So you had this amazing idea for an app on Farcaster 

You were so excited working on it days and nights, knowing how many users could benefit from it

The only problem is, you don’t have much distribution since your account is quite small

You decide to launch the app anyway — as open source

But what happens next surprises you..

A bit after you launch, a much bigger account on the platform launches an app just like yours.

Very quickly that app gains traction and dominates the platform – not because the app is better than yours (it’s not) but because the user simply has a lot more followers and better distribution

All your time and effort were wasted

This is a problem faced by countless devs and creators on social media every day

They have an idea for something that can benefit the community, but they don’t want to just give the idea away and for others to get all the credit for it

But what can be done about it? 

- you could delay releasing the idea until you have better distribution

- you could scrap ideas that are “easy to copy” and only focus on those that are more personalized (branded), difficult to replicate, or that require network effects

- you could release closed source, proprietary apps  or copyrighted art

But notice what all these “solutions” have in common:

They force you to focus on superfluous issues instead of on creating the most value for the community

If this only affected 1 or 2 members in the community this wouldn’t be a problem, but these are issues that affect millions of users on social media every day

This dynamic hurts both the creators and the community as a whole

The damage to the community is incalculable

If everyone could just focus on value creation instead of having to jump through all these hoops the community would likely have been a few orders of magnitude more prosperous

It’s a massive coordination failure

And the problem isn’t that there are people who steal others’ work — you’re always going to have a few rotten apples on any platform

The problem is that the platform creates the incentives for users to steal by not penalizing such behavior

And it makes users less likely to create value for the community by not giving them proper credit for such work

What’s worse, the platform simply doesn’t care because who gets credit doesn’t affect their bottom line

No matter who gets credit for your work, the platform will still make money from the engagement

Because the platform doesn’t have creators’ best interests in mind, what could be an easy fix never gets implemented since the problem isn’t even on the platform’s radar

So how can this massive coordination failure be fixed? Suppose if users had an incentive to proactively note on a post whether it's influenced by other content on the platform, and assign how much it is influenced by it

Then, if a big account simply copies the work of a smaller account, users could point out that 100% of the value was created by the smaller account

If the work goes viral, the smaller account would get 100% of the funds flowing to the bigger account on the network

On the other hand, if the larger account adds value to the original work, say improving it by 10%, the two users would share funds flowing to the work proportionally to their relative contribution

Can such a system be gamed, with users falsely attributing credit to themselves or fraudulent accounts?

Not if it was designed well

For instance, users may need to stake some money to participate in the attribution process — if the community thinks the attribution is fair the users could get rewarded, but if it’s fraudulent the user’s stake could be slashed.

So now smaller accounts can create freely and openly on the platform (as public goods), knowing that if others use their work (“permissionlessly”) they would still get rewarded based on the value they add to the network

Users would also want to collaborate with others and add value to others’ work, instead of thinking how to extract value from others

At the same time attributors have a (monetary) incentive to proactively improve the value flow on the network, thus making the whole system work (this process can also be supplemented by LLMs)

When users can focus on creating the most value for the community, instead of being distracted by superfluous issues, they can thrive and enjoy their work more

At the same time the community gets the most growth and prosperity from this process, while the platform gets far more growth

There is only one catch in this process: it can only be done credibly on an open graph network.

That would be the subject of my next post..