Networks like Farcaster enable us to shift focus from aggregating attention to unifying identity. They give us the capability to embrace the fragmentation of experience across multiple applications, unified by a single social graph. Incidentally, this is exactly why Farcaster and its competitors are uniquely positioned to capture a growing number of users who are seeking genuine, specialized connections on a post-social, ad-driven web.
Note: none of this was written by AI.
The rise of digital slop across social networks is apparent to the extent that it's impossible to ignore. If you're a frequent user of LLMs (or any AI-driven product), you can typically tell within a few words whether the response you're reading has been written by a human or not. On the premier social networks, AI-generated content dominates the responses above the fold before you reach an ad. If you're not already reading something inauthentic, someone will ensure you are by tagging Grok in the first comment. The Dead Internet Theory is playing out before our very eyes.
Content itself is no better. Threads, articles, images, videos, and even news are being generated by the hallucinations of a machine. It creates a nether-realm where you begin to wonder if you're reading anything genuine at all. Are these machines communicating with each other to facilitate a mechanism that keeps our attention, and nothing more? We're consuming the shadow of truth, the idea of authenticity. And we're accepting it knowingly.
Rather than blindly eat what is put in front of us like farmyard hogs, many have begun to flee the feed and seek more relevant sources of entertainment, news, and connection. I recall reading an article several years ago about how more social interaction would occur within insulated group chats, rather than being broadcast across social graphs that have become popular over the past 15 to 20 years.
Both anecdotally and materially, this has occurred. The flight to directed, specific conversation is a response to the immense amount of noise one must deal with on broadcast networks and the very slim and constantly reducing amount of signal one finds.
Hence, news feeds have shifted to Telegram, where one can receive exactly the type of information they want to read, with absolutely no noise blocking the signal. Similarly, group chats facilitate conversation with people you want to hear from, providing the information and connection you actually desire.
As such, niche social networks are on the rise.
When the fight for the dominant social graph was at its peak and users began to fall into their respective subcultures, the common mantra among the zeitgeist was, "Nah, I'm not downloading another social app. I already have too many." However, today that has begun to change. Niche social networks, such as Substack, which caters to readers and writers (wordcels), or Strava, which caters to fitness enthusiasts who like to share their stats, have begun to capture growing attention. Whereas in the past bolting a social feature to your app would have been seen as unfocused or even desperate, now the ability to refine what one consumes is quite attractive.
I believe this new commonality is why networks like Bluesky try to lean into the "curate your feed" concept. Whether this slight iteration is enough to mitigate the fact that they are ultimately still a traditional broadcast network remains to be seen. The bottom line remains clear, though. People will continue to gravitate towards specialized applications that provide them with what they want or need quickly, as long as those applications remain focused on their use case.
Reddit was once a great place to discuss shared interests, but it has become a counter signal for almost everything. Dribbble was once a valuable resource for designers, but it has since become little more than a glorified moodboard. Many such cases.
There is a genuine risk that attention will be fragmented to the extent that no network is populous enough to be interesting. A unified (ideally decentralized) social graph fixes this issue. Hop from one app to the next, but authenticate with one persona. Alternatively, stay in one app but have many specialized mini-apps within it.
The solution does not need to interact with the attention layer at all. We've spent too much time trying to aggregate attention. This misdirected intention has led to the issues stated above. We need to aggregate the identity layer. Unfortunately, solutions like OAuth only exacerbate the problems created by the incumbents who have set aflame what was once a genuine way to connect in pursuit of year-over-year profit.
Where OAuth engrains users into an unescapable, centralized graph tied to a single entity, decentralized solutions are already being well-funded and developed at scale by a variety of brilliant minds. You have Fediverse, Farcaster, World, and Telegram all vying for the top spot in this burgeoning vertical. Where Fediverse and Farcaster offer "sufficiently decentralized" components and infrastructure, World and Telegram take a more centralized approach.
Still, all of these provide tooling that enables devs to build within apps where users already exist, and users to find experiences that reflect the current meta of doing what you actually want online rather than what an algorithm desires.
It's clear that we're aiming to escape the machine and seek authentic connections and community. I'm encouraged by the fact that more and more people are unwilling to accept the egregious, compounding tradeoffs presented by the FAANG cabal. Social is evolving, and that's inspiring.
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the only way you keep the creators is if you buy them — it is no different than any other network all boarders are closed, all walls have doubled in size — increasingly, this is the future of the internet everything will niche out — the internet is at full maturity, has consolidated, and is now refragmenting ahead of AI people are looking for places where they can be MORE human, not less — all this shit we are throwing at them is LESS consumer crypto is once again obsessed with the “normie” no creator is going to understand what an “LP” is, what “fungible tokens” are, how to manage a token supply, or what a yoyo pairing means or does every non-native creator that generates any kind of virality is going to rug their community — accidentally or not — as they have, every single time we’ve tried anything like this before any exuberance is quickly sold by insiders — “free money” — that’s exactly what they came here for ALL of the non-natives rug, ignorance or not, MOST of the natives rug at first sight of any kind of systematic slowdown how do you prevent this? you give them a shit ton of money up front but you lock it up & stream it to them overtime then you educate still, this will not work because you have a crypto model that is entirely incompatible with “normies” we have learned nothing — 10 years later we still think if we go after normies & bombard them with shit they don’t understand at the very top of the funnel, they will retain its the same reason why fc cannot retain non-crypto users they come here & are immediately drowning in crypto content, which they DO NOT like sure, we can shower them in engagement & pay them a bunch of money to stay for a while but once those rewards dry up, they will churn, because they fundamentally have NO INTEREST in crypto now we’re forcing them to “coin” themselves; we’re giving them a mid-5 fig market cap & trying to get them addicted real-time earned fees they don’t even know what a market cap is! yet you’ve attached one to every post? to themselves? you’ve already lost them then they look at the feed — IT’S CRYPTO — everything is crypto: it’s indexes, memes, crowdfunds the first account is porn (they will churn once the payments stop); the next 9 are crypto we are not serious about onboarding these so-called “normies” otherwise we would not “tokenize” them at literally the first step in the funnel
what i find most interesting about this little “tokenize the world” debate that we get into every bull run is that the OGs, the people who launched tokens in 2019, maybe dabbled in NFTs in 2021, maybe deployed a creatorcoin in 2023, have ABSOLUTELY ZERO INTEREST in deploying & managing another token yet we think some pornstar or youtube vlogger will…
Exactly. Been there done that. Hyperliquid tho
amen brother 1000 $tipn
You’d appreciate my latest blog I think. I’m of the mindset that fragmentation is actually a net positive and more niche microcosms are how we avoid falling into a black hole of dead internet. https://paragraph.com/@48hrs/signal-loss
💯
I can't tell if this is a QC in agreement or disagreement 😆
typical incoherent basil blab
Insert conspiracy theory bulletin board meme.
Nah, I fuck with it Just wasn't sure if you agree that we're operating correctly by niching down or not
Facts
The truth of what you are saying really hit me when you said normies don't know what a market cap is. They don't.
yeah but you forget that the ponzu gambit is "if this gets everyone in the world to use it, it will work" - it's just that all the previous ponzus didn't make it over the hump. the one that actually passes the tipping point is different the banks are choosing eth, everything will be tokenized. this time is different
banks choosing eth, financial contracts coming onchain, and cross-boarder payments are very different than getting taylor swift to tokenize her instagram post
yes but zoom out. the whole economy is going to be on ethereum. getting money from the banking economy on eth or the commerce economy on eth into the social media economy on eth is going to be much much lower friction
https://i0.wp.com/www.business-to-you.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Technology-Adoption-Life-Cycle-Crossing-the-Chasm.png?ssl=1
also crypto, along with toxic fandom message boards run by absolute entitled shit head nerds, are the only spaces on the internet that refer to new users as “normies” with a straight face
basil, you are so real for this 🎯 unfortunately, it falls on deaf ears. The "builders" in crypto casino are just happy in their token echo-chambers and will keep justifying it as they are intellectually bankrupt and "number go up" is literally the height of their product strategy.
"they come here & are immediately drowning in crypto content, which they DO NOT like " THIS a bajillion times. Been trying to non-crypto-niche up my feed, it's just doomed to failure. the network effect of the echo chamber.
Networks like Farcaster enable us to shift focus from aggregating attention to unifying identity. They give us the capability to embrace the fragmentation of experience across multiple applications, unified by a single social graph. Incidentally, this is exactly why Farcaster and its competitors are uniquely positioned to capture a growing number of users who are seeking genuine, specialized connections on a post-social, ad-driven web. Note: none of this was written by AI.