TL;DR:

Legacy social media could only monetize user engagement, even though real-world impact is far more valuable. Farcaster can capture the value of real-world impact, but it's stuck on the old attention-based business model. /impact aims to accelerate Farcaster’s transition from a DAUs & engagement-focused protocol to one that captures the value of real-world impact. The goal is for Farcaster to become a social media hub that attracts high quality contributors, where users are rewarded for contributing to the community, and communities form thriving Network Economies with a stake in maintaining and improving the protocol.

Monetizing engagement means creating economic incentives around how much attention content gets. It could be simply counting recasts, replies or likes, or applying complex calculations to factor in the influence of those who interact with the content and so on.

Capturing real-world impact means creating economic incentives around all forms of contributions that are valuable to communities. Through this process communities can form active and thriving Network Economies around Farcaster.

Legacy Social Media

There are two reasons why legacy social media couldn’t capture real-world value; centralization and lack of cryptocurrency integration. Centralization meant that no community could trust the data the platform presented was reliable. If the community didn’t know whether the data was manipulated by the platforms or by bots, how could it come to consensus on the value of any contribution? Without programmable currency integration they also couldn’t form a Network Economy to monetize the contribution.

But legacy social media could have a competitive advantage with a different business model; getting ad revenue by monetizing attention. The platforms had full control over everyone’s data, and full control over what content users were served. Each feature of the user interface was then designed to maximize user attention, and give the platform feedback so its algorithms could serve more users with content that leads to more attention and engagement. Then the platform analyzed each user’s data so advertisers could better target their audience.

Users were the product, not the customer. What mattered was maximizing DAUs (Daily Active Users), and even more so the amount of time users spend on the platform. This is how legacy platforms made their money.

Since drama and conflict seem to get the most attention, that’s exactly the type of content that proliferated on the platforms. Whether user interactions were pleasant or toxic, if the content was beneficial or harmful, truthful or fabricated, didn’t matter. The effect was somewhat predictable; people lost trust in media and institutions, society became polarized, and it became harder to tell truth from fiction.

How can Farcaster do better?

With Farcaster we now have decentralized social media, and we have the ability to integrate cryptocurrency into it. We have everything we need to have a social network that can capture real-world impact – a paradigm that has far more economic potential than monetizing attention.

And yet, it seems old habits are hard to break; we’re still using most of the legacy interface elements (likes, recasts, follows, replies) and we’re still focused on monetizing user attention. Can we really keep doing the same thing and expect different results?

This is why we need to start boldly experimenting with new incentive structures and interface elements. Instead of monetizing attention we can have a platform that incentivizes users to create value for their communities, and then reward them based on the value they created.

The better we can capture value, the better the quality of the content – and of interactions – on the platform will be. Farcaster will become a social media hub that attracts high quality contributors, users will know they are rewarded for contributing to the community, not for engagement farming, and communities will form thriving Network Economies with a stake in maintaining and improving the protocol. This is the goal of /impact.