ambassador count, content volume. Better numbers, easier funding, listings, exchange deals, TGE. The moment incentives stop, retention, TVL, and volume collapse together. Communities turn into bots and ex-contributors overnight. Large parts of Web3 have stopped optimizing for adoption and started optimizing for the appearance of adoption. Once simulated participation is priced higher than real users, the industry forgets how to ship things people actually want.